WGSS 66.12 Gender, Performance, & Healing
If the turn of the 2010s saw an uptick in conversations about self-care in the United States, the 2020s has ushered in a spate of discussions on the topic, often blurring the borders between academic and public platforms. But what exactly might ‘care’ look like and for whom, particularly across labor intensive practices like higher learning, scholarly productivity, and community organizing? Across struggles for political liberation, how have racialized artists of various genders turn to performance, broadly conceived, as a way to experience self-care, collective repair, and meaningful healing? This course charts interdisciplinary formations and performative happenings that center notions of care, repair, liberation, and healing in the lives of communities of color and allied peers. Highlighting interlocking issues related to gender, sexuality, race, disability, and economics, we will mine live performance, staged plays, body art, land art, literature, spoken word, digital publics, and theoretical discourse. Over the course of 10 weeks, we will examine disciplinary methods, political investments, activist gestures, and everyday aesthetics that together may come to define aesthetic acts of care and healing. This query seeks not so much to account for what healing is, but what notions of healing can do at the intersection of performance and deviant identities. As such we will consider the inherent paradoxes—limits and inevitable ruptures—of performance as healing while seeking to conjure fierce possibilities for liberatory performance today. Across our discussions we will mine the fields of Black feminist thought, Lantinx feminisms, performance studies, visual cultures, and queer of color critique. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to devise their own creative acts of care and/or original performances bent towards healing.