Sticking Stigma: Performance, Affect, and the Movement of Social Norms

Stigma is the social process at the heart of discrimination and social abjection. In Sticking Stigma, Dani Snyder-Young examines the cultural technologies of power artists and cultural producers employ to manipulate stigma and its resulting affects in performance projects oriented toward the alleviation of social inequalities. This includes performances explicitly and implicitly working to reduce stigma experienced by marginalized communities as well as performances working to stigmatize behaviors aligned with facets of oppressive hegemonic power. Applied theater projects have been used to reduce the stigma related to many health conditions including bipolar disorder, HIV, suicide bereavement, mental illness, autism, and substance use disorder. Beyond this applied theater tradition, theater and performance studies tend not to use the framework or language of stigma very often. Stigma is a more commonly used framework in social science fields such as health and sociology. However, theater and performance regularly attends to the material and affective violence of stigma power: oppression, dispossession, abjection, objectification, expulsion. Snyder-Young examines a set of activist performance projects attempting to use the force of stigma to redistribute and recenter social power.