I argue that healing performances are an important site of activist practice and urge performance-based healing (including applied theatre, dramatherapy, and social justice theatre) to engage in decolonizing critiques and methods, integrating performances of healing and activism. By studying the work of transgender artists of color and analyzing their healing intentions and methods in activist performances, I theorize the possibilities of change incited by the performances—both utopic social change and individual healing for audience members and performers. As this project formulates it, trans-healing is a term I utilize to address the particular needs and experiences of people who self-identify as trans to heal themselves and their queer and trans communities. “Trans-healing” does not suggest that trans identity or trans people need healing, but rather, that society does.

Three case studies are presented to examine the possibilities of trans-healing in performance. To open even the possibility of trans-healing, it is important to recognize all the artists in this dissertation as cultural and knowledge producers who perform a valuable labor.

I examine Sri Lankan-American queer trans solo performer, D’Lo, arguing that performing in a trans temporality, alchemizing tragedy into comedy, and “transing” tradition can yield trans-healing possibilities for the performer and audience members. In the case of the group, Living Mythologies, consisting of five multi-ethnic trans and intersex femmes of color, I argue that their performance opens an Anzaldúan borderland space where tensions between dis/ease and healing, death and life perform activism and healing possibilities. Through decolonial projects such as resisting colonial closures, reclaiming mythological figures, and rebuilding a community space through a “hermeneutics of love” (Sandoval) that centralizes (and thus reframes) the narratives of trans people of color, Living Mythologies performs a trans-healing. Finally, I argue that the South Asian American (former) spoken word duo, DarkMatter, performs possibilities of decolonizing the neoliberal university. I refer to their workshop/ performance as a “pedagogy of failure” (LeMaster), finding the theoretical site of “failure” in the context of the neoliberal university, useful for threading important connections among healing, performance, pedagogy, and decolonial activism.

Much has been written about the work that a spectator does in direct physical relationship to live performance. Distinctions are made between active and passive spectatorship and these distinctions typically fall along the lines of the Cartesian mind/body divide. This project seeks to destabilize the binary distinction between physical participation and allegedly passive reception. Using the imagination of the spectator as the fulcrum upon which this allegedly passive spectatorship can be recast as an active co-creation of the performance event. Using the philosophical writings of Kendall Walton, as well as theories from spectatorship studies, reader response theory, and material culture, this project sets out to redefine the types of active participation that have heretofore been considered passive. By including close readings of several performances, as well as phenomenological experiences as an audience member, this study seeks to expand the ways in which practitioners and thinkers alike conceptualize and respond to the activated spectator.

Proceeding from different conceptualizations of nostalgia in Japan and the United States, this dissertation argues for the need to expand definition of nostalgia and the potential for conversation in performance studies around multiple nostalgias as analytical and pedagogical tools. In Japanese, there are various ways of writing and saying words that translate in English to nostalgia. In English, on the other hand, the term nostalgia alone covers an expansive array of emotional relationalities with the past, conceptually unified by how perceptions of time-space interact with memory and emotionality. Given the multiplicity of time-spaces that theoretically exist, however, as well as the mind’s ability to cognitively conceptualize multiple time-spaces and memories based on perspective, framing nostalgia in different ways appears both possible and necessary. Expanding current available terminology regarding nostalgia around the relationality of past memories to multiple time-space perceptions, particularly in the realm of performance, produces two directionally opposed forms of nostalgia: proximal and reminiscent. Beginning with historical case studies centered in postwar Japan and working up to the present day, each chapter examines the ontology of nostalgia in relation to various examples of performance to illuminate how dividing nostalgic phenomenology into these two separate categories offers an expanded epistemological understanding of how performance relates to time-space. In Chapter 1, Robin Bernstein’s scriptive things are used to contextualize the performativity of nostalgic objects within postwar Japan. Chapter 2 looks at photographs of Yukio Mishima as attempts to recontextualize the political standing of Japan after Allied Occupation. Chapter 3 draws parallels between Japanese performance theories and post-Method American acting pedagogy via the queer time-space of nostalgia toward the development of queer spirit and conversatiation. Lastly, Chapter 4 looks to contemporary play texts as dramaturgical opportunities for generating queer spirit in theatrical spatio-temporality. Together, these case studies open doors for nuanced examination of memory, emotions, and queer time-space and how they can play a significant role in performance making. By doing so, this new nostalgia-centric theory promotes future-focused queer time-space as an optimal state of aesthetic representation and potentiality.

Ritual Negotiations: Abjection, Kinship, and (Re)performance in German-Occupied France and Post-Katrina America examines how performance was used in response to two massive internal displacements wherein national subjects were described as “refugees”: the Exode in France during World War II and the exodus of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. I argue that internal displacement is a recognizable moment of abjection, a break in national identity, connected to the etymologic origins of the word “abjection” itself: to cast away. Internal displacement is abjection marked by the rupture between self and once identifiable connections to family, home, community, and nation which enforces internal exclusion from the national kinship system. As the border to nationhood was encroached in internal displacement, France and the United States attempted to recover this abjected state through ritual negotiations: performances attempting to rework and test national belonging through a reimagined collective nationhood. France and the U.S. echoed each other in the evocation of spectacles that were used to reimagine their respective nation. France and the U.S, however, continued marginalization for their citizen subjects deemed as “refugees” through hyper-visibility, disciplinary space, and voyeurism. The dissertation continues the examination into abjection and kinship by analyzing several plays and a memorial exhibit that negotiate with the overpowering narratives perpetuated through these national spectacles. The plays and museum exhibit demonstrate that restaging events, narratives, and imagery used to marginalize and control citizen bodies, can have the serious consequence of reperforming abjection.