Call for papers vol. 10 Performative Practices and Inclusivity: Dissident Bodies Between Fragility, Care, and Discomfort
Performative Practices and Inclusivity: Dissident Bodies Between Fragility, Care, and Discomfort
The term performance is used today across a wide range of contexts (for example, in business or sport), reflecting the considerable semantic flexibility of the concept. Within the arts, performance, by virtue of its ephemeral and constantly evolving nature, “defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists” (Goldberg 1979, p. 6); “it will always be a means to break through any limits or conventions imposed on art activity” (ibid., p. 125). Understood either as an autonomous artistic practice (performance art) or as a category of contemporary art emerging from the 1950s onwards (Heinich 2014), performance is notably characterized by its capacity to integrate multiple artistic languages. A seminal example is Untitled Event (1952), which brought together John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Tudor, combining text and poetry readings, piano compositions, dance sequences, film projections, and other artistic forms. Performance is also characterized by the direct involvement of audiences, as in Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, leading to the notion of a “Relational Aesthetics” in contemporary artistic practices (Bourriaud 1998). The inclusive nature of performance thus calls for the continual reassessment of its definition, opening new perspectives for understanding artistic creativity and the processes underlying aesthetic production.
How does including the other within oneself – for example, in one's gestures, without absorbing or reducing the other to what is one's own – enable an unexpected process of becoming within one's corporeality, or even one's individuality, thereby opening up new possibilities for creation? More broadly, what impact does inclusivity have both on individuality as an ongoing process of becoming and on the ways in which we create and act together?
Dissident bodies may take a variety of forms. They include physically constrained or diseased (Foucault 1999); queer and trans bodies that resist being assigned to overly rigid and restrictive traditional categories (Bigé & Maillet 2025; Bigé & Blanchard 2024); and burlesque bodies, which provoke laughter precisely because they transgress the established order (Grasset, 2025). How do these different forms of corporeality enable alternative modes of perception, experience, and action in the world, and in what sense do they foster creative modes of togetherness?
To what extent do performative practices, bringing into play and staging bodies and persons with non-normative motivity, disrupt established landmarks, ultimately reshaping the very meaning of inclusivity?
Editors: Christine Leroy, Serena Massimo, Alessandra Randazzo
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