Future Texts

Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies

Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies sketches several possibilities for future texts, those that imagine new pathways through the forms used to express contemporary questions of race, gender, and identity. Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies’ area of investigation is situated within popular culture, not as a place of critique or celebration, but rather as a contested site that crosses an array of media forms, from music video, to games, to global journalism. While there is an established tradition in feminist writing founded on experimental expression that disrupts patriarchal culture, it has too often failed to consider issues of race and class. This is evident in the dilemma faced by black feminists who, alienated from dominant feminism’s failure to consider their experience, have been forced to choose whether they were black or women first. To push back against such identity splintering, Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies begins with the politics and aesthetics of Afrofuturism, which sets the stage for the dialogue around contemporary feminism that runs through the collection. With a paradigm of remix as linguistic play and reconfiguration, the chapters confront the question of narrative codes and conventions. These new formats are crucial to rewriting the relationship between hegemonic and resistant texts.