Scholarship: Social Impact of the Shepard Tragedy in Academia

If you're a literary person, you're probably like me and can't believe how few literary, scholarly articles there are actually out there on The Laramie Project.  If you widen your scope to documentary theater or work on Tectonic in general, the net gets wider, but few people in my field are tackling this play as a text or performance like any other drama.  The social and historical angles of the play, perhaps, are  taking precedent in the scholarly imagination.

On the flip side, though, that means that other disciplines are interested in Matthew Shepard and The Laramie Project as well-- and they're writing about it.  This past week I found some fun, interesting, and melancholy reflections across the disciplines.  I found doctors, psychologists, archaeologists pedagogy experts all reflecting on the tragedy and the play, and each of them sheds a little light on the social impact both Matt and Tectonic Theater had on America in the previous decade.  Here's a list and shot description of some of the most interesting I found.  Enjoy!

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Blackburn, Mollie, and J. F. Buckley.  "Teaching Queer-Inclusive English Language Arts."  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 49.3 (2005): 202-212. 

Charles, Casey.  "Panic in the Project: Critical Queer Studies and the Matthew Shepard Murder."  Law and Literature 18.2 (2006): 225-252.

Dunn, Thomas R.  "Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterrepublic Memories."  Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13.4 (2010): 611-652. 

Hoffman, Scott W.  "'Last Night, I prayed to Matthew': Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality, and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America."  Religion and American Culture 21.1 (2011):121-164. 

Hurst, James C.  "The Matthew Shepard Tragedy: Management of a Crisis."  About Campus 4.3 (1999): 5-11. 

Noelle, Monique.  "The Ripple Effect of the Matthew Shepard Murder: Impact on the Assumptive Worlds of Members of the Targeted Group."  American Behavioral Scientist 46.1 (2002): 27-50.

Saewic,  E., and S. Marshall.  "Reducing Homophobia in High School: The Effects of The Laramie Project Plays and an Integrated Curriculum."  Journal of Adolescent Health 48.2 (2011): 111.

Scholarship: First-hand Accounts of the Shepard Tragedy

Now that I've had free time to start back up on bibliographic snooping, I'm starting to find a lot of personal responses to Shepard's death from Laramie witnesses, but what surprised me is to see where these personal experiences are popping up: in trade journals.  It seems that a lot of people in Laramie and Fort Collins who were involved somehow with the Shepard attack looked introspectively at how they personally and their professions were forced to respond.  Douglas Black, for instance, bore the nation's brutal outrage and abuse for months afterward as a university spokesperson in CSU; Dr. Klein felt his professional role seep deeply into his personal life and his family's connections to the killing.  

The exception, of course, is Walt Boulden's recollection of Matt Shepard as a personal friend, which is purely a personal recollection of Matt and was published in Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services a year after TLP opened in Denver.  He recalls a strawberry hunting expedition on Casper Mountain with Matt that really humanizes Shepard-- and Walt Boulden, come to think of it.  It's worth a read if you can get hold of it.

In any case, enjoy! 


Black, Douglas. "Straw Men: An Exercise in Virtual Unreality."  American Scholar 69.2 (2000): 93-100.  

As some of you may know, Colorado State University's homecoming parade coincided with Matt Shepard's brief stay before his death at the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins.  At some point in the parade, which had a "Wizard of Oz" theme, one float erected a straw man in the truck with the phrase "I'm Gay" spray-painted on its face and "up my ass" on its back.  That was the second attack on Shepard, only this time in the form of a cruel joke, playing out not far from where Matt was struggling to survive.  That stunt cost one Greek organization its charter, and another nearly suffered the same fate. 

Douglas Black worked at CSU in the President's office as a staff member, and he bore the impossible burden of the nation's outrage; almost immediately, Black, as the mouthpiece for the university on this incident, became the focus of national abuse.  Outrage against the float mutated into personal insults and threats to him personally, and the incident left Black feeling personally scarred in much the same way as his childhood bullying had; he also notes, "The most savage attackers were those claiming to speak for tolerance."  His perspective on the way the story traveled, how the university responded, first-hand look at how Cyberspace and messaging technology fueled the outrage and fueled vigilantism and abuse is extremely personal and interesting.  We may be used to this in our Facebook world and Twitterverse, but it was still all new in 1998.  Also, the writing is really, really good.  You can tell what Douglas Black does for a living. 

