Joey Mauro

Joey Mauro is a MA candidate in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch. He is a writer and editor from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations known as Vancouver, British Columbia) and currently lives on Lenapehoking known as Brooklyn, New York.

Title of Project:

Self-Immolation as Performance: A Disassemblage of the Biopolitical Subject

Project Description:

This paper argues that Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation performs the disassembling of the mechanics of the biopolitical subject, and, in doing so, produces a broader political intervention by means of an affective movement. The question that guides this paper is as follows: How does an individual act of political violence against the self touch the many? To answer this question, the paper elaborates on the relationship between the affective elements of ritual self-sacrifice in self-immolation and Michel Foucault’s formulation of governmentality and the biopolitical power relation. The paper maintains that, because Bushnell’s body is a soldier’s body––because it was a totally conducted and conducting body––his resistance was necessarily a corporeal performance. Bushnell’s death––which is to say the death of the formal subject––marks a form of necro-resistance to the brutality inherent to the total management of life. Although the individual body is the stage for this mode of resistance, self-immolation has the capacity to move the collective away from biopolitical being. Describing the affective capacity of self-immolation, then, is a critical task for performance studies at a moment when much of the critical discourse understands self-immolation through the interiority of the subject––by pathologizing or glorifying the individual who performs resistance through the body––and, in doing so, occludes both power relations from which this mode of political resistance emerges and the movement it stirs up in others. 

Areas of Academic Interest/Research:

His research interests revolve around performance studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies poetics, literary theory, critical theory, and the relationship between resistance, social movement and art.