Performance and the Medical Body
- Submitting institution
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Anglia Ruskin University Higher Education Corporation
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 578
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- ISBN
- 9781472570796
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The series editor invited Mermikides to make a proposal after participating in the symposium that launched Mermikides’ project on the interface between medicine and performance (AHRC ‘Science in culture’ 2012–2014). Mermikides approached Bouchard to be co-editor because of their complementary research interests: Mermikides in the creation and staging of medical performance, Bouchard in analysing such performances as well as medical practice and discourses. Thereafter the proposal-writing and editorial processes were entirely collaborative.
The project addressed the need to capture then-new convergences between 21st-century drama performance practice and the medical domain. Our approach was to focus on the shared concern of the human body as an object of scrutiny. Our foundational argument that ‘the body’ is socially constructed through medical discourse, technology and practices led to the conceit of structuring the book so as to replicate the historical shift in medicine ‘from examining the outside of the body, in holistic terms, to examining its internal and microscopic structures’ (p. 12).
To reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the field, our editorial methodology involved scanning theatre studies, performance practice, medical humanities and disability studies (drawing on respective and mutual networks including the TAPRA working group on Performance and Science, which we co-founded in 2016) in order to identify thought-leaders with distinct yet complementary perspectives. We each liaised with five of the commissioned contributors through the writing process, responding to successive drafts to create a deliberately ‘heterogenous mix of methodologies, topics, and voices’ (Conti, review in Theatre Journal) that cohered under our conceit of the ‘medical body’.
The book was designed to establish the intersection of theatre and medicine as a distinct category worthy of scholarly attention, in an interdisciplinarily accessible format. The co-written introduction provides one of the very first overviews of this field. Bouchard also wrote chapter 9, 'The Pain of Specimenhood'.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -