Acting out: a performative exploration of identity, healing, and wholeness

This paper examines the autoethnodrama entitled OUT, a play produced and enacted as a staged reading at the University of Illinois during Spring 2009. As an ethnodrama, OUT explores the authors reflections of reconciling his sexuality and spirituality, challenges rigid and fixed notions of coming out, and instead proffers it as a dynamic ongoing process. Utilizing the methodology of autoethnodrama and other performative based methods???inclusive of but not limited to poetry, framing, monologue, and dialogue???OUT re-imagines and recovers the queer individuals relationship to his/herself, their community, and to the society at large. Specific concepts addressed include, mystory, dramatic structures (i.e. framing, juxtaposition, polyvocality) and poetry. Anecdotes from each show, coupled with actual textual examples from the play will be utilized to illustrate the ways in which recovery???restoring healing and the wholeness of the individual???is enacted by performers, and then interpreted by those attending. Lastly, OUT through its usage of performance method, and critical engagement with Black feminists (see hooks 2004; Lorde 1984) offers for both author and reader a chance to find love, affirmation, and create whole and boundless self-identities