Guided by under-studied archival documents, including public-health and pharmaceutical advertisements, as well as contemporaneous visual art and performance pieces by queer artists of color, this dissertation analyses the critical and evolving role that aesthetics have played in combatting HIV/AIDS since the early days of the pandemic. Drawing on methods and...
In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt analyzes how routine modes of debt and indebtedness restrict black women’s behavior across the everyday sphere and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Modes of indebtedness are characteristic of racial capitalism and...
Uttering Sonic Dominicanidad: Women and Queer Performers of Música Urbana Verónica Dávila Ellis What meanings are ascribed to the voices and sonic compositions of Caribbean and Latinx women and queer performers? What do their sounds tell us about Caribbean identity, gender, sexuality, and race? This dissertation centers the work of...
The term blowback originated from the American intelligence community to indicate the unexpected consequences of American foreign policy. In my dissertation, I give an account of how blowback results from these security policies. Blowback shows the cases that security policies create more harm than good to the enacting country due...
Although Jewish studies, sociology, and performance studies texts abound with productive scholarship on Jewish men and their contributions to comedy in the mid-century United States, there is remarkably scant attention devoted to the equally significant contributions of their female counterparts. Nowhere is that bias clearer than the peculiar case of...
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...
This dissertation explores performance as a mechanism of racialization and politicization of Native Americans in the United States. I analyze performances of Indians on theatrical stages to define how an embodied repertoire of visual, aural, and kinetic markers, what I call the Stage Indian, became codified and circulated within popular...