"That is Not the Way to Do It" Queerness, Race, and Citizenship in Rodgers and Hammerstein

Authors

Dennis Sloan, DePauw UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2020

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Rodgers and Hammerstein's Asia-Pacific musicals - South Pacific, The King And I, and Flower Drum Song - mark characters of color with signs of queerness. It argues that Asian and Pacific characters are placed outside Cold War era ideals of American white heter-normativity in their performances of gender, their marriage practices, and the queer spaces they occupy, in ways that both encourage assimilation and make integration impossible.

Comments

This article is posted with permission from the journal's editor.

Recommended Citation

Sloan, Dennis. 2020. “‘That is Not the Way to Do It’: Queerness, Race, and Citizenship in Rodgers and Hammerstein.” New England Theatre Journal, no. 31: 51–69.