Boulden, Walt.  "A Tribute to Matthew Shepard."  Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 13.1(2001): 7-14.  

If you want a perspective of Matt Shepard that doesn't involve the typical platitudes but is nevertheless entirely positive, Walt Boulden's tribute in Journal of Gay and Lesbian Services really is rather touching.  Boulden seems to feel he is charged with the impossible task of rescuing Matt's memory from the grave, which is an unfair burden to take on, really; what he eventually produces, however, makes Matt feel more human to me than anything else I've had time to read so far.  

Boulden knew Shepard in Casper and remained friends with him at UW.  There's one particular story of Matt he shares which at first seems a quirky choice-- a tale of hunting for wild strawberries on Casper Mountain-- that offers the reader a tantalizing glimpse into Matt Shepard's personality.  

If you can't find the article, this also serves as the introduction to the book From Hate Crime to Human Rights: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard.  Routledge, 2001.  

Hurst, James C.  "The Matthew Shepard Tragedy: Management of a Crisis."  About Campus 4.3 (1999): 5-11.

 This is the most impersonal recollection of the ones I've read, but that's due especially to the kind of article Hurst is writing.   James Hurst was the VP of student affairs at UW when Matthew Shepard was murdered.  The article explains the university's actions in trying to deal with the sudden crisis on campus it caused, and he details especially what the university president, student organizations, and administration did in the days following the beating to deal proactively with the incident.  This is a great article if you want a backstage peek at how the LGBTA, the university, and the community responded to the hate crime. 
(Oh, and he also mentions that initial reports from the police mention the possibility that the murder was a robbery and/or a hate crime. Simultaneous narratives. Just sayin'. )

Klein, Daniel S.  "What Happened in Laramie."  Annals of Internal Medicine 130.3 (1999): 235-236.

 Daniel Klein is an MD in Laramie and was the county health officer when Matthew Shepard was beaten, and his response to the tragedy is both as a Laramie community member and as a concerned doctor.  His narrative of how his family experienced the crisis shows just how close this community really is, relationally speaking.  Even though he was not the attending physician in the ER that night, his position brought him in the orbit of the murderers, their acquaintances and family, the media, the victim, and the emergency workers who attended to him.  As a personal/professional response to Matt's murder, he gives a good representation of one eyewitness perspective of the Shepard tragedy.  Note especially how the narratives of two previous murders in Laramie, the landscape, and community play in his telling. 

Links: Kaufman's take on "10 Years Later" in "American Theater"

When studying The Laramie Project, usually the first starting point for studying the play are two articles written by Don Shewey and Moisés Kaufman published in American Theatre.  With the premiere of 10 Years Later came yet another article from Kaufman about the project, again published in AT.  Like his previous work, this article is also an expository work explaining the process of producing the play, from its first inception, changes to the process, and its final form as a worldwide Internet linkup premiere.  I'm not entirely sure how helpful Kaufman's explanation is for explaining the whole process behind the creation of 10 Years Later in reality, but it is surely a great exploration of what Kaufman thought they were doing as they interviewed Laramie residents and former residents again, ten years after Matthew's murder.  It makes his investments, beliefs and goals for the new epilogue very clear for the researcher. 

One thing I found interesting is that Kaufman claims that this new play "deals with history" and how it's created, which is quite different from the first play's goal.  That's fair enough, but he talks (again) about the emergence of the robbery narrative as if it started after the fact, an attempt to re-write history-- and as I have pointed out repeatedly from my little soapbox in this little corner of the Interwebs, the robbery narrative arose at the exact same time as the hate crime narrative.  Oh well.  He also calls his re-interviews with DeBree and Dave O'Malley as an attempt to "clarify the facts."  That may be the most interesting comment I've heard Kaufman make in print so far.

Nevertheless, how and why someone chooses one narrative over another as "truth" is particularly interesting regardless-- not just for Laramie, but for Mr. Kaufman, Tectonic Theater, and myself as well.  You can read the article online here through the Theatre Communications Group website. 

