Abstract
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William Yang’s performance Sadness challenges essentialised categories of identification
by juxtaposing tales of his Chinese-Australian family with the journey of friends from his
community dying of AIDS-related complications and infection. In doing so, Yang foregrounds
the threat of mortality that attempts to stabilise identity politics for the
‘nation’. In the age of global media Yang resists multi-modal approaches to his
medium to reclaim the theatrical space of narration. As a consequence, Yang’s
Sadness affords an opportunity to rethink the imperatives intrinsic to the classification
of social subjects in terms of racial, sexual and reproductive practices, and the relationship
of the citizen-body to modes of cultural representation.