Graduate Seminar in Performance Studies: The Vulnerability Artist

Catalog description

This graduate seminar in performance studies, open to students from all disciplines, will investigate practices of enduring, surviving, reimagining, parodying, and just plain grappling with the inescapable “vulnerability” of the body and the self. Rooted in the interdisciplinary ethos of performance studies, the seminar will use the aperture of the “Vulnerability Artist” (adopting a term used by the performance theorist José Muñoz to describe the work of performance artist Nao Bustamante) to survey foundational and recent scholarship on embodiment, disability, health and illness, mad studies and neurodiversity, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, among other areas of inquiry. We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to vulnerability and consider how they relate to longstanding debates within performance studies. Students will write a culminating seminar paper that expands upon course topics in relation to their own research interests.