Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times

This book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States. The feminist performative acts featured in the book contest the aggressive unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual and racial equality, the appearance of new planes of discrimination, and the social consequences of political economies based on free market ideology. The investigations of affect theory follow the circulation of intensities – of political impingements on bodies, subjective and symbolic violence, and the shock of dispossession – within and beyond individuals to the social and political sphere. Affect is a helpful matrix for discussing the volatile interactivity between performer and spectator, whether live or technologically mediated. Contending that there is no activism without affect, the collection brings back to the table the activist and hopeful potential of feminism.

“This volume gathers powerful scholarship by a global roster of writers, also including Antje Budde, Sue-Ellen Case, Charlotte Canning, Sandra D’Urso, Sarah French, Rebecca Jennison, Aoife Monks, and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi. It details and analyses an extraordinary array of performance and art practices. It tells a resounding horror story about the global reach of neoliberalism, the disparity it brings, and the precarity it multiplies, especially for women. … it delivers the powerful, inspiring affect of feminist resilience and resistance.” (Jen Harvie, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, Vol. 8 (2), 2020)

Elin Diamond is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, USA.Denise Varney is Professor of Theatre Studies and co-director of the Australian Centre in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia.Candice Amich is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, USA.