Abstract/Summary

This thesis examines shame in the performance work of three practitioners: Marina Abramović, Samuel Beckett and Ana Mendieta. In doing so, the thesis analyses Beckett’s Footfalls, Rockaby, Happy Days, Catastrophe and Not I and looks at specific productions of these plays. These works are considered alongside Abramović’s Cleaning the Mirror I (1995), Nude with Skeleton (2002/2005/2023), Rhythm 0 (1974) and Balkan Baroque (1997) and Mendieta’s Untitled (1976) silueta, Rape Scenes (1972), Moffitt Building Piece (1973) and Glass on Body/Face (1972). Bringing these pieces into dialogue in the first study of its kind, the thesis asks how they negotiate and manifest mechanisms of shame through performance. It considers what this might reveal about shame’s role in the social categorisation of bodies and the matrices of power that govern them. Taking a specifically female-gendered and socio-political approach to shame, the thesis interweaves psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, feminisms and the cultural politics of emotion to consider the intersections of shame and concepts of the body, femininity, hybridity, disgust, risk and rage. Shame is an under-researched area in the study of these artists but one which yields important insights into their approaches to the female body and therefore the thesis responses to this lacuna to illuminate new and productive ways of viewing these works. The thesis’ central argument is that in different ways these pieces reveal the role of shame in marginalising and oppressive systems of power, but that paradoxically, when looked at side by side and through the lens of shame, they allow for a reframing of shame as constructive, productive, and disruptive of normative social and cultural constructs in radical ways.