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Source:  

Kaufman, Moisés.  "Anatomy of an Experiment: When the Tectonic Team Returned to The Laramie Project, the Docudrama's Sequel Became a Collective Creation Seen and Heard 'Round the World."  American Theatre Jul/Aug 2010.  Web. 

The Bibliography Upgrade is Complete!

The updated bibliography lists are now available!  You know, for all dozen or so of you currently studying TLP.  But I hope it helps nonetheless...

After I had gathered a lot of things I wanted to add to my old bibliographic master-list on this blog, I made things easier on myself by dividing things up to make searching through it a little easier on the researcher. 

When you now click on the Bibliography link, which is now just under the title bar at the top of the page, you will be directed to a page asking you to choose which page you want:  literary/dramatic, or non-literary/dramatic sources.  Things which are useful in multiple applications, however, appear on both lists. 

With this also came an increase in useful material on both lists.  If you have any questions, remember you can always email me at jackrabbit.blog@gmail.com and I'll help out as much as possible.  I'll even ferret things out for you from my capacious Research I library if you need it. 

Also, if there's something that should be on this list that currently isn't, please, by all means let me know!  I'll happy to add it to the list. 

Coming Soon: Changes to the bibliography!

So, one of the more popular places on this blog has been, since its inception, a running bibliographic master-list of everything I've found regarding The Laramie Project and the Shepard murder and trials.  In order to keep up with the newest stuff coming out and to make it much more reasonable to navigate, I will shortly introduce two new lists instead-- one for literary study and one for everything else.  These will include a lot of updated bibliography and links to video sources as well. 

Eventually, this will include a list of things I think are useful for the teaching of The Laramie Project at the high school and college level.  But that's going to take a little more time.  I'll let you know as soon as both of the new pages are operational! 

UW's Web archive collection for Matthew Shepard

 The University of Wyoming has collected a web archive of information relating to the murder of Matt Shepard and the political aftermath through the Internet Archive.  The information is collected and stored via archive-it.org. 

You can access their link pool here and check out what they've amassed.  It ranges from LGBT activism to WBC home movies.  If you're more interested in the social issues surrounding Shepard, it's a good resource.

A short primer of Academic code

So, all this talk about code switching has got me thinking...  what are the verbal and non-verbal codes of the humanities?

I mean, I know pretty clearly what things make a person's speech "western" or "conservative" or "evangelical" (which has a vocabulary entirely its own).   But, what about the world I spend most of my time in anymore-- the humanities?  What codes do we use here?   So, I've just been listening to people talk for the last couple days to see what short-hand people in my environment use in everyday speech.  What I found is pretty interesting, and highly amusing in a weird sort of way.

Okay, so here are some words I've heard used to code disapproval or rejection:

Fox News / Glenn Beck/Bill O'Reilley
black-and-white thinking; binary oppositions
NASCAR
bumper sticker logic/sloganeering
speaking in soundbites
speaking in code  (ironic...)
framing/ frames/ framed discourse
essentializing
Wal-Mart
fanatical
brain-stem
Bubba
paternalistic
Imperialist/Capitalist
Othering
objectify/objectification
marginalizing
monological
tendentious
literalist/fundamentalist
shrill

Here are words we use to code approval or congratulate ourselves:

provocative
polyvalent
synthesizing
subtle thinker/subtle thinking
hermeneutic
semiotic
measured/thoughtful
critical
meaty/deep
performative
intellectual
humanistic
measured
postmodern/posthuman/post-Christian
self-referential
has gravity/gravitas

Words we use to sound smart and identify with the academic club:

dialectic
abject
agency/being an agent
queering/queer (especially as a verb)
deconstruct
slippage
Foucaultian
gender (as a verb)
ecriture
linguistic turn
hybridity/ hybrid
interstitial
dialogic
discourse/discursive
historicize
signifier/signified/signifying
Bakhtinian (quoting Bakhtin is like academic gold.  The same goes for Slavoj Zizek.)
meta-anything
base/structure/superstructure
fetish/fetishize
Oedipal
sublime 
Lacanian
post-colonial
Other/Othering
paternalism
subaltern
subjectivity
langue/parole

