Stigma and dispositives of control: the scenic presence of people with disabilities

Abstract

Ever since our gestation, through the “revelation tea”, one is expected to play a specific role, to perform within a predetermined “space”, whether as a man (blue) or as a woman (pink). This restrictive construction is a consequence of social regulatory ideals, imposing itself over people throughout their entire existence, subjecting and limiting what they will say, how they will behave and how they will act: in what way their bodies are going to perform. In this scenario, art presents itself as a space of resistance, as it has the power to destabilize such regulatory ideals, inaugurating “fictions” and dissents, therefore, democratizing the “distribution of the sensible”. The objective behind this article is to present different projects in the performing arts in dialogue with diverse bodies, especially, the bodies of people with disabilities, taking the collective “O Grão” as an example. This collective composes itself as a proposal of resistance against the dispositives of control that constitute us as passive subjects, who must amenably remain within the portion that was pre-determined in the “distribution of the sensible”.