In this dissertation, I explore postmodern choreographic engagements of pregnant bodies in the US over the last 70 years. I discuss how choreographers negotiate identification with the look of their pregnant bodies to maintain a sense of integrity as artists and to control representations of their gender and physical abilities while pregnant. I consider the utility for pregnant artists of filmic techniques, ironic mimicry of feminine stereotypes, obstruction or re-direction of the audience’s gaze, and refusal to be recognized as any familiar type of “woman.” I study how artists reimagine and restructure rhythm, duration, and spatial locations of movement based on perceptions of their pregnant bodies. I analyze fraught collaborations between artists with divergent experiences of pregnant bodies and pregnancy needs. I problematize choreographic processes surrounding pregnancy that present pregnancy as an experience indissociable from constructions of sex and gender, and I challenge and historically contextualize ideas about the “naturalness” of pregnancy, birthing, and motherhood. Finally, I examine dances exploring radical physical transformation inspired by experiences of pregnancy, and I consider how the artists of these works use choreography to create conditions and community that support their experiences of personal metamorphoses, that allow them to have queer orientations towards pregnancy, and that help them to practice care towards themselves in ways that they deem significant and otherwise unavailable. Across chapters, the artists discussed include Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, Sandy Jamrog, Jane Comfort, Jody Oberfelder, Johanna Boyce, Miguel Guti�rrez, Yanira Castro, No�mie LaFrance, Hana van der Kolk, Jennie MaryTai Liu, and Meg Foley. By presenting their bodies in performance, these artists demonstrate how their experiences surrounding pregnancy intersect not only with their artform and its history but also with their personal experiences of race, gender, and sexual identification. I argue that choreography offers them tools that are alternative to medicine (or other forms of social representation) for understanding what/how pregnant bodies do and feel and what they can mean for individuals and their communities. The works within these pages invite readers to see dancing bodies and pregnant bodies in new ways and for their potential to manifest new possibilities.

This dissertation undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the competitive reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, drawing upon approaches and perspectives from LGBT Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Performance Studies. Hosted by veteran drag performer RuPaul, Drag Race features drag queen entertainers vying for the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” Since premiering in 2009, the show has become a queer cultural phenomenon that successfully commodifies and markets Camp and drag performance to television audiences at heretofore unprecedented levels. Over its nine seasons, the show has provided more than 100 drag queen artists with a platform to showcase their talents, and the Drag Race franchise has expanded to include multiple television series and interactive live events. The RuPaul’s Drag Race phenomenon provides researchers with invaluable opportunities not only to consider the function of drag in the 21st Century, but also to explore the cultural and economic ramifications of this reality television franchise.

While most scholars analyze RuPaul’s Drag Race primarily through content analysis of the aired television episodes, this dissertation combines content analysis with ethnography in order to connect the television show to tangible practices among fans and effects within drag communities. Incorporating primarily content analysis methods, the first two chapters study the integral role that Camp plays on RuPaul’s Drag Race, as a form of queer social memory and a set of economic strategies. Chapter One analyzes how Drag Race uses encoded Camp references to activate audiences’ memories and confer queer cultural status onto the referenced materials. Chapter Two investigates how the show uses Camp to build a Drag Race-based economy, through a process that I call Camp Capitalism. Incorporating primarily ethnographic methods, the latter two chapters study how RuPaul’s expanding Drag Race economy impacts fan consumers and drag artists. Chapter Three draws upon participant observation data from three years of RuPaul’s DragCon, in order to analyze how Camp Capitalism operates in RuPaul’s expanding economy. Chapter Four presents interviews with three Los Angeles-based drag queens, who identify tangible impacts that Drag Race has on their lives and communities. Through this interdisciplinary study, I demonstrate how Camp theory and ethnographic methods provide invaluable research tools for reading RuPaul’s Drag Race.

In this dissertation, I study the politics of corporeal dissent and liberation in the work of three contemporary dance artists from India: Mandeep Raikhy (New Delhi), Padmini Chettur (Chennai), and Surjit Nongmeikapam (Imphal). I argue that, seen through the lens of dissent, their choreographic practices can be interpreted as a form of activism that questions, disagrees with, and resists an array of power structures—commercialized Indian classical dance, religious fundamentalism, western capitalism, and the ethnonationalist state. Political dissent is what brings these three choreographers together, but how they choose to exercise it sets them apart. In chapter one, situated in New Delhi, Raikhy’s focus on proposing the body as an agent of dissent to majoritarian ethnonationalism pushes viewers to question what secularism is, why we should value it, and what its limitations are in the Indian context. In chapter two, set in Chennai, Chettur’s fracturing of the formal principles informing the Indian classical dance bharatanatyam is an effort to structure a relational dialogue with the dance form, a process which I refer to as liberatory deconstruction. In chapter three, against the backdrop of Imphal in India’s northeast, Nongmeikapam’s resistive hybridity—both a strategy and a tactic to utilize the processes of assimilation and to disrupt it—allows for an empowering negotiation between national and regional culture in hopes of destabilizing the hierarchy between the two. This dissertation contributes a new perspective on the interconnections between the global, (trans)national, and local politics of contemporaneity in India. In bringing together choreographers from distinct urban sectors in the country, this project, based on ethnographic field research in five major cities in India—the three mentioned earlier, along with Bangalore and Kolkata—gives a broad overview of shifting power dynamics within Indian contemporary dance, at the same time maintaining a microanalytical focus on cultural and regional influences. By doing so, this dissertation challenges any notions of a monolithic, homogeneous category of “Indian contemporary dance” and instead demonstrates the role dissent plays in the manifestation of contemporary dance aesthetics in India—enabling choreographers to articulate how bodies move through, question, and create culture.