The 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overruled 49 years of legal abortion in the United States, creating a patchwork of state laws under which abortion is completely banned in 13 states, and is severely limited or tied up in legal proceedings in at least 10 others. In the face of this apparent legislative and judicial failure for legal abortion, Performing Abortions After Roe v. Wade: Emergent Cultural Politics, calls attention beyond politics-as-usual towards an emergent cultural politics that may be found in performance. The talk focuses on late 20th and early 21st century theatrical and protest performances about abortion in the United States that are not normally taken seriously in the political arena. These performances–from the choreographed and scripted to the spontaneous, from stages to the streets–represent the range of people’s experiences with abortion, especially focusing on women of color, young women, rural women, and queer, non-binary, and trans people. Emergent cultural politics, enabled through and by cultural performances in the present, are not concerned with pragmatism or winnable campaigns; rather they are committed to what creates more transformative possibilities, and how those may be adapted and scaled in nonlinear and decentralized ways. Through fundamental shifts in notions of temporality, representation, relationality, embodiment, and care, they set in motion capacities for performing in ways other than those that were commonly in practice in the “pro-choice” movement for the last fifty years, and offer a way forward beyond the gridlock of the American electoral-legislative-judicial system.
Bio:
Rosemary Candelario is an artist-scholar with research interests in Asian American and Asian diasporic dance, butoh, ecology, site-related performance, and representations of sex and reproduction in performance and popular culture. She was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and the 2024 Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award for Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, and Practices (Routledge 2023, co-edited with Matthew Henley). She received the 2022 Mid-Career Award from the Dance Studies Association. Her current book project builds on decades of work for abortion access to examine performances about and in response to abortion by artists and activists in the US, arguing that these performances effect an emergent cultural politics that offers a way forward beyond the gridlock of the electoral-legislative-judicial system. Rosemary is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, with affiliations in the Center for Asian American Studies, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She serves as the President of the Dance Studies Association and holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA. www.rosemarycandelario.net
Performance Studies Department
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