by Matthew Zundel

This essay offers a reading of Mario Mieli’s militant political project through the theoretical lens of performativity. Performativity, suspended between, and fully incorporating both the linguistic and the theatrical, courses through Mieli’s cultural production. I begin with a discussion of the role of the travestito within the context of Mieli’s involvement in the emergence of gay theater in Italy in the late 1970s and its necessarily political valences.