“There’s Nothing but Delight and Desire?” The Poetics and Politics of Joy in Charlie Josephine’s <i>Cowbois</i>

Abstract This article investigates Charlie Josephine’s queer Western Cowbois which premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in October 2023 to critical and popular acclaim. Critics unanimously praised Cowbois ’ boisterous and joyous celebration of gender and genre fluidity, yet many of them also described the play as one which aroused a visceral rather than intellectual reaction, as though these two notions were necessarily disconnected. Drawing on postcritical and affect theory, this paper looks into joy and pleasure, long considered as unworthy of consideration in academic discourse, as politically effective. It also places Josephine’s play within a recent tradition of joyful militancy. Josephine’s “queertopia,” to borrow the playwright’s words, offers a wilfully optimistic – yet by no means escapist – stance on the LGBTQ+ experience. Cowbois ’ politics lie in its erotic celebration of queer bodies, in Josephine’s belief in a “slightly flawed utopia,” as well as in the feeling of dialectical pleasure which it arouses.