Bodies of a People

Bodily imagery abounds when we talk about collectives and those who live in them: a people can be “crippled” by a natural disaster, pronounced “healthy” after an economic upswing, beset by an “epidemic” of a new social woe. However, we lack a precise vocabulary to address the complexity of such embodied collectivity – namely, one that bridges metaphor and material in a way that reflects a range of lived experiences. In response to that need, Bodies of a People develops a framework from critical disability studies, crip theory, and performance studies to offer Volkskörper (“body of a people”) to Anglophone scholarship on disability and performance. To do so, it first disentangles Volkskörper from its relatively recent history as a violently normative, singular “body of the people” and reclaims its longer history as a manifold, often crip and queer body that embraces vulnerability and diversity. Using that reframing, the book traces non-hegemonic Volkskörper in a selection of Germanophone plays and productions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By considering those performances of shared bodies, the book opens new ways to understand how people’s bodies of all kinds arise, perform, rest, fail, and change.