Sticking Stigma

Stigma is the social process at the heart of discrimination and social abjection. In Sticking Stigma, Dani Snyder-Young examines the cultural technologies of power that artists and cultural producers employ to manipulate stigma and its resulting affects in performance projects oriented toward the alleviation of social inequalities. This includes performances explicitly and implicitly working to reduce stigma experienced by marginalised communities, as well as performances working to stigmatise behaviours aligned with facets of oppressive hegemonic power.

Applied theatre projects have been used to reduce the stigma related to many health conditions, including bipolar disorder, HIV, suicide bereavement, mental illness, autism, and substance use disorder. Beyond this applied theatre tradition, theatre and performance studies do not often use the framework or language of stigma. Stigma is a more commonly used framework in social science fields such as health and sociology. However, theatre and performance regularly attend to the material and affective violence of stigma power: oppression, dispossession, abjection, objectification, and expulsion. Snyder-Young examines a set of activist performance projects attempting to use the force of stigma to redistribute and recentre social power.