To an end: Death as a queer theory of dance

Abstract

How might death shift our understanding of dance? For artists and scholars, the constitutive question of dance has proven both long-standing and salient. In Western dance studies, certain theorists have dominated debate around what dance is or might be, and privileged vitality as the ontological norm at the expense of alternative views. Looking to this lack of diversity, this project offers a queer perspective on the liveness of dance through the lens of queer death. Drawing on the antisocial thesis in queer theory, which contends that political and symbolic associations between queer people and death might inform understandings of normativity, this project contrasts death with vital normat..