Playing the cancer card: illness, performance and spectatorship
Abstract
Playing the Cancer Card: Illness, Performance and Spectatorship investigates
the experience of spectatorship in relation to illness, an area that has received
comparatively little attention in Performance Studies. The thesis interrogates
these concerns through original interviews, archival research, close textual
readings of performances and performance documentation and draws on critical
frameworks, primarily from performance, literary and cultural studies concerning
spectatorship, illness, disability, documentation and narrative. The project
analyses both my performances that exemplify being an object of spectatorship
and my experiences as a spectator to the performance of illness.
! Playing the Cancer Card argues that performance, through the
experiences of spectatorship that it invites, works to broker the chasm between
embodied experience of illness and discourses of that experience. The
Introduction reviews academic literature and examines relationships between
illness and models of disability. In Chapter 1, readings of work by Sontag,
Spence and Baker demonstrate how individuals may strategically reject public
production of, and spectatorship to, their work. Chapter 2 analyses interviews
with Baker and Marcalo, demonstrating how performance can generate
tensions between artists and advocacy groups when modes of spectatorship —
regarding propriety and community politics — are policed. In Chapter 3, an
analysis of cancer blogs elucidates how they may redress limitations imposed
by traditional narrative structures around illness, forging new relationships
between the ill and their spectators. Here I also consider my performances that
respond to the pervasiveness of traditional narratives. Chapter 4 examines Fun
with Cancer Patients, my practice-based research project, and argues that by
addressing constructions of cancer, one may create work that productively
addresses spectators who both have and have not experienced cancer. In the
Conclusion, I evaluate two of my projects that address illness tangentially,
arguing that understanding ourselves as spectators and objects of
spectatorship can expand discourses surrounding embodied experience,
especially of illness.
Authors
Lobel, BrianCollections
- Theses [3834]