ABSTRACT
Reenactment is a form of performance that does both public and personal work. Investigations of particular events, processes, and structures must attend to how the personal, psychological, and emotional experience of reenactment speaks to matters of ethics, politics, and power. Gender is both the nexus around which social, political, and cultural institutions are organized and one factor among many in the performance of identity. Gender and other performatives are not expressions of the “true” or essential nature of identities. The performativity of gender, as one facet of the intersectional constitution of the subject, makes possible the destabilization of what passes as normal, coherent, and stable in reenactment performances. Bringing together gender performance and performativity, affective understandings of time and history, and queering practices and utopias underscores how paying attention to gender in reenactment scholarship enables us to critically and responsibly attend to matters of ethics, politics, and power.
