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GENDER AS RITUAL AND ‘POETIC RITUALITY’ IN CONTEMPORARY ‘BIOSCIENCE DRAMA’ impact of rituals as symbolic and communicative actions, all of which are also constitutive for drama and theater.*° Fischer’s categories show the fundamental relation between theater, drama, and ritual practice in general.*' However, “poetic rituality,” as she conceptualizes it, means that the artwork itself showcases ritual practice by (either) describing a specific literary and dramatic adaptation of ritual patterns, types, genres, and ways of language usage, and/ or it features a particularly ritualised structure. Hence, “poetic rituality” in the “Fischerian” sense also arises when a particular ritual or ritual practice fundamentally shapes the aesthetic construction and the concept of a drama or a piece of literature. RITUALISTIC THEATER AS GENDERED LIMINAL PROCESS IN IGOR BAUERSIMA'S FUTUR DE LUXE Written in 2002 by German-language Swiss playwright Igor Bauersima, futur de luxe extensively uses ritual and self-reflecting theatricality by addressing biomedical issues and religious rituality at the same time. However, while ritualized cultural practices and all the more sacral rituals anthropologically serve as coping strategies for the existential challenges of illness and death, futur de luxe addresses the age of biotechnology as a liminal phase for humankind. While Victor Turner considered the adaptation of ritual in drama and theater as an artistic and innovative liminal process in itself, Bauersima’s futur de luxe is, on various levels, explicitly playing with aesthetical liminality in order to explore the ethical liminality of current biomedical sciences. Futur de luxe achieves dramatic and theatrical irony by unmasking the inherent self-destructiveness of a binary gender concept, setting the disembodied male subject position as a rationalistic and fundamentally atheistic result of abjection of the “Other”? The play recounts the story of a shared dinner of the Jewish Klein family on a Friday night in the year 2020. The father, Theo, mother Ulla, the 25-yearold daughter Uschi, and the 24-year-old twin sons Felix and Rudi, meet at the parents’ house to celebrate Shabbat. While the family argues that they have never been particularly religious, the daughter insists on the sacral background of the meal, so that at the beginning of the play the religious ritual of lighting 30 Saskia Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945, Paderborn, Fink, 2019, 28-30, 79-80. 31 See connections between literature and ritual / theater, drama, and ritual in Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual und Literatur, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1996; Erika Fischer-Lichte: Das Theater der Rituale, in A. Michaelis (ed.): Die neue Kraft der Rituale, Heidelberg, Winter, 2007, 117-139. % On the concept of ‘Othering’ in the context of human cloning see Solveig Lena Hansen: Alterität als kulturelle Herausforderung des Klonens. Eine Rekonstruktion bioethischer und literarischer Verhandlungen, Münster, Mentis, 2016. * 183 ¢
