Disseminating performativity

Here is one of the thoughts that has recently been driving my ideas about my dissertation - just an exerpt that talks about how I see early modern theater functioning with relation to certain methods of performance and the spread of popular concepts of gender and treason.

The implications of theatrical marginality provide a space from which the possibilities of performance disseminate from stage to state. Both the place of the stage and the body of the actor provide a malleable surface upon which the doctrines of the dominant ideology may be inscribed, and often – though not necessarily overtly – subverted. However, both stage and body also serve as vehicles for a kind of performative contagion; performance – particularly in early modern England, and on both the theatrical and political stages – enables the transference of performative modes (gender, social position, etc.) in an often decidedly transgressive and subversive manner. The performance of certain modes – that of femininity, witchcraft, treason, and monarchy in particular – was especially threatening in relation to the dominating ideological paradigms of the English state, enabling their dissemination by virtue of performance acts functioning as a contagion capable of spreading that which is performed not only from the acted to the actuality of the actors’ bodies, but to the bodies of the populace and even to the body politic of the nation itself.