Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times ed. by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich (review)

Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, an impressive collection of twenty-three essays edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich, interrogates performance's complex engagements with neoliberalism's revision of social life throughout the world. Bringing together scholarship on performance and activism from over a dozen countries, the book offers "complex responses to lived experiences of precarity, dispossession, and struggle" (2). The introduction sets out the book's central conceit: "the nexus of feminism, performance, and affect constitutes a powerful, activist engagement with contemporary life, and presents some of the most courageous acts of opposition to the depredations of existence in neoliberal times" (5). Each of the book's five sections explores a different theme: the role of the neoliberal state in shaping emotion and affect; performance activism that exposes institutional violence against women; disparate performance traditions identified as global spectacles; the historical provenance of neoliberal ideas and the resistances that have attended its development; and the affective power of site-specific performance.

As to be expected, there is considerable thematic overlap among the five sections. A trio of chapters focuses on performance in Australia: Varney reads former prime minister Julia Gillard's famed Misogyny Speech as a landmark feminist performance opposing hard-right politics; Sandra D'Urso elucidates Indigenous women's affective resistance to the neoliberal restructuring of civic space; and Sarah French examines how the work of Moira Finucane reignites the political origins of burlesque to disrupt neoliberal individualism. Two essays analyze markedly different Indian dance traditions: Urmimala Sarkar Munsi discusses the precarity faced by female dancers in Bollywood, while Vibha Sharma interrogates the class dynamics of the North Indian folk-dance form Swaang, which has incorporated women out of commercial needs rather than out of respect for female performers. Irish performance also appears in multiple chapters: Aoife Monks aligns the rise of Irish dance (and the international hit Riverdance) with the emergence of the Celtic Tiger economy and a masculinist neoliberal project; Shonagh Hill, meanwhile, analyzes the affective intensity of The Boys of Foley Street, a site-specific show that relies upon empathic spectatorship to foster female solidarity.

Other chapters pick up on several of these threads. Attention to precarity informs Rebecca Jennison's essay on site-specific work in Fukushima and Okinawa, two prefectures still reeling from natural and nuclear disasters in March 2011. Jung-Soon Shim argues that Korean theatre artists are tapping into a tradition of dissident performance to dramatize the economic precarity disproportionately faced by young women. Marla Carlson's chapter profiles Marina Abramović as an "artrepreneur," whose "emergence as a blockbuster art star crucially depends upon her implicit embrace of neoliberal individualism and explicit rejection of feminism" (133). Antje Budde, meanwhile, describes the work of Toronto's Digital Dramaturgy Lab, which seeks to shift the focus of artistic production from profit-making to communal experience. Sue-Ellen Case's thought-provoking piece problematizes the performance of legalized same-sex marriage in the United States as a form of cathexis to the state. And Charlotte Canning historicizes the Depression-era play Can You Hear Their Voices?, which reacts against the early stirrings of neoliberalism in the 1930s and reaffirms global economics as a feminist political issue.

The collection boasts some especially memorable standouts. Diamond elegantly reads Kara Walker's "A Sublety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby"—installed in a sugar refinery scheduled for demolition—as an index of neoliberalism's entanglement with systemic racism in the United States, here in the form of gentrification and the displacement of people of color in New York. Diamond points out, perhaps provocatively, that the entrepreneur whose group was contracted to demolish the refinery also served on the board of the arts organization that commissioned Walker's work. But rather than adjudicate the artist's potential complicity in the uneasy alliance of business and art, Diamond instead tries to "imagine a feminist activism with...