Hershini Young,
“‘Sound of Kuduro knocking at my door’: Kuduro Dance and the Poetics of
Debility,” African American Review 45
(3), 2012
Paper - Performance, disability and Africana studies
"Kuduristas, acutely aware of the six to twenty million land mines still waiting to be detonated, as well as the fact that one out of every 334 Angolans has lost a limb as a result of land mine detonation, emulate to various degrees the movements of the land mine victims around them, and are themselves victims." p.391
"The virtuosity of these performers does not rely on their ability to “pass” as normative. Rather, dance itself and what it means to be able-bodied are reconceptualized so that depending on the context, nonnormative embodiment can function advantageously." p.391
"As Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer develop in another context, the conjunction of sex and disability “is most often the occasion for marginalization or marveling: the sexuality of disabled people is typically depicted in terms of either tragic deficiency or freakish excess. Pity or fear, in other words, are the sensations most often associated with disabilities”" p.392
"Costuleta’s powerful deployment of the erotic combined with a virtuosity that refuses the category of “disabled” exceeds not only his de-eroticization as an amputee, but also the commodification of his sexuality as “thug” and/or player— the “primitive” urban masculinity that his adoptive family was so afraid of." p.392-393
"Costuleta’s sexualized performances expose how racialized ideologies of ability value some sexual practices over others. Instead of his amputated leg being a hindrance to acts of intimacy typically
predicated on “sex as a privileged domain of ability” (Siebers 40), his performances open out our very definitions of sexual behavior, asking us to consider sexuality as an eroticized field of possibility." p.393
"By naming herself as worthless, Titica embraces her abjection as a practice of freedom.8 Her name along with her performances of racialized femaleness cut across naturalized identitarian positions." p.394
"The dance on the roof of an abandoned car or in the narrow hallway of an apartment building gestures towards hierarchical structures of domination that play out in the architecture of the city itself. Acts of oppression are ultimately also spatial practices of subjugation. In other words, oppression changes the way we perceive and utilize the landscape." p.396
"Kuduristas form part of an African diasporic genealogy of gendered and raced performances that embody the past’s and present’s claims on each other. This genealogy becomes the site of the emergence of possibilities forged via a critical imagining of modes of sociality that bend and mold space to constitute new black geographies." p.397
"Performance remakes space and the body so that human variation is not incidental or deviant but rather constitutes an essential part of performance." p.397
Paper - Performance, disability and Africana studies
"Kuduristas, acutely aware of the six to twenty million land mines still waiting to be detonated, as well as the fact that one out of every 334 Angolans has lost a limb as a result of land mine detonation, emulate to various degrees the movements of the land mine victims around them, and are themselves victims." p.391
"The virtuosity of these performers does not rely on their ability to “pass” as normative. Rather, dance itself and what it means to be able-bodied are reconceptualized so that depending on the context, nonnormative embodiment can function advantageously." p.391
"As Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer develop in another context, the conjunction of sex and disability “is most often the occasion for marginalization or marveling: the sexuality of disabled people is typically depicted in terms of either tragic deficiency or freakish excess. Pity or fear, in other words, are the sensations most often associated with disabilities”" p.392
"Costuleta’s powerful deployment of the erotic combined with a virtuosity that refuses the category of “disabled” exceeds not only his de-eroticization as an amputee, but also the commodification of his sexuality as “thug” and/or player— the “primitive” urban masculinity that his adoptive family was so afraid of." p.392-393
"Costuleta’s sexualized performances expose how racialized ideologies of ability value some sexual practices over others. Instead of his amputated leg being a hindrance to acts of intimacy typically
predicated on “sex as a privileged domain of ability” (Siebers 40), his performances open out our very definitions of sexual behavior, asking us to consider sexuality as an eroticized field of possibility." p.393
"By naming herself as worthless, Titica embraces her abjection as a practice of freedom.8 Her name along with her performances of racialized femaleness cut across naturalized identitarian positions." p.394
"The dance on the roof of an abandoned car or in the narrow hallway of an apartment building gestures towards hierarchical structures of domination that play out in the architecture of the city itself. Acts of oppression are ultimately also spatial practices of subjugation. In other words, oppression changes the way we perceive and utilize the landscape." p.396
"Kuduristas form part of an African diasporic genealogy of gendered and raced performances that embody the past’s and present’s claims on each other. This genealogy becomes the site of the emergence of possibilities forged via a critical imagining of modes of sociality that bend and mold space to constitute new black geographies." p.397
"Performance remakes space and the body so that human variation is not incidental or deviant but rather constitutes an essential part of performance." p.397
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