Students and theater professors at the University of Michigan are staging a “BIPOC and queer” version of the Wizard of Oz.
The event, called “Our Oz,” will debut on April 12. It is a “reimagination of The Wizard of Oz through a BIPOC and queer lens, as devised by professors José Casas (head of playwriting minor, Theatre & Drama) and Jake Hooker (head of drama at the Residential College) and U-M students.”
The play will be “[i]ntersectional and interdisciplinary,” and “explores and experiments with the tropes and images of multiple renditions from the Land of Oz as originally conceived by L. Frank Baum.”
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Professor José Casas’s other productions have included “la rosa grows beyond the wall, all brown all chingon, aDoBe, a million whispers all at once, and the vine.”
Professor Jake Hooker, who lists his pronouns as “he/his or they/theirs,” is the Co-Director of “A Host of People,” a “multi-racial Detroit-based ensemble theater company” that works to create “theater that is fundamentally rooted in justice.”
The mixing of the identities of “BIPOC” and “queer” has been seen in other colleges and universities as well.
Stanford University, for example, is planning a Jan. 21 dating specifically targeted at “Queer BIPOC” individuals.
Certain university programs and initiatives also engage in a similar imposition of modern ideas of gender ideology on older works of literature or periods of history.
This semester, for example, Boston University is letting students take a course on “Medieval Trans Studies” in which participants read medieval works of literature and documents allegedly featuring “alchemical hermaphrodites, genderfluid angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, trans saints, sex workers, and genderqueer monks.”
Harvard University is offering a similar “Queer/Medieval” course in which students read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and other medieval works, by using “queer theory” to interpret the text.
Harvard University also featured a course in the fall semester about “Gender in Byzantium” that examined ideas like “same-sex desire and relationships (homosociality); cross-dressing (trans monks?); intersectionality (gender, race and class); authorial (cis- and trans-) gender performance; eunuchs (a ‘third gender’?); incorporeal/genderless angels.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of Michigan and Professors Casas and Hooker for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
