The literature on social media performance is remarkably thin. Monographs by Hadley, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and Patrick Lonergan—alongside a small number of articles—comprise the field. Intersections between social media and performance, however, are ripe for new scholarship: both explore audience, voice, accessibility, inclusivity, live-ness, mediation, identity, and representation. This panel questions both traditional notions of performance and exclusionary practices of community formation.
Digital Snap:
Roxane Gay, Twitter, and the Performance of Feminist Rage
Sara Ahmed ends Living a Feminist Life (2017) by gifting her readers a “killjoy survival” kit, of which“feminist snap” is an important element. Ahmed highlights the role it plays in gathering proof and testimony, and liberating women from silencing and shame. Roxane Gay’s Twitter description reads, “if you clap, I clap back,” which illustrates the power of feminist snap, clap back, or feminist rage in social media performance. Engaging Ahmed’s textand Gay’s Twitter activity, this paper argues that social media holds possibilities for radical epistemologies. Twitter becomes a stage for performances of feminist rage that prompt self-collecting archives of rebellion and testimony, featuring women’s voices—always in danger of being silenced—and trauma-inducing responses that are often otherwise publicly denied.
Nicole M. Morris Johnson(PhD Emory) is assistant professor of African American Literature and Culture at CSU Northridge. She will begin an appointment as assistant professor of African American Literature, Culture, and Theory at SUNY Buffalo in 2019. She has articles published or forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and South Atlantic Review, and her work appears in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance.
The Places of Protest:
Theatric and Digital Representations of South Africa’s Fallist Movement
In 2014-16, the series of student protests collectively known as “Fallism” challenged the South African academy to reconsider its place in a decolonial movement. While social media enabled protesters to appeal to a wider audience, it also forced them to navigate potential outsiders while seeking to further the cause among like-minded protesters. The Baxter Theatre Collective dramatized this tension in March 2018, presenting The Fallat St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Through an analysis of The Fall’s Cape Town and New York receptions, this paper argues for an analysis of digital virality that considers local trajectories, and contends that the insecurity of digital publication makes any pure insider/outsider binary impossible.
Susanna Sacksis PhD candidate and Virgil Heltzel Fellow in English at Northwestern. Her research examines the role of international institutions in contemporary African literature, and the influence of digital publication on the relationship between poetic form and community formation in southeastern Africa.She will begin an appointment as assistant professor of English in Anglophone Literature at the College of Wooster in 2019.
La Medea:
Bending the Limits of the Human and the Theatrical
Social media is integral to Yara Travieso’s La Medea (2018), a complex media ecology which combines live music, choreography, video feed, and live broadcast. Medea’s classical myth is retold as if on Twitter, and audience members are invited to tweet, take pictures, or otherwise engage via social media. This paper argues that La Medeabends the limits of what is public, what is theatrical, and what is socially acceptable, and problematizes the exposure of women’s stories to public scrutiny, consumption, and voyeurism.
Lilianne Lugo Herrera is PhD candidate in Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami. She holds a BFA from the Universidad de las Artes, Havana, Cuba. Recent awards include the ASTR Thomas Marshall Award, the NEH Summer Institute on Digital Technologies in Theatre and Performance Studies, and the Feministas Unidas Graduate Essay Award. She has articles published in Reading Cuba, Valenciana, and Gestos.
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Across national contexts and formats—from South Africa to the US, from Twitter feed to live performance—these papers examine possibilities in social media performance for protest and politics, narrative and representation, and diversity and inclusion.
Papers will be 15 minutes (45-50 minutes including introductions). The panel conveners, Catherine Quirk and Carolyn Ownbey, will begin discussion, asking each presenter one question (10 minutes), before fielding questions from the audience (15 minutes). This structure will allow for robust conversation regarding social media performance that we hope will continue beyond the panel. We aim to assemble a network of young women scholars working on issues of race, gender, and politics in social media performance. As conveners, we bring an important combination of specializations—theatre and performance, protest and politics, social media as practice and archive—to stimulate conversation and think through how performance and new media can be studied together.
Catherine Quirk is an actor and PhD candidate at McGill University. Her dissertation addresses the use of performance theory in the Victorian novel as a female alternative to the self-help plot. Her work appears in Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens,Wilkie Collins Journal, Theatre Notebook, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She lectures in Theatre History at McGill and Concordia, and is co-editor of the Dickens Society Blog.
Carolyn Ownbey(PhD McGill) is Assistant Director of Research Initiatives at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, where she specializes in facilitating collaborative, interdisciplinary research. Her scholarly work focuses on anticolonial literature and performance, new media and protest, and theories of democracy and citizenship. She has articles published in Textual Practiceand Safundi.
Quirk and Ownbey are presently collaborating on aproject on social media in contemporary performance and protest, a section of which they presented at the 2018 MLA.