Embodied Refusals: Performance and Transnational Feminist Witnessing in the Face of Gendered Violence

Ross, Danielle

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-xnck-2667

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Embodied Refusals: Performance and Transnational Feminist Witnessing in the Face of Gendered Violence

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This dissertation explores the entanglements of performed refusals and witnessing practices in the face of gendered violences. I analyze how contemporary artists use staged performance to generate new modes for witnessing histories of gendered violence across temporal and national boundaries. In particular, I investigate four performances addressing local histories of gendered violence in unique geopolitical locales: Regina José Galindo’s (279) Golpes and Presencia, both of which grapple with the epidemic of feminicide in Guatemala, Nigerian-American choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili’s Poor People’s TV Room, a diasporic choreography inspired by the 1929 Women’s War and the 2014 Boko Haram kidnappings of schoolgirls, and Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen’s Corbeaux, which stages public, vocalized mourning performed by Moroccan elders and younger women who join the cast in each local touring site. I argue that each of these embodied works enact modes of refusal that remix how witnessing occurs on and offstage, and I analyze how their transnational investments contribute to new modes of reckoning with lineages of patriarchal violences.My research sits at the intersections of performance studies, critical dance studies, and Black, Women of Color, and transnational feminisms. I employ a mixed methodological approach to attend to the nuanced data which each case study offers, including analysis of secondary literature and archival evidence, reception and rhetorical analysis, critical ethnography, and choreographic analysis, which I employ in order to attend to performance sites, sound, costuming, and lighting, amongst other embodied and aesthetic elements. Using these methods, I analyze each work’s distinct modes of performed refusal, including privacy, withholding, and nonexposure, and I elucidate how each performance reveals the transnational divides and cross-cultural (mis)translations threaded in the projects of both performance and redress. My research traces these acts of refusal as I analyze how their modes of evasion contest expectations of divulgence common in redressive action around gendered violence. Ultimately, I argue for each performance’s embodied practices of refusal as generating new analytics for understanding the enduring grasp of gendered violences.

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