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Paper short abstract

Presenting video excerpts from a virtual exploratory rehearsal process alongside individuals with the genetic condition Turner Syndrome, this discussion considers how performance ethnography elucidates the ethical contours of imagination.

Paper long abstract

What kind of ethical work does imagination play in performance ethnography? How does situating performance help bring to the fore the ethical contours of imagination in everyday life? This presentation considers a virtual exploratory rehearsal process alongside six interlocutors with Turner Syndrome (45,X). The collaboration was designed to elucidate their complex lived experiences with the genetic condition, which results in infertility and is contested as an intersex category. Individuals with Turner Syndrome consistently situated their identities in relationship to imagined "ideal" models of diagnosis, and similarly in relationship to imagined "others" with minority sex, gender, and disability identities. During a ten-week rehearsal process that culminated in the original play "The Butterfly Effect," the group participated in role-playing exercises and other imaginative practices that directly engaged, and made embodied, these relationships. This presentation therefore considers how performance ethnography can help to clarify how we imagine our identities in relationship to cultural expectations, especially those that queer and disabled bodies bring into relief. Furthermore, it ponders the ethical dimensions, for researcher and interlocutor, of engaging imagination as a means to identity oneself in contrast to others. Prioritizing a series of video recordings from rehearsals, this presentation seeks to capture moments of imagination, and its complicated ethical ramifications, in action.