The fluid nature of performance studies and the widening embrace of the idea of performativity has produced in Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance a collection of great interest that crosses disciplinary lines of academic work. The essays move from the local to the global, from history to sport, from body parts to stage productions, and from race relations to global politics.
1) Sue-Ellen Case is Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis. She has authored and edited several books in the field of feminism and performance studies, including Feminism & Theatre; the Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture; and Performing Feminisms.
2) Philip Brett is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, Riverside. A leader in gay studies in musicology, he is co-editor of Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, and he has written extensively on the music of Benjamin Britten.
3) Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer, dancer, writer, is Professor of Dance at the University of California campuses of Riverside and Davis. She is author of Reading Dancing and Choreography and Narrative and editor of Choreographing History and Corporealities.
Part 1. Conferencing About the Unnatural
1. Introducing UNNATURAL ACTS, 1997 Susan Leigh Foster
2. ACTING UNNATURAL:Interpreting Body Art Amelia Jones
3. Listening to Local Practices: Performance and Identity Politics in Riverside, California Deborah Wong
Part 2. Contesting White Spaces
4. Black Noise / White Mastery Ronald Radano
5. Like a Weed in a Vacant Lot: The Black Artists Group in St. Louis George Lipsitz
6. Yayoi Kusama's Body of Art Kristine C. Kuramitsu
7. Oh, You Can't Just Let a Man Walk Over You:
Staging Threepenny Opera in Singapore Sue-Ellen Case
Part 3. Acting Manly
8. The Britten Era Philip Brett
9. A Question of Balls: The Sexual Politics of Argentine Soccer Jeffrey Tobin
10. Music at Home, Politics Afar Timothy D. Taylor
Part 4. Talking Vulvas and Other Body Parts
11. Looking Like a Lesbian: Yvonne Rainer's Theory of Probability Catherine Lord
12. Structure, Size, and Play: The Case of the Talking Vulva B.J. Wray
Part 5. De-composing the Unnatural
13. Decomposition Elizabeth Wood
Notes on Contributors
Index