Conveners: Diana Taylor & Marinanne Hirsch

This working group will consider a number of topics related to embodiment and performance. Has embodiment come to serve as a fruitful new term replacing the tired paradigms of race, class, gender and sexuality? Has the rise of digital technologies changed the ways in which we think of the body and presence? Focusing on embodiment in virtual and actual spaces, we will explore such issues as embodiment and affect, memory, biopolitics, medicine, technologies of reproduction, globalization, migration, activism and resistance.

Biographies

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU.  She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War', Duke U.P., 1997, and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003). She is Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Most recently, together with Leo Spitzer, she published Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010). Her co-edited book Rites of Return is forthcoming, as is her own book the Generation of Postmemory: Visual Culture After the Holocaust.

Participants

Gaelyn Aguilar
Gustavo Aguilar
Pedro Bennaton
Sebastián Calderón-Bentín
André Bezerra
Maria José Contreras
Giselle de Carvalho Ruiz
Jean Howard
Ananya Kabir
Rosanne Kennedy
Kavita Kulkarni
Tamara Leacock
Debra Levine
Yvette Martinez
Vivian Martínez Taberas
Ausonia Monteiro
Tomás Urayoán Noel
Lorie Novak
Juarez Nunes
Michael Peterson
Leyneuf Tines
Kate Trebuss
Bretton White