Becoming-minoritarian in Paco Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones

Abstract

Marginalization is at the core of Paco Bezerra’s work. The dramatic themes explored in his plays are varied, ranging from molestation, feminism, ecoterrorism, and immigration to bullying and many others. However, on another level throughout his oeuvre, there is always another element that stems from the marginalization aspect embedded in the dramatic conflict: a far more insidious and entrenched rotten core that affects everything and everyone on stage. While most of his characters are clearly beleaguered on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or a combination of several biases that act unabashedly on the surface, there is also an unrelenting criticism toward a higher form of political oppression or authoritarianism that pervades each play. In this article, I examine Bezerra’s Grooming and El señor Ye ama los dragones as enunciative acts of oppositional discursive strategy to show how the marginalization process, at the two levels sketched above, occurs. By analyzing the plays under Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minoritarian, minor literature and becoming-minoritarian, we can witness how marginalization functions to rupture the fragile order in Bezerra’s plays at both levels. Hereby we can see that the playwright has created works that belong to a minor language as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining the move from the particular issue at hand, the dramatic motor, to some larger unspecified phenomena, suggests a potentially troubling forecast for Spanish society.

KEYWORDS:

• Paco Bezerra
• contemporary Spanish theater
• marginalization
• minoritarian