Mask-to-Mask Encounters: Performing Disability, Resisting Stigma

Mask-to-Mask Encounters offers a new framework for understanding the intersections between stigma, disability, and performance. It explores how disabled performers — whether in everyday life or representation — deploy creative practices and radical maneuvers that have the potential to contest stigma and escape what I term as “the mask of disgrace.” To a large extent, this dissertation developed as a critical response to and a revision of the sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on stigma, performance of self, and what he termed “face-work.” Based on his work, I conceptualize stigma as a “mask;” as a powerful symbolic negative mediator that interferes with the wearer’ presentation of a “face.” Through disgracing, stigma taints people’s identities and produces disability as inhuman and inferior. As long as disabled people are not accepted as normal human beings, they cannot radically improve their impression and are required to switch to a different set of daily maneuvers that negotiate stigma. Ultimately, I argue that these maneuvers need to be acknowledged as performances.