Politics of affections and womanhood in the arts of presence: playful reversals of hegemonic norms of staged representation of the female subject

• Grant number: 24/05806-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: April 29, 2025
• End date: April 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Theatre
• Principal Investigator: Lúcia Regina Vieira Romano
• Grantee: Lúcia Regina Vieira Romano
• Host Investigator: Ana Cristina Nunes Pais
• Host Institution: Instituto de Artes (IA). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

Commenting on the field of the arts of presence, in close relation to the norms of social (re)production of gender, we intend in this project, developed in cooperation with Universidade Nova de Lisboa, to address the politics of emotions and the normalization of women's sensitive experience in vivid theatricalities. Following the chain between interpreted emotions, subjectivity and truth (Foucault, 2012), we will observe the logic of dealing with emotions as a mechanism for controlling the emotional subject (Didi-Huberman, 2021), which in Western theater of the European tradition is combined with a historical process in which the work on staged emotions proved to be sexually differentiated. We will then look for indications of deviations from the "rhetoric of control" specifically projected onto women, in proposals in the face-to-face arts that problematize and broaden the range of representable emotions and thus modify the relationship between the formation of a grid of expressive emotions and the construction of femininity. Questions of territoriality and coloniality will be added to the debate around the "prosodies of affection" (Tait, 2021), suggesting the existence of singularities in the play between physical restraint and the rational use of emotions in arts productions in the presence of the Global South, especially in Brazil, which clash with the visions formulated in the practices of enunciation of Eurasian origin. As these singularities extend to the public performance of feelings, we will tune in to the harmony between the performing arts and civic life (Pais, 2015) in these territories. We will focus the case studies on some creations by women artists whose proposals alter the courses of embodied feelings and individual action and thus influence the economy of scenic representation and its social effects. Theoretical and bibliographical research will be combined with experimentation in a creative laboratory and the construction of sharing procedures (Salles, 2002), emphasizing the transformation of thought throughout the investigative process and valuing reporting practices in the body of experience co-constructed from experimental statements (Stengers, 2002). Finally, inventive learning (Kastrup, 1997, 2004) will be triggered, with a view to producing an expanded awareness of the themes dealt with in the artistic-formative exchange.