Miasmatic Performance: Women and resilience in carceral climates

This article distils and disinters the socio-legal airs of a term, miasma, largely known in the contemporary period as a discredited theory of disease causation. For millennia miasma has been a confused diagnostic, ascribing religious, medical, social and legal pronouncements in an attempt to define the origins of corruption: not (purely) of air, but corruptions of persons passing through the commons. Today, miasma’s fogs continue to envelop and shape society within climates of stigma. Returning to miasma, I suggest here, can offer ways of articulating the performance registers of social stigma as a carceral power. In this article I develop a concept of miasmatic performance as a way to subvert and counter-map the criminalizing impact of stigma in carceral society. I contend that considering miasma as a performance register of law can also help to indicate its climates of extra- and interlegality.

Miasmatic performance describes theatre’s ability to create dissident connections and intensify audience awareness of their own social performance from within carceral society. Performance strategies in the works I investigate here reposition criminal identities as porous, intersubjective conditions; they circumvent perceptions of the stigmatized as other, avert redemption narratives, and delay or deny cathartic resolution. Miasmatic performance makes stigma part of the collectivity of a performance as it subtends and twists temporalities, social and legal conditioning, and the limits of the collective body.