Performing Civil Death: The Medea Project and Theater for Incarcerated Women

Abstract

This essay examines how the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women challenges the ideology of the U.S. prison system. I argue that through an ethic and aesthetic of interdependency this community-based ensemble subverts the racialized, classed, and gendered discourse of criminal dependency that serves to produce and to police a growing population of (non)citizens who are caught both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation. Ultimately, I show how the Medea Project advances a vision of democratic citizenship that illuminates both the intersubjective and the infrastructural ties between self and other, subject and world.

Keywords:

• Community-Based Performance
• Political Theater
• Prison
• Welfare
• Neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Rhodessa Jones and the women of the Medea Project for their generosity and guidance.

Notes

1. Jan Cohen-Cruz explains that community-based performance began to consolidate in the 1970s, to grow into a movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and to cohere into a field in the 2000s. A number of scholarly and popular texts by such authors as Burnham and Durland, Goldbard, Kuftinec, Kuppers and Robertson, and Schwarzman have come to define this emerging field. A body of writing on arts in corrections has emerged alongside this larger discourse; see Balfour, Cleveland, Fraden, Tannenbaum, Thompson, and Williams.

2. For further discussion of how the Medea Project approaches realness as a performative process, see Fraden (67–120).

3. For more on the self-esteem movement and neoliberal governmentality, see Cruikshank.

4. For a critique of community arts’ funding mandates, see Kester (124–51).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nina Billone

Nina Billone is a PhD candidate in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Department of the University of California at Berkeley