Okay, so our words-- those we use of others, and those we use to describe ourselves-- can tell us a lot of what we think about ourselves.  The funny thing is that a lot of things in the first list is classist, and it's demeaning specifically to intelligence or social class.  Everything in the last two lists are, for the most part, come from a very useful and interesting critical language that has clear benefit in the intellectual arena.  But that's not how we use them in coffee-shop conversation.  They're our codes of belonging, our secret handshake.  Nothing makes you part of the smart set like puffing on about "subaltern identites" or "the sublime," especially if you can work a little Burke or Habermas or Zizek into that conversation, too. Besides, how much fun is it to say "Slavoj Zizek?"  Tons. 

In a sense, I have no problem with the presence of this "club" per se.  That's the way society organizes itself, to be honest.  People with a common association share a common language.  But it's good to take a shot of our own medicine, apply some of that Lacan and Foucault to ourselves, and realize that our language is a tool that we use to manipulate the social order around us, too-- not just the people we don't like.  We use it to get a leg up on that other guy, the person with different political or philosophical beliefs that doesn't share our special vocabulary.  And that impenetrable wall of "discourse" that we erect can keep out those who have the brains and can argue back but don't know the lingo.  

So, perhaps we need to be wary of our motives when we employ the specialist language of our trade outside of the classroom: for unless we deconstruct our Oedipal tendencies and queer our postmodern  discourse, our phallocentric essentializing of the gendered postcolonial ecriture may threaten to objectify the Other into an abject body, subverting their subjectivity and historicizing them into a subaltern who cannot speak.  NASCAR.

 And ya know what's really funny?  That sentence almost works, in a bizarre, mind-bending sort of way.  *giggle.*


Oh, and if you have some free time, check out the Postmodernism Generator to see these codes put to work... in a really fun sort of way.

Aaron McKinney's Tattoos, or the Ethics of Reading Humans as Literature

One thing that I've been wondering about is how little literary criticism has been written on The Laramie Project so far.  When I started thinking about the play, my initial impulse was to write an academic article.   (I've changed my mind since then.)   But when I started to pull together scholarly sources to start my research, I found that there wasn't too much to build from.  I started to wonder: why I can I find so few literary scholars writing about this play?  

For instance, when I did a search in the MLA Bibliography for The Laramie Project, I only got eight hits; six were articles of literary criticism, and one of those is Tigner's.  I tried the International Index to Performance Arts and netted another 4-5 scholarly articles, but they're mostly about documentary/nonfiction performance rather than the play as text.  That seems really strange for a play that has been as popular and culturally important for the last eight years as TLP has.  Just for comparison, Shaffer's play Amadeus had nineteen articles written and indexed in MLAB by 1988.  Why haven't all those gape-mouthed literary professors who teach this text (of whom I suppose I am one) been writing about it? Why are pens so silent in my own professional field? 

Maybe others aren't writing on this text as a literary object for the same reason that I'm a little reticent about writing on this text in an academic forum myself.  I don't like treating actual, living human beings as abstractions (which was probably clear with one of my previous posts).  It's one thing to talk about "Mozart" and "Salieri" as characters because, even though these people are real, the play itself is a total fiction.  I can even do it with Spiegelman's Maus because the conscious meta-narrative and the fictive animal story insulates the reader enough from the unspeakable horror of Vladek Spiegelman's lived reality to give him a more critical eye.  I have a much harder time doing the same thing with a person in The Laramie Project, especially when it's somebody I took classes from or saw in church.

Maybe other critics have the same hangups.  For instance, there are only 36 articles in MLAB for In Cold Blood, and they mostly seem to be focusing on genre or journalistic concerns  rather than treating it as a literary work.  Maybe we're all running into the same question: what are the ethics of reading a documentary work or "faction" (fact-based fiction) as a literary event?  Is it ethical to treat a real, live human as a symbolic construction, whether it be the Clutters, Gary Gilmore, or Russell Henderson?  Do you lessen the gravity of the situation if you talk about Aaron McKinney's failures from a literary, rather than a historical or cultural standpoint?

Or, to put it from a more practical standpoint: am I doing a disservice to Aaron McKinney (and, by extension, Matt Shepard) as a human being if I treat him like a literary construction?   

