Remapping Disability through Contested Urban Landscapes and Embodied Performances

From antiquarian references to early modern corporealities, in her book Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (2018),1 theater and performance studies scholar Kélina Gotman probes the archives to expound how colonial, medical, and ethnographic discourses cultivate the materialization and dissemination of the choreomania concept. Through a process she calls “translatio,” Gotman examines popular journalistic, medical, historical, and socio-cultural repositories in order to contextualize the ways in which various spontaneous and disorderly bodily movements, occurring in public spaces, are politicized and imagined as threatening (to the social order). Using conceptual frames such as the rhizomatic (Deleuze)2 and the genealogical (Foucault),3 the author gives rise to an emergent series of critical readings on the epidemic disease. She remaps the historiography of choreomania and presents seminal embodied “choreotopology” in addition to contested “chorezones.” By centering on the importance of socially sanctioned movements as well as the fitness (control, sexuality, and