Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa

Professor Associado, Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC | Fortaleza, Brazil) 

Education: 
New York University (PhD, Performance Studies) 
PUC-SP (MPhil, Communications and Semiotics) 
New York University (MA, Performance Studies) 
Universidade Federal do Ceará (BA, Social Communications) 
  
Research interests: 
Gender, sexuality, and race in Brazil; Queer performance and performativity; Performance art and contemporary dance; Embodiment and performance theory; Experimental ethnography; Social and political ontologies of eroticism, affect, and aesthetics 
  
Biography: 
My work considers how attention to the body illuminates the discursive formations of power that constrict as well as animate it. While my interests extend widely across art and everyday life, my recurring focal point circles back to the embodiment of political resistance in minoritarian performance practices and its multiple forms of worldmaking. I’m primarily a performance studies scholar and a specialist in queer performativity in Northeast Brazil, but in order to explore the political and aesthetic potentialities of embodiment in enacting social reality, I often engage with other artistic and non-artistic genres/modes of enunciation, such as voice, everyday speech, music, film, visual arts, and literature. Though associated to the Dance Studies undergraduate program and the Graduate Program in the Arts at UFC, my pedagogical activities are inherently interdisciplinary, ranging from the cultural politics of gender and sexuality to the history of performance art, from philosophical and sociological theories of the body to black studies and indigenous contemporary avant-garde in Brazil. My current work, tentatively titled Violence as an aesthetic lab: the critical work of performance and dance in post-dictatorship Brazil, maps out a significant shift, at once political, aesthetic, and affective, in Brazilian performance art and contemporary dance from the late 1980s to date. At the core of this shift is a clear exhaustion of the conciliatory pact with colonial and hetero-patriarchal premises of hegemonic notions of “brasilidade” that upheld most forms of aesthetic modernism in twentieth century Brazil, and the articulation of a radical sense of refusal, unsettlement, and fugitivity as formal and conceptual frameworks that challenge Brazil’s ingrained colonial unconscious.