Abstract

This article broadens rhetoric’s scope by reclaiming a space for it in drama. It reviews rhetoric’s bodily beginnings in theatre to read contemporary plays, specifically Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, as rhetorical critique. As critique, Angels enacts the relationship among language, bodies, and power via Kushner’s dramatizing of the metaphoric constructions of AIDS and ideology. The play also performs the disruption and resignification of discourses that marginalize peripheral bodies on the sociopolitical stage. Consequently, Angels adopts a sophistic approach to rhetorical critique that demonstrates language’s mutability.