Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Hybrid Session
Moderator: Laura Levin
In the Shoals Between Media and Performance: Rebecca Schneider’s (im)Media Theory
Rebecca Schneider, arguably the leading theorist of American Performance Studies, has recently moved from Brown’s Theatre department to its storied department in Modern Culture and Media. To her readers, this has a certain logic. Save those focused on digital media, and no performance theorist has so consistently tacked between broad conceptualizations of performance and the similarly broad, transhistorical claims of media studies – an interdisciplinary field in many ways analogous to performance studies, though rarely in conversation with it. How to think about media and performance together? How to conceptualize the rarely breached shore between these two paradigmatically postmodern inter-disciplines? Towards this broader attempt, this paper reads and critiques writings from across Schneider’s career.
Schneider, I argue, has presented an empty concept of ‘media’ to preserve her theory of a ‘performance’ which can disrupt modernity by establishing transhistorical exchange. But, as I show, this is ultimately an (im)Media theory, holding that the material world serves as a neutral slate upon which intersubjective communication can flow freely. Through this reading, we can better understand the deep divides between performance and media theory, boundaries which stem from the overly expansive claims of our own treasured canon.
Dr. Douglas Eacho, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, CLTA Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Assistant Director, Academic BMO Lab in Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies, and AI University of Toronto
Bio: Douglas Eacho is a historian and theorist of digital performance-based at the University of Toronto (Ph.D., Stanford University). His work contextualizes performance and computation within the history of capital. Essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Theatre Survey, TDR, and elsewhere.
Reconceptualizing Internet Archives: Feminist Memes as Repertoire
Feminist archive scholars have long warned about both the power imbalances and the erasures that are embedded in the institutional practices of archives. Digitally-born artifacts are no different. The current meltdown of, and mass exodus from, Twitter shows what is at stake when our cultural archives are owned by corporations that need not be held accountable to their public. This paper proposes to consider internet archives from a feminist performance studies perspective. To do so, it examines how vernacular discourses on reproductive rights have been captured by feminist memes. The paper situates these memes as digitally-born artifacts that make up an ongoing archive of resistance that is embedded in our visual and cultural landscapes. Drawing on a private meme collection I have developed with the Internet Archive, I will look at hashtags and memes surrounding Roe V. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson. The paper frames collective archives of feminist memes as effectively vibrant spaces of critical and creative reckonings. It ultimately argues that these memes are best framed not as archives but as performative repertoires that provide vital acts of transfer (Taylor 2002). For Taylor, the repertoire stands in contrast to official archives, which can act as institutional sites of oppression for those bodies most marginalized and erased by official discourse. This leads to the questions the paper explores: Are we enacting repertories online? What do they look like? How do they function? What are they transmitting, and how do we attend to them as sites of research?
Shana MacDonald, Associate Professor Communication University of Waterloo
Bio: She is the PI for the SSHRC funded Insight Grant “Feminist Digital Media (2016-2020): Building Affective and Activist Worlds” and co-director of the Feminist Think Tank.
‘You Have Left Your Imprint in my Heart, Forever and in Gold’: Embodied Memorial in Virtual Tribute Burlesque Performance
In this paper, I explore how mentorship between generations of women who perform burlesque produces care, support, and collective mourning through “tribute act” performances. The “Tribute” act is a performance wherein contemporary neo-burlesque performers create a burlesque act inspired by one of the Burlesque Legends– or any burlesque performer who was a feature or headliner before the year 1975. Post-2020, virtual tribute act performances can be read as a response to the “unmooring” effects of social isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Legends have passed on or are in failing health and require material support and a collective process of ascribing value to their life’s work through performance. To do so, I closely read a virtual tribute act created in 2021 by Portland-based Lola Coquette to the late Marinka– a trans-Latinx burlesque performer who was an international headliner throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Central to the creation of this tribute act was Coquette and Marinka’s relationship and the responsibility bestowed on Marinka to carry on her legacy. Using a metaphor of “reaching out through time,” or reaching across the shores of life to those who have passed on, I describe how performing tribute acts involves extending this ethos to a kind of transtemporal erotics in the Lordian sense– an erotics that, yes, is rooted in revelling in the joy of performing sexuality, but also the sensuality that comes from tracing the roots of kinship through performance across the bounds of time, and past the barrier of death. This burlesque aspect of looking back and acknowledging our elders is not so much about sex as it is about embrace, willful entanglement, and care.
Julia Matias, University of Toronto
Bio: Julia Matias (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate completing a collaborative degree with the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on feminist knowledge production in neo-burlesque. She is also an active neo-burlesque performer.