Research for TLP and Matt Shepard: Comm, Journalism and Soc. Sci.

Due to the nonfictional nature of The Laramie Project and its engagement with both the underlying historical event (Matt's murder) and the social issues surrounding it, I've come across a lot of scholarly work regarding the play, the movies and the historical event in other disciplines.  The media onslaught has naturally piqued some curiosity in the Communications discipline, but I was surprised at some of the others-- psychotherapy, for instance, and education.  I've compiled a list of the more interesting ones for you below. 

A couple of the trends are quite interesting.  Note, for instance, that five of the articles are psychoanalytic approaches to the play that attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness; one of the authors in that list is Stephen Wangh, one of the authors of The Laramie Project.  Two others are looking at the play as a tool to foster LGBTQ acceptance in a social setting, and one tracks the impact of such violence on communities.  The Pace article is pretty neat-- it tracks a small handful of Matthew Shepard Scholarship winners in their college careers. 

And, my favorite topic-- the unhinged media coverage of Shepard's murder and the aftermath-- also makes a showing here in the bibliography.  The complete list is just after the jump! 

"Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming": Stephen Wang writes on TLP

How on earth does one person forgive another? And, in the face of terrible violence against the self, how does the individual (and a the community) find healing?  These are questions that lie at the heart of The Laramie Project, and questions that, apparently, at least one of the writers struggled with as they crafted their play. 

 Stephen Wang served as a draumaturge and writer for The Laramie Project in its various forms, and he has done some sophisticated thinking at a critical distance from the play about the nature of forgiveness.  This article appeared, along with three commentaries and a reply, in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues.  Looking at both the psychoanalytic tradition, the theatrical tradition, and even religious groundings for forgiveness, Wangh gives his readers a fascinating look inside The Laramie Project at the company's understanding of forgiveness and how that, in turn, crafted the play they all created.   What I really like about Wangh's approach is that he's extremely open about how Kaufman and the other writers approached their documentary material, and he's willing to be honest about where the members of Tectonic might respectfully disagree.  Definitely pick up this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues if you're at all interested in the The Laramie Project, the writing process, or its social impact.  I will probably be coming back to these articles at a later date because I want to read Frommer and Sandage's critiques to see what other insight they might give us.

Jackrabbit's conference paper on TLP, sort of

A few days ago I posted my initial reaction to presenting something vaguely academic at a scholarly conference; I figured that it was a lot easier to actually post the damn thing to let you see for yourself what I did than to try to reinvent the wheel-- especially when inventing the wheel the first time seems to have consumed a good portion of my sanity.

I have to give this with a caveat or two: first of all, this is not the final draft I presented.  I had to make a lot of handwritten changes to this before presenting, and now I can't find the stupid thing to type them in.  So this is simply a draft-in-progress; as such, it doesn't have any of my citations in it, either.  Besides, that will keep lazy undergrads from plagiarizing this for a research paper.  (For those who were considering it: shame on you, lazy undergrads.  Go to the bibliography page for sources and write your own.)  

So, please treat this for what it is: more of a sketch of my research than anything actually presentable or scholarly in of itself.  You can also view my Powerpoint presentation (oh joy.) to fill in the quotations, evidence and critical background, if you're that masochistic, here.  (hint: right-click the file on that page and click "save," otherwise your browser will try to open a Powerpoint file, with hilarious results...)

So, without further ado, here's a look at Jackrabbit's mediocre first attempt to act like a grown-up and treat The Laramie Project like a scholar after the jump!

Jackrabbit Goes to the Academy: and I survived!

This past weekend was the bi-annual NEXUS interdisciplinary conference at the University of Tennessee, focusing on the theme of "Trauma and Testimony." Yours truly presented a paper on The Laramie Project dealing with testimony and community identity, which went... interestingly.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going to be able to pull the damn thing off, but after a lot of hair-pulling I managed to get a paper written, and the presentation went off with just a few minor lumps, bumps and bruises.

