“Yeah, well, I’m thinking about how there’s so much that we do every day that’s about sensuality but it’s fulfilled in a very hollow way, like through buying, eating fast food, all this stuff, as though we’re constantly filling ourselves. We have a great spiritual need but it’s filled by things you can buy, things you can bet on. There is a way that we interact physically with the world, and touching is one of the things, that’s how we live, through touching. We take the boxes off the shelves, we take the shirt to the cash register, but it’s a kind of touching that can’t be reciprocated by things, of course. Touching each other is a whole different thing because it’s a living being, and there’s the possibility of touching being returned.

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.”

Interview— Naomi Wallace: Looking for Fire
http://revcom.us/a/1232/naomirwinterview.htm