This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing "what arouses" in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

List of FiguresAcknowledgments Body and Arousal: On Social, Cultural, Scientific, and Artistic Experiment: Introduction - Julia Listengarten and Yana MeerzonSection One Pleasured Body1 Kokoschka's Fetish: Violence, Puppetness, and the Female Simulacrum as Mediated Body/Object in the Central European Avant-Garde - Tim Butler Garrett 2 Dalí's Dream of Venus: Sex, Surrealism, and Disability at the 1939 New York World's Fair - Keri Watson 3 Blood and Desire: Collaborating through Arousal - Alissa Clarke 4 Getting Lippy with the Patriarchy: Contemporary Women Artists' "Lip Art" - Lara Cox 5 Transformation and Arousal: The Pleasure of Performative Indeterminacy in Persona Theatre Company's Phaedra I - Avra Sidiropoulou Section Two Political Body6 Höch's Weimar and Wilhelm: Rundschau's Avant-Garde Reframing - J. Brandon Pelcher 7 The Dissonance of Resonating Bodies and the Collisions of Reality Friction: Structures of Ambiguity in Christoph Schlingensief's Bitte Liebt Österreich - Tony Perucci 8 The Sacrificed Young Woman: Necropolitics and Patriarchy in Koffi Kwahulé's Bintou - Selim Rauer 9 Pussy Riot's Radical Acts: Transgressive Bodies in Performance and the Ghosting of the Russian Avant-Garde - Julia Listengarten 10 Body as Site for Feminist Theatrical Discourse: A Pedagogic and Performative Experiment with Arousing Images by Anuradha Kapur - Indu Jain 11 Both Sides, Now: Between Narratives of Decline and Gestures of Care - Alvin Eng Hui LimSection Three Abject Body12 The Knee, the Elbow, the Face: On Body as Abject in Vladimir Nabokov's Visual Imagination - Yana Meerzon13 Trauma, Ethics, and the Puppet Body in Handspring Puppet Company - Dawn Tracey Brandes 14 "Upside Down": The Rough Play of Narcissister's Avant-Porn - Rebecca Clark 15 Queer Epistemologies in the Making of Queer Makishi: Visibility, Trans-position, and Devised Performance Practice - Johann Robert Wood 16 Island Icarus: Signaling through the Flames as Critical Performance Design - Dorita Hannah List of Contributors Index