Seminar: Performance and Labour: Feminist Perspectives on Artistic Work - Details

Seminar: Performance and Labour: Feminist Perspectives on Artistic Work - Details

General information

Course name Seminar: Performance and Labour: Feminist Perspectives on Artistic Work
Subtitle
Semester WiSe 2025/26
Current number of participants 54
Home institute Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft
Courses type Seminar in category Teaching
First date Tue., 14.10.25, 10:00 - 12:00

Rooms and times

No room

  • Tuesday, 10:00 - 12:00, weekly (from 14.10.25)

Informationen für das eVV

Studienbereiche/Modulzuordnungen

Comment/Description

This seminar explores the entangled histories of performance and labour through the lens of feminist theory and critical artistic practice, with particular attention to the current conditions of austerity. Artistic and cultural work, often romanticized as exceptional, immaterial, or self-expressive, is deeply embedded in the economic, affective, and institutional logics of neoliberalism, where precarity, hyper-flexibility, and self-exploitation have become structural norms.
A central concern will be to think artistic and cultural work as labour: embodied, affective, gendered, and frequently invisible, yet indispensable to the production and maintenance of cultural institutions. We will engage foundational theoretical frameworks, Marxist, feminist, post-Fordist, and decolonial, in order to critically examine how performance does not merely represent labour but performs its tensions, contradictions, and possibilities for refusal.
In the context of shrinking public infrastructures, increasing demands for resilience and visibility, and the normalization of overwork, following questions are important: What kinds of labour sustain the cultural field? What are the ethical and political implications of working under such conditions? And how might feminist and performative practices resist, subvert, or reimagine these demands?
The seminar combines theoretical readings with close attention to performance-based and choreographic practices that expose, disrupt, or reconfigure the conditions of artistic labour. Readings include work by Silvia Federici, Kathi Weeks, Marina Vishidt, Angela Mitropoulos, and others.