Riccardo Bin Wu

Research project: A Dramaturgy of Precarity: Rethinking Performativity, Social Reproduction, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This PhD project intends to develop a dramaturgy of precarity as an innovative method to critique China's governmental deployment of precarity for marginalisation and exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to Ridout and Schneider's call for positively deploying precarity in performance (2012), my dramaturg delves into certain performance techniques, a circularity of temporalities, and digital technologies to reveal how the performativity of socio-political power produces precarity and its affective engagement like fear and anxiety through intermedial performance.

I will collaborate with domestic workers in China, whose labour is considered one of the most precarious, to investigate their sufferings and the expertise developed around how to live with conditions of vulnerability and instability during the quarantine. From both Marxist and feminist perspectives, my project aims to reevaluate reproductive labour in everyday life, helping us reimagine a non-capitalist, inclusive, and more utopian future collectively against precarity.