Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 39.2

This issue included articles by Sam King-Shaw and Heather Grimm, and the bulk of the issue was dedicated to the special section “Consent and Its Limits” edited by Lindsay Brandon Hunter and me. This special section included articles by Lindsay, Kristen Holfeuer, Zachary Easterling, Kate Busselle, Sharon Green, Clara Kundin and Dane Futrell, and Vicki Hoskins.

Opening to My Introduction to the Issue

I want to begin my introduction to this, my first issue of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism as editor, by thanking my predecessor, Michelle Liu Carriger; the journal’s managing editor, Tiffani Hagan; and the journal’s new book review editor, Bryan Schmidt, without whose work this issue would not have been possible. This particular issue of JDTC will be partially devoted to the special section “Consent and Its Limits,” which I have been privileged to edit with Lindsay Brandon Hunter. I want to thank, too, the many scholars who have volunteered their expertise to give feedback on the articles in this issue. JDTC publishes special sections, not special issues, so complementing the special section in this Spring 2025 issue are two articles—by Sam King-Shaw and Heather Grimm—that I am excited to share with you.

I write this introduction as many of California’s citizens peacefully demonstrate against the violent actions of the US federal government in Los Angeles, where I grew up. Questions of sovereignty, power, carcerality, governance, legality and illegality, citizenship and community are at the forefront of my mind. I am, of course, also thinking of consent. Our special section in this issue is titled “Consent and Its Limits,” and the response of many of the people of Los Angeles to a hostile military occupation of their city reminds me that the US Declaration of Independence begins its second paragraph with the passage “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Questions of bodily sovereignty, autonomy, and governance are central to this issue of JDTC, and if the scholars included here are focused especially on the meanings and uses of consent for performance studies and dramatic theory, all of them have kept justice central to their thinking.

Lindsay Brandon Hunter conceived of this special section in the summer of 2024, while she was simultaneously preparing to perform in Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, and as that play reminds us, consent, bodily autonomy, and sovereignty are linked concepts. Indeed, given that play’s focus on who the US Constitution benefits and protects (the “Men” in the Declaration), we might ask: When is it that we consented to be governed? Under what conditions did we grant the consent to be governed? Can one meaningfully refuse such consent? What might be the consequences of refusing consent to being governed? In what ways does the state itself use violence to demand that we consent to be governed? As Pamela Haag has argued, “The opposition of consent to violence is a rich object for historical analysis because it is a concept that underwrites the three dominant social relations of liberal culture: it is relevant to the meaning of sexual freedom; it shapes ideas of citizenship as defined through consent to a ‘social contract’; and in a market economy driven by ideologies of free contract it contributes centrally to the assumed legitimacy of a labor relation.”