Considering Bodies in Evaluating Taste
Seminar Description
Judgments of taste often derive from bodies. Performances “in good taste” typically involve the exhibition of a body’s physical or virtuosic skill, while performances considered “in bad taste” have nearly always involved the presentation of bodies that are somehow not “normal”– bodies that are not, for example, clothed, white, thin, beautiful, clean, or healthy. Performances ranging from popular entertainments to “legitimate” theatre routinely exploit bodies either to satisfy or to critique the public taste: strip shows, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, circuses, drag contests, Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, contortionists, actors in fat suits to play Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Sometimes this exploitation occurs at the expense of individual dignity, but sometimes it is undertaken self-consciously in order to shock audiences or to challenge cultural norms. Sometimes, too, evaluations of taste based on the presented bodies can interfere with the intention of a performance, as when the inclusion of disabled, diseased, or unusual bodies on the “legitimate” stage unintentionally generates a freak-show effect. In addition, judgments of taste can usually be traced to a bodily reaction in the viewer, a visceral assessment of what does (or should) make some body feel admiration, in the case of good taste, or discomfort, in the case of poor taste. Disability theorist Tobin Siebers has even suggested that aesthetics consists of “what some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies.”
For this seminar I have invited abstracts for papers that examine judgments of taste in relation to bodies. Proposals oriented towards a theoretical, historical, or interdisciplinary overview of the topic were encouraged, as well as those providing a close analysis of specific performances. Targeted topics included:
- how designations of “bad taste” relate to the presence of non-normative or unexpected bodies
- how performers counteract or critique the association of atypical bodies with “bad taste”
- how critics, scholars, and lay audiences use their own or others’ visceral reactions to defend assessments of taste or quality
- how performers encourage or resist audience members’ visceral reactions to unfamiliar bodies
- how both mass entertainments and “legitimate” stages exploit spectacular bodies, and how/why these performances collide with “high” evaluations of taste and quality
The twelve papers selected for inclusion have been organized into trios around four points of intersection. Each author’s paper will address the question assigned to the trio, and these authors are encouraged to engage in comparison, critique, and discussion with the other two members of the trio. During the November conference, seminar participants will work in their groups of three to present to the seminar what intersections and divergences they found in their research, and how these might impact on the work of the other participants.
D. Ohlandt, Ph.D. 