Performing Disemployment: Disability Performance and Theatrical Labor in the United States since the 1970s

McKelvey, Patrick T.

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Overview

Year:: 2017
Contributor:: McKelvey, Patrick T (creator); Ybarra, Patricia (Director); Schneider, Rebecca (Reader); Self, Robert (Reader); Passanante Elman, Julie (Reader); Brown University. Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: disability; performance; work; theatre; crip; queer
Extent:: 12, 257 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7301/Z03B5XMK

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Description

Abstract:: “Performing Disemployment” argues that theatre and performance practices emerged as the critical nexus between disability politics and the politics of work in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I draw upon archival research and performance analysis in order to demonstrate the pervasive insistence on acting, onstage and everyday, as a path to workforce participation – and by extension, citizenship – for disabled Americans. Disability has long been understood as the inability to work. But during the past half-century, policymakers, activists, and artists have redefined disability as the capacity to perform. As state agencies and activist communities ushered disabled Americans into the theatrical labor market, queer and feminist disabled artists developed performance practices and institutions that contested employment as the horizon of disability policy and activism. I excavate a genealogy of “disemployment,” a term I appropriate to describe performance practices with contradictory trajectories, sometimes ushering disabled Americans toward employment and sometimes contesting employment as the prevailing goal of disability politics. Moving across a broad repertoire of disability performance, “Performing Disemployment” reveals the parallel – and sometimes intersecting – histories of state agencies, disability activist organizations, and individual disabled artists who mobilized theatrical performance to reimagine the relationship between disability and work.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2017

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Rights: In Copyright
Restrictions on Use: Collection is open for research.

Citation

McKelvey, Patrick T., "Performing Disemployment: Disability Performance and Theatrical Labor in the United States since the 1970s" (2017). Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z03B5XMK

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Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department.
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