Performing Identity/Crossing Borders: The Cyprus Symposium

Symposium Overview

As national borders become more porous and more restrictive, identity politics and the body — in all its manifestations — have once again become a critical concern. As the body crosses borders between nations and identities, corporeality is interpellated, fictionalized, reconfigured, and detained within a socially sanctioned construction of security and necessity. This performance symposium will address how bodies pass between identities, across borders, and how the constraints of gendered, sexualized and racialized imperatives might be interrogated, challenged, or inverted. Participants in the symposium are asked to address how notions of identity are inscribed or erased as questions of citizenship are reconsidered through the lenses of racialization, class movement, sexual identity, and gendered/transgendered realities. Performing Identity/Crossing Borders will be a symposium blending critical performances and performance criticism. Papers or presentations will address citizenship, racialization, gender and sexuality in the context of borders and performance. Interdisciplinary and performative critiques are welcome.

The site of the event will be Nicosia, Cyprus (May 3-6, 2007), emphasizing the nature of a state divided and how that effects the bodies that pass by, over, and through spaces such as the ‘dead zone’ in disparate political spheres.The proposals for presentations have been reviewed, and links to symposium resources (including participant bios and abstracts) are available to the left of this page.