Impersonations

A provocative exploration of gender in the Renaissance, from theatrical cross-dressing to cultural subversion.

Personhood is considered at once a sign of legal-political status and of socio-cultural agency, synonymous with the rational individual, subject, or citizen. Yet, in an era of life-extending technologies, genetic engineering, corporate social responsibility, and smart technology, the definition of the person is neither benign nor uncontested. Boundaries that previously worked to secure our place in the social order are blurring as never before. What does it mean, then, to be a person in the twenty-first century? In Impersonations, Sheryl N. Hamilton uses five different kinds of persons - corporations, women, clones, computers, and celebrities - to discuss the instability of the concept of personhood and to examine some of the ways in which broader social anxieties are expressed in these case studies. She suggests that our investment in personhood is greater now than it has been for years, and that our ongoing struggle to define the term is evident in law and popular culture. Using a cultural studies of law approach, the author examines important issues such as whether the person is a gender-neutral concept based on individual rights, the relationship between personhood and the body, and whether persons can be property. Impersonations is a highly original study that brings together legal, philosophical, and cultural expressions of personhood to enliven current debates about our place in the world.

Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

In this entertaining and provocative new work, Joel Schechter selectively surveys political satire covering a wide range of periods and events from Aristophanes to the present. His absorbing essays focus on the satires of Jonathan Swift, Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Dario Fo, and the Guerrilla Girls, among others. Schechter furthermore examines how the histrionic behavior of some politicians and world leaders has prompted them to become unwitting contributors to political satire. He argues that these politicians are as theatrical, if not as comic, as the plays, pamphlets, and films in which they are satirically impersonated. As examples, he cites Hitler, Stalin, and Reagan as performers whose "acts" rival anything a satirist could invent and any impersonation a comedian could stage. In Schechter's view, satiric impersonation is not only an art form through which one living person appears to be another, it is also an act that reveals that the person imitated is an imposter. For example, he comments that "while Hitler conquered Europe, Chaplin [in his film The Great Dictator] in his own way conquered Hitler; adding him to a repertoire that included the Little Tramp and (later) Bluebeard." Schechter approaches satire with candor and humor, personalizing his text by concluding with a memoir of his own brief career as an actor-politician.