research for naomi wallace

So, finally, here are the two articles I pulled from that I found online. The first is "Enemy Within," and you can find it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2007/feb/06/lyngardner.features11 . This article speaks mostly about how Naomi is percieved. It especially talks about what obstacles she has to face as far as the government goes, or just how she is not very welcomed in her playwrighting from the government because she is, after all, a very political writer.
("Today, if you put forward ideas of a different America, you are accused of being naive or presumptuous and of not accepting reality," says Wallace") This was a quote I pulled from the article that gives you an idea of what she faces as a writer, and how she thinks as a person. (Gardner, Enemy Within.)

The second article was titled, "Looking for Fire," by Connie Julian. It is found at
http://revcom.us/a/1232/naomirwinterview.htm. This was an interview with Naomi Wallace, and although she did not talk extensively about her background information, I feel that by reading this, you will know her more personally than you would with a biography.

("In this culture we are sexualized in a certain way, not only to be heterosexual, but we are told there is one story of the body, and that is how you interact with the body. You know, the attention is put on the breasts or the groin and these other parts of the body are neglected, right? [laughs] But it's not so much just finding, "Oh, my toe is erotic," it's not about that, it's that if we're trying to re-imagine ourselves, then maybe we need to touch the world and what's out there in a different way, and grasp it in a different way. It's through making it strange to ourselves that we sometimes get into a new place, and then we can look at ourselves differently or look at our possibilities differently.
While I have also written about queer sexuality, I've mostly done what you're talking about in heterosexual relations in my plays because how heterosexuals touch and act out their sexuality is extremely overdetermined and restrictive. I've tried to break that down. The Trestle at Popelick Creek was an experiment in trying to write a heterosexual love story which is not dead at the gate in terms of being a site for change.
I do not believe that any sexuality is inherently liberatory or resistant. It depends on where it's sitting in history. So the challenge for me is how can I take a relationship between a boy and a girl and remake that desire in a way that they're not just a boy and a girl any more. They have to look at what it means to be a boy and a girl, how they are supposed to act, how they are supposed to touch and what they want to do with that knowledge. That's why a lot of folks have felt that it's a very queer play in that way. Because the sex that the boy and girl have is not your typical teenager sex when they finally get down to it. Because they are strangled by the norm, what they are allowed to do, what their choices are, which are so few. So it's a boy and a girl trying to break out of how they are meant to interact as young heterosexuals.
I think there's also a way of looking at the body, the way the body is so overused in this society in terms of selling it, or the way it labors, or the way the body is used up, by capitalism you could say, used and thrown out the back door. How we're these incredible bodies, with this enormous capacity to feel and desire, and how that's destroyed or how that's harnessed for other means, like channeling our desires into buying or consuming. So to try to relook at the body, and almost retrain our bodies to respond in a different way, or go to a different place than where the legal touch requires it to go. I've always been interested in that." -Naomi Wallace) (Julian, Looking for Fire.)
That was just an excerpt from the interview that I found very interesting because Naomi Wallace's plays are very sexual, but in a very different, almost raw, way from the "mainstream," or "common," sex scenes we see in plays today. The rest of the interview is very informative and really shows what Naomi's mission is as a writer. I encourage you to read the entire thing- it may help when reading her plays.