Published Paper Details:

"I was lonely and frightened, I didn't know the next step. I was finally fully persuaded that I was "queer," but had no idea what to do about it." With these words written by American playwright Tennessee Williams in his autobiography Memoirs (1975), I would like to take my audience to his phantasmagoric world of the 'Queer.' In such a realm, there is a continual interplay of conflict revolving around language, identity and belonging. Today, the lexical meaning of the term primarily caters to sexual orientation. However, it originally meant 'strange' or 'peculiar.' While reading the one-act plays of Williams, it doesn't seem that they strictly cater to the former meaning rather they contain elements of both the former and latter connotation of the term. In this regard, I shall introduce a string of characters from his one-act plays who might be categorized as 'queer.' Using this word, Williams perhaps tries to portray not only himself but also some of his beloved protagonists as the 'other.' The reason behind deciding to work on his short plays is that, these works have been long overshadowed by the popularity of his longer plays such as The Glass Menagerie (1944) or A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) or Cat on a hot tin roof (1955) and so forth. However, the short plays are equally significant and reveal fascinating perspectives on the quality of being different from what is conventional or usual. The texts often engage with an abiding concern for the individual's construction of an identity in relation to his or her society. From this viewpoint, my paper shall investigate issues of the depiction of individual struggles as they relate to identity within the contested terrain of social space. Interestingly, several philosophers have spoken about the notion of 'Othering.' However, my paper proposes a general understanding of Tennessee Williams' concept of 'Othering' from a philosophical point of view drawing on theories of the 'Other' and its representation propounded by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). The primary reason behind choosing Levinas' concept of 'Othering' is that he seems to celebrate the 'other' and so does Williams in his works and of all philosophers, in the twentieth century Levinas spoke the most on the notion of 'othering.'