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Author ORCID Identifier

Caroline Weist: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-8703-2690

Description

Bodily imagery abounds when we talk about collectives and those who live in them: a people can be “crippled” by a natural disaster, pronounced “healthy” after an economic upswing, beset by an “epidemic” of a new social woe. However, we lack a precise vocabulary to address the complexity of such embodied collectivity – namely, one that bridges metaphor and material in a way that reflects a range of lived experiences. In response to that need, Bodies of a People develops a framework from critical disability studies, crip theory, and performance studies to offer Volkskörper (“body of a people”) to Anglophone scholarship on disability and performance. To do so, it first disentangles Volkskörper from its relatively recent history as a violently normative, singular “body of the people” and reclaims its longer history as a manifold, often crip and queer body that embraces vulnerability and diversity. Using that reframing, the book traces non-hegemonic Volkskörper in a selection of Germanophone plays and productions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By considering those performances of shared bodies, the book opens new ways to understand how people’s bodies of all kinds arise, perform, rest, fail, and change.

ISBN

9783112224229

Publication Date

2026

Publisher

De Gruyter

DOI

10.1515/9783112224236

Keywords

twentieth-century German theater, critical disability studies, performance studies, contemporary German theater

School

School of Arts and Sciences

Department

Modern Literatures and Cultures

Disciplines

German Language and Literature

Comments

Creative Commons

BY-NC-ND 4.0

Bodies of a People: Disability, Community, and Critical Volkskörper on the Post-1900 German Stage

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