Upcoming CAS event

Feminist Performance and the Limits of Witness in Neoliberal Times Candice Amich, A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of English Monday, September 23; 4:30 PM Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A, CMU

Since 1999, Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo has used her body to register what Judith Butler calls "the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability," calling attention, for example, to the femicides that have accompanied the feminization of labor globally. Galindo's extreme bodily acts viscerally transmit neoliberalism's gendered economies of violence. Indexing brutal acts of state violence, but also more subtle invasions of the female form through cosmetic culture, Galindo's performances explore neoliberalism from the inside out. The harm which Galindo's performance practice invites to her body collapses the distance between testifier and witness to absorb the spectator in a vision of violent mutuality.