Tactical Dramaturgies: Media, the State, and the Performance of Place-Based Activism

This dissertation seeks to develop a theory of protest as it relates to the tactics and mobilizations of specific groups and the performance of their ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical responses to the contested relationships between state and space. In doing so, I make use of theoretical frameworks provided by performance, the social production of space, and media theories in order to develop a theoretical analysis of resistant practices of Idle No More, Occupy Wall Street, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). In these sites I explore moments of performative resistance that challenge the supremacy of state power, dominion over language and voice, control of the body, and agency over space. Primarily informed by Marxist spatial theory, supplemented by additional postcolonial and feminist theory and Indigenous knowledges, I examine digitally-enabled networks of solidarity and place-based activism that take up a critical stance towards digital networks, technologies, and cultures. My theoretical fusion of Henri Lefebvre, Brechtian performance traditions, and Glen Coulthard’s challenge to recognition politics, generates for me a form of critique that makes the case for an inclusive and empowering spatial ethics. I have, therefore, sought to highlight the threads that connect these different philosophies and to seek out some of those places where such ethics can be put into practice through radical performances of political resistance. These mobilized performances which enact the tensions between margins and centres, ephemerality and materiality, localism and international solidarity, become the elements of a tactical dramaturgy that reveals the precarity of those ideologies and mechanisms of oppressive power. Drawing on examples from these acts of political resistance, the sites and theory come together in my analysis under three broad themes: the voice as a challenge to the universal, the occupation of space as a challenge to state spatial supremacy, and the invocation of the mortified body as a rejection of the biopolitical state.

Department dc:contributor.department

Drama

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Gagnon, Jeffrey Georges

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Freeman, Barry

• Media
• Performance
• Protest
• Space

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/106315

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/106315