Sonya Merutka

Sonya Merutka is a queer scholar and community organizer researching choreographies of weighted movement, friction, and pleasure in contemporary feminist and queer performance art and practice. They received their bachelor’s degree in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the co-founder and organizer of Queer Theory Reading Group, an interdisciplinary, community-based, weekly education forum with an emphasis on critical queer studies, which was founded in Berlin in 2015. Sonya currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Title of Project

Choreographies of Weighted Movement: (Non)resistance & the Pleasure that Persists 

Description of Project

By looking at the choreography of what I call the weighted movements of our everyday, which could look like a hook, crawl, or drag, brought to life and into creative practice by artistic gesture, I want to draw attention to the often overlooked movements of the political, that may feel more like a burden than an intellectual contribution or an engagement with the social. I'm interested in signaling toward an ambivalent and conflicting pleasure that may be present in these movements—a pleasure that weaves in and out of circumstances of restraint, fallenness, obligation, and endurance.

Areas of Academic Interest

critical race and queer studies, contemporary performance art, choreography