Actually, I discovered that getting this paper together challenged a lot of my previous ideas about why I resent The Laramie Project so much, and that was a good thing.  Essentially, I didn't like what the play was doing to my ability to define my own existence, but I also realized that it's that destabilizing of Laramie's idea of community that allows the LGBT community to speak.  Secondly, I never liked having to allow certain people (who I will not name because of their litigious personalities) to speak for me.  That's the same argument that a lot of TLP haters use about letting gays and lesbians speak out against them, and I have to wonder...  I think that Tectonic did a great thing by allowing my gay friends and neighbors the agency to speak of their life in Laramie, and in doing so they challenge the way that the "majority" have defined the community, and they feel the same press of being "defined" by a society external to their own.  Is that why I'm so ambivalent for this play-- because now I have a vague idea of what it feels like to be a voiceless member of the GLBT community, defined by the center and unable to speak back?

Anyhow, getting to that realization took a bit of personal wrestling.  Due to exams and other concerns, I couldn't actually write the presentation until the week of the conference.  Even though I had loads of time to do it, I kept staring at a blank screen, tapping my fingers, reading friends' blog posts, doing some creative writing.  Finally, the night before I had to give the paper, I stared at my terrifying, blank computer screen and typed out a single phrase:

a strained and sometimes fractious relationship

 I stared at that phrase for about two solid minutes, and once I had the source of my writer's block on the page, the paper I had been writing in my head for the last month and a half sprouted out from under my fingers.  I stayed up all night writing the stupid thing.  

 The other three papers in my panel were freaking awesome, and there's one in particular I might write about, if "Annie" will let me, that is.  She wrote about her family's personal experience with a personal trauma and the weird position families get into, rhetorically speaking, as they try to urge the press to act as an outlet for their personal testimony. Since she's interested in the ability of victims to speak, as am I, it seems like a good fit...

And, Laramie made its presence known in an odd and interesting way once more to me at the conference.  The website for the conference is illustrated with images of trauma and violence of the sort that the presenters research, and this picture was one which one of the organizers (whom I don't even know) had found on Flickr:

Never forget that Laramie, Wyoming is a town scarred by more than just the Matt Shepard incident; every town's psyche shows the scars of a parade of grief.  The roadside memorial which stands at Tie Siding, Wyoming was erected after eight members of the UW cross country team were killed by a drunk driver just a week after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11.  They were traveling to a meet at the time, and the man who killed them was another UW student.  At the time, I had been attending school at my new college in the Deep South for a little over three weeks. 

When I saw this photo on the website, it stopped me in my tracks.  I mean, I was at a conference to talk about how Laramie has tried to speak through a moment of tragedy, and here I was being confronted by one that I haven't even thought about for years.  What makes one tragedy seem so indelibly burned into our collective consciousnesses and others, like this one, must remain silent except for eight pairs of shoes and a peeling marker at a deserted crossroads?  It sometimes seems so unfair, but that's just the strange way that collective memory works.  Somethings remain, others don't, and all will eventually be forgotten.  Perhaps it was good for me to step back a little from the Shepard tragedy and put it in this larger context-- in comparison to those Laramie tragedies whose presence scars just as deeply but whose stories don't get told: James Merritt, Kristen Lamb, Cindy Dixon, the Tie Siding accident, the 2006 double murder-suicide...

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PHOTO CREDIT:

1) The 2010 Nexus logo, used with permission.  You can view the full conference description here.

2)  The roadside memorial at Tie Siding, Wyoming, taken from gregor_y's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregor_y/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Bibliographic info for "The Laramie Project": Lit Crit and Theater

After the jump on this page is a list of major works that I've been able to find that focus on The Laramie Project to some degree in the MLA Bibliography and the International Index to the Performing Arts.  I tried to stick to presenting scholarly articles that were both in good journals and were of some length.  The IIPA, for example, has a ton more, but a lot of them are just short news blurbs or show announcements.

Note also the number of these that are by TT members, interviews with TT members, or about their practices.  There's not as much on the literary side of The Laramie Project as I had expected, strangely.  The articles vary both in focus and in quality, so definitely check these out for yourself when using them. 

