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This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing "what arouses" in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.
About the author
Julia Listengarten is Professor of Theatre at the University of Central Florida, USA. She is an artist scholar and her research interests range from contemporary performance to socially engaged creative practices. Her recent books include Visual and Performing Arts Collaboration: Transdisciplinary Practices (2023, with Keri Watson) and Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (Methuen Drama, 2022, with Yana Meerzon).Yana Meerzon is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books, most recently Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism (2020). She has co-edited nine collections of articles, including Handbook on Theatre and Migration (2023; with S.E. Wilmer).
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2023 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize
This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.
Foreword
An unprecedented investigation into the complicated and multifaceted relation between arousal and the precarious body from a range of perspectives.
