Location: Zoom Room 2
Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/6087153816?pwd=ppMzS6CF8VMyDMKcF9DX0BiTTC3Exf.1
Moderator: Sarah Robbins
Abstracts:
T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko and Giorelle Diokno, “TradWife Strife: Ecologies of Performative Femininity, Conservatism, and Identity Politics in Contemporary Social Media”
A New York Times’ 6 November thrice-retitled op-ed, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace: And if so, can conservative feminism fix it?” opens with the provocation, “Men and women are different” (Douthat et al. 2025). On 9 November, University of Oklahoma psychology student Samantha Flunecky submitted a short paper (for which she received 0/25 points) reading, “God made male and female […] differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose” (in Petit 2025). Backlash to the NYT op-ed was fast and furious from feminist readers; OU put Flunecky’s instructor, transgender graduate student Mel Curth, on administrative leave.
Both examples reflect a growing and discomfiting trend toward conservative feminism in the US, most performatively evidenced in the social media phenomena that is the #TradWife. A “cult of domesticity” emerging in 2020, the #TradWife life is, largely, only possible through extensive personal wealth, privilege, and whiteness (Sherman 2024; see Jerkins 2024, Haug 2024, and Ramzi 2024). Yet, even as reels parodying it trouble what Neil Shyminsky identifies as the “conspicuous consumption” tradwifery performs (2024), it is not only the (re)performance of over-the-top domestic femininity that furthers #TradWife content but its users’ complicitly (in)conspicuous consumption.
Through interpretive analysis of #TradWife reels, from @ballerinafarm’s homesteading life to @hannasaurrr’s parodically milked “sheepgoat”—and to Julia Roberts’ voiceover in a pre-US election ad reminding that the voting booth is “one place where women still have the right to choose” (2024)—we consider how these videos reflect a larger ecology of performative femininity on social media consequently refracted onto and by the sharded prism of identity politics in the US at this contemporary moment.
Molly Dunn, “Challenging Inherited Conceptions of Illness: Hannah Wilke’s Intra-Venus and Autopathography as a Site for Change”
In 1978, Susan Sontag published Illness as Metaphor, a book of critical theory that investigates our cultural treatment of disease, considering the history of illness not from a physical perspective but from a metaphorical perspective. Diseases such as tuberculosis (historically) and cancer (presently) take on metaphorical meanings within art, literature, and politics, Sontag argues; ‘cancer,’ for instance, comes to stand for any unwanted, invasive threat. Moreover, due to our lack of understanding of the nature and causes of these diseases (cancer replaced tuberculosis as the most mythologized disease once the pathology of tuberculosis was understood), we assign attributes to those afflicted by them. With tuberculosis, the afflicted were romanticized. Cancer, however, remains a “rare and still scandalous subject that seems impossible to aestheticize” (Sontag 8).
One performance artist whose work serves as an effective intervention into this inherited legacy of cultural understanding of disease is Hannah Wilke (1940-1993). Wilke was an American multidisciplinary performance artist whose work largely centered on questions of femininity and the body. When diagnosed with lymphoma in 1986, Wilke’s work continued to focus on her body, only now, this body was marked by cancer. The Intra-Venus exhibition (1994) consists of thirteen photographic portraits, as well as related sculptures and paintings. This autopathographic exhibition presents a unique and compelling view of Wilke’s experience of cancer that diverges significantly from the one Sontag describes.
By engaging in autopathographic photography, Wilke refuses to allow her illness to be viewed in the inherited way. While our conceptions of illness and cancer are rooted in a long legacy of metaphorical use within art and literature, Wilke’s Intra-Venus exhibition demonstrates that autopathographic work that returns the narrative agency to the one afflicted can effectively disrupt this inherited conception and offer a new, more compassionate view of the illness experience.
Jo Vignola, “Temporalités dissidentes : Fabriquer le soi entre spectres, métamorphoses et fantasmes”
Cette communication propose d’aborder les temporalités trans à partir du concept de déplacement identitaire et des implications spécifiques qu’il engendre dans la création en solo performatif. En mobilisant la notion formulée par Susan Stryker : un mouvement continu, sans destination fixe, mais qui s’éloigne d’un point d’origine non choisi, j’examine comment les pratiques scéniques trans* génèrent des structures temporelles non linéaires fondées sur l’anachronie, la fragmentation et la (re)construction constante du soi.
L’analyse repose sur deux études de cas : Wild Thing, mon solo performatif, et The Silicone Diaries de Nina Arsenault. Ces œuvres se construisent dans une porosité des temporalités du soi, réactivant des identités passées (par l’usage fluide des noms de naissance et choisi, par l’évocation de genres antérieurs ou par la convocation de traces matérielles) tout en spéculant des identités à venir. Dans The Silicone Diaries, le futur est littéralement sculpté au scalpel : Arsenault transforme son corps en archive vivante et en projection spéculative d’un idéal de féminité. Dans Wild Thing, le futur se rejoue dans un cycle de mues et de régénérations inspiré de l’Ouroboros. Les vêtements déposés comme peaux anciennes deviennent matières à recommencement, activant des filiations spectrales du Moi passé-présent-futur.
En s’inscrivant dans une temporalité trans, ces deux solos performatifs montrent comment la discontinuité, la métamorphose et le déplacement façonnent des manières singulières de raconter le soi. Cette communication témoignera de logiques transnarratives qui permettent de concevoir la création trans* comme une expérience de temporalités dissidentes incarnée.
Biographies:
T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko is Associate Professor at University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her most recent book is the coedited collection 50 Key Performance Artists, with Adriana Disman (Routledge, 2026).
Giorelle Diokno is a queer Filipinx scholar and PhD graduate from the University of Toronto. They research contemporary Filipinx Canadian performance, as well as ethics of representation, pedagogies on performativity, and the politics of witnessing.
Molly Dunn is an MA student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, where she also completed her BA (Hons). Her research is focussed on the work of Hannah Wilke, specifically her Intra-Venus series, and autopathographic representations of cancer. She explores how photographic illness narratives can serve as effective interventions into our understanding of cancer and cancer patients, while offering agency over one’s experience of disease.
Jo Vignola est un artiste-chercheur indiscipliné. Sa démarche repose sur l’écriture scénique autothéorique, où le corps devient lieu d’analyse et de transformation. Ille propose une méthodologie fondée sur l’agentivité, la non-expertise et la (re)construction du soi, afin de laisser émerger des formes qui échappent aux logiques disciplinaires et normatives.