...Tavia Nyong'o Can “performance” ever be exactly defined? Or is the constitutive tension between what performances are and what performatives do simply part of what makes the field of performance studies politically pertinent? © 2009 Duke University Press 2009 Peer Review Stanley Aronowitz...

...Drew Daniel This essay examines the phenomenon of “queer minstrelsy”—roughly, straight performers pretending onstage and in their lyrics to be gay, here exemplified by the Meatmen, the Frogs, and Zeigenbock Kopf—as a means for thinking about performance as both a catalyst for, and a solvent...

...Nao Bustamante © 2014 Duke University Press 2014 Nao Bustamante performs Given Over to Want (2007), Santiago, Chile. Photo credit: Jorge Aceituno. Courtesy of the artist Social Text 121 • Vol. 32, No. 4 • Winter 2014...

...Cecilia Vicuña © Cecilia Vicuña 2015 Cecilia Vicuña, Vaso de Leche, two photographs from a set of photographs that document a site-­specific performance in Bogota, 1979. Courtesy of England & Co Gallery, London Social Text 122 • Vol. 33...

...Michael Wang © 2014 Duke University Press 2014 Michael Wang, Rock Pigeons (Feral/Domestic), performance (trained homing pigeons, feral pigeons), from the series Invasives, 2010. Courtesy of the artist Social Text 121 • Vol. 32, No. 4...

...Catherine Soussloff; Mark Franko Duke University Press 2002 Visual and Performance Studies A NEW HISTORY OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY No one can any longer separate knowledge from power, reason from...

... with the material world. The term scriptive thing integrates performance studies and “thing theory” by highlighting the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. A knife, a camera, and a novel all invite—indeed, create occasions for—repetitions of acts, distinctive and meaningful motions...

... past and present, as a corollary of institutional corporatization, and heed the call for a more sincere alliance between theater and performance studies. The essay is also a call for the arts and humanities in general to confront the market and global logics of knowledge production; it argues that we...

...Christine Bacareza Balance In his chapter “Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative” in Cruising Utopia , José Esteban Muñoz models for us what he terms the “productive consumption” of photographer Kevin McCarty’s work. Inspired by Muñoz’s dialogic approach, recognizing that our own...

...Shane Vogel This essay develops a theoretical framework of biopolitical performance, or more simply bioperformance , with which to approach the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s A Drum Is a Woman . Presented on the drama anthology program The United States Steel Hour...

...Karl F. Swinehart Colla and camba are two racialized, regionally indexical, and contrasting stereotypic characterological figures of Bolivian national personhood. This paper examines the enregisterment of an other-centric rendition of the colla register through an analysis of stylized performances...

... of the Brutalist structures erected under the Marcos dictatorship into sites of transgender performance. More specifically, it examines the conversion of the Manila Film Center (1981)—a long-abandoned structure rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of entombed construction workers—into the host site for the Amazing...

... infidelity and rumormongering elucidates local representations of race and gender. In a broader sense, this soap opera shows how moral inversion and poetic indirection are at the center of Ghanaian theatrical performance and interpretation, giving insight into how Ghanaian performers and audiences imagine...

...José Esteban Muñoz The great paradox of any punk scene is the ways in which it can simultaneously foster a sort of nihilistic individualism and an often transformational sense of commonality. This essay considers the performance of a punk rock commons that emerged from the Los Angeles punk scene...

...David L. Eng This essay is a tribute to José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013). It explores Muñoz’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory and affective difference as they play out in queer theory’s “antisocial thesis.” I suggest that Muñoz’s conception of racial identity as a performative cluster of common...