Performing prosthesis: prosthetic bodies and performances of disbelief
performance art, gender, disbelief, prosthesis, prosthetic body
Considering performance art as an action-thought form, this dissertation raises a discussion on of a series of performances of disbelief. In a dynamic that involves the prosthetic body and the self-reflective processes of gender inscription, this research aims to trace an aesthetical and political understanding on the effects of a metalinguistic appearance of the prosthesis on the scene. Privileging the dialogue between performance studies and concepts from queer theory, each chapter organizes an analysis of works that propose, with particular intensity, a critique of gender as a mechanism imposed in a complex network of economic, political and social relations. Highlighting the metaprosthetic gesture as a metacritic procedure of the prosthesis on itself, it is argued that the prosthetic body, on the verge of becoming another, not only experiences the genre as a machine, but unfolds itself as an agent of disbelief zones in relation to a texture of knowledge that produces identities, significant practices and enunciation positions from genitality (cisnormativity).