A Little Bibliography: Op-ed statements on the Shepard beating

Matt's beating and murder in 1998 couldn't have come at a more timely point in terms of stirring up some seriously wicked national debate on GLBT rights.  When you look at some of the national discourse at this time-- questions about DOMA, Trent Lott's comparison between homosexuality and kleptomania, the ex-gay movement's advertising campaign--  Shepard's death was like dropping a piece of hot slag in the middle of a munitions plant.  That's where my frustration with the politics surrounding the Shepard case comes from: once everything exploded, there was no easy way to sort the productive from the non-productive dialogue, and for every passionate and reasoned call for change, there were so many others just spewing about their own brand of incandescent hate on both sides.

In a real way, even though I adore him as a playwright and I understand the source of all that fury, Tony Kushner's response to Matt's death was just as frustrating to me as Trent Lott's: neither seemed to think far enough beyond their own concerns to see the real human beings on the other side.  The fulminate rage in Kushner's rhetoric in his editorial makes me flinch.  For all his condemnation of those "savor[ing] the unsavory details" of the Shepard murder, Kushner just seems to me to use Matt Shepard as a grisly trope, a blunt object he can hit back at the Republicans with in retaliation.  If you're arguing for human rights and the equal dignity of all people,  I don't see the point of slapping somebody upside the head with a real human being.  I have the same problem with anti-abortion activists driving around in trucks with pictures of butchered babies on the sides: neither approach provides space for compassion, understanding or forgiveness-- and it certainly doesn't uphold the dignity of the real human beings whose lives are at stake. 

In any case, a few of the more notable responses I have attached here as a short bibliography if you're interested.  From a literary standpoint, obviously those by Kushner and Vidal will be of the most interest.  But the one that piques my own curiosity is Paul Capetz' meditation on the church as a ground of reconciliation between gays, lesbians and straight Christians.  His response is provocative, unwavering, and, knowing what has happened within the Presbyterian church (my current church home) since this was written, it's an interesting bit of prophecy.  He also recognizes the humanity on both sides of the debate and speaks in love even as he calls passionately for change.  Please, no matter your personal conviction, give his argument a fair read.  Full bibliography (with references to Wyoming letters, too) after the jump...

Angstademic Discourse

[Hello all! As of today, the Jackrabbit will be spending most of her weekend furiously typing on her first round of PhD field exams in medieval literature. So while I'm collapsing into a nervous wreck over Boethius, Beowulf, The Pearl poet and/or Chaucer, please enjoy the melodious tones of this silent scream into the Bloggosphere...]

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 So, the good news is this: I found out last week that I am going to be talking about The Laramie Project at an interdisciplinary academic conference focusing on "memory and trauma" as their theme.  I'll present the paper in March as part of a panel on issues of narrative trauma, representation and recursive storytelling (this would take a lot of time to explain.)  Anyhow, my personal experience with The Laramie Project and questions regarding trauma and memory are going to be placed alongside narratives of natural disasters and displacement, civil war, and victims of seemingly motiveless violence.  And among all this, I'm supposed to come up with something theoretical and pithy about The Laramie Project that will make the collective cogs in the audience members' heads hum pleasantly, a good performance of academic gymnastics.  And at the moment, the prospect of this makes me think just one thing: Ugh.      

So, at first I was thrilled to finally talk about all this in an academic forum.  Then a couple days later I started to experience a little bit of doubt, and that doubt has turned into some outright panic about having to discuss this in person to academics.  I'm worried: is anything I'm doing here actually worthy of being considered academic?  Or, on the flip side, is anything I'm doing here actually worthy of being considered authentic writing?  What's going to happen if I pull whatever-the-hell-this-is into the academic sphere where it can be theorized to death? 

A bigger question might be this:  what the hell IS this thing I'm writing?  Can I even remotely call this a foray into an academic discussion? And, should I?

Online articles about TLP from American Theatre

The Theatre Communications Group has two good articles for research on The Laramie Project.  Their publication American Theatre has two good feature articles about The Laramie Project available for reading online.  One is a background piece about the process of creating the play, and the other is a short explanation by Kaufman himself.

Browse down to the May/June 2000 issue on the link above to find both articles.

Source Citation:

Kaufman, Moisés.  "Into the West: An Exploration in Form."  American Theatre May/June 2000: 17-18.

Shewey, Don.  "Town in a Mirror."  American Theatre May/June 2000: 14+.