Infrastructural Dramaturgy and the Politics of Disability Art and Performance

This dissertation draws on performance studies, critical disability studies, and critical infrastructure studies scholarship to investigate the infrastructural politics of contemporary disability performance. Throughout, I show how disability performance enacts modes of infrastructural inversion that reveal the politics and ideologies embedded within built, interpersonal, and administrative infrastructures. These inversions highlight how infrastructures provide uneven forms of support across different populations and contexts. I also illustrate the potential of disability performance to reimagine inequitable infrastructures in service of a more inclusive, accessible, sustainable, and just world—a world that enables disabled bodyminds and disability culture to flourish. This dissertation presents a series of case studies that closely analyze works of disability performance and explore how these performances intersect with infrastructures in both theatrical and quotidian contexts. To conduct these analyses, I develop a methodology of infrastructural dramaturgy; an approach that mobilizes the analytical potential of dramaturgy and critical infrastructure studies to emphasize infrastructural elements by attending to the context and composition of a performance. Using the lens of infrastructural dramaturgy, this dissertation engages with works like Alex Bulmer’s May I Take Your Arm?, Kinetic Light’s DESCENT, and Hanna Cormick’s The Mermaid, among others, to investigate the infrastructural politics of sites and practices including sidewalks, access ramps, administrative protocols, and ways of organizing time. Ultimately, in this dissertation I surface the politics, priorities, and value systems embedded within infrastructures and query how they could be altered to better support disabled bodyminds and disability culture. I also illustrate how disability performance is a form of world building that can imagine and materialize worlds that are rooted in the tenets of equity, interdependence, and ethical care.