House Arrest: Museological Performance, Animacy, and the Remains of Rural America

Abstract

The words “inanimate” and “object” usually trip off the tongue together. But the habit that conjoins them veils both a certain redundancy and a certain anxiety. Is not everything inanimate, by definition, an object? Could we even imagine an animate object? … Could we? The prospect of living things become objects and dead ones become acting subjects is an ontological scandal, on the one hand ethically disturbing (think: “objectification”), and on the other perversely fascinating (think: zombies). It is also the very stuff of theatre, as a generation of work on dramatic haunting, theatrical props, and feminist performance has made clear. Theatre, we are told, is a place where the dead are nightly resurrected, inert things assume “action force,” and women or minorities are routinely frozen in stereotyped roles that make them the passive objects of dramatic machinations.