‘Citizens of fate’: Blood, disease and the question of mortality in Sadness by William Yang

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.