Performing the East: M. Butterfly and the Politics of Queer (In)Visibility in Central Asia

• In Event: Daring, Subversive, Transgressive: Strategies of Self-Representation in 20th-Century Central Asian Art

Abstract

This presentation examines Central Asian theater as a space for the subversion of gender and sexuality, focusing on Vladislav Pazi’s 1992 adaptation of M. Butterfly in Frunze (now Bishkek). Staged during the perestroika era and early independence period, this production reveals how theatrical performance navigated and reimagined Soviet and post-Soviet norms surrounding gender and (homo)sexuality.
Originally written by David Henry Hwang and premiered on Broadway in 1988, M. Butterfly reimagines Madama Butterfly, subverting its Orientalist narrative through the story of René Gallimard, a French diplomat who falls in love with Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer later revealed to be a male spy. Themes of gender deception, colonial fantasy, and the West’s constructed image of the East are central to the play’s critique.
Vladislav Pazi (1945–2006), a Leningrad-trained director, staged M. Butterfly at the Frunze Russian Drama Theater, modifying Hwang’s script to align with local sensibilities while erasing its explicit queer subtext. By contrast, Roman Viktyuk’s Moscow adaptation, also from 1992, embraced the play’s homoeroticism, using avant-garde choreography and casting Kazakh countertenor Erik Kurmangali as Song. The contrasting choices of these two adaptations reflect diverging attitudes toward queerness in the Russian and Central Asian cultural landscapes of the 1990s.
Through a comparative analysis of the three productions, this paper argues that Pazi’s M. Butterfly functioned as a site of both queer erasure and coded transgression, complicating dominant narratives of gender, sexuality, and East-West relations in Central Asia.

Author

• Saltanat Shoshanova, U of Regensburg (Germany)