“Please Look at Yourself”: Insecurity and the Failure of Ethical Encounter in Autobiographical Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Encounter between “I” and “You” is a central feature of autobiographical performance as the performer attempts to communicate an intimate sense of what it means to be a particular self to a second-person assemblage of curious witnesses. Ostensibly, the intention is that through this performative encounter, knowledge is imparted and the stranger becomes less strange. RARE, created by playwright Judith Thompson and an ensemble of disabled performers with Down Syndrome, stages just such an encounter between the audience and the autobiographical real. Using the lens of disability performance theory, this analysis of RARE considers how all autobiographical performance is entangled in questions about how the encounter with the real is shaped and to what end. The ethical instability of the situation combined with the risks of failed transmission invite the question: Why do we watch? Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s description of the source of fear in intercultural encounter with the stranger as founded in hybridity, this article traces several points of hybridity in RARE. First, RARE presents a thematic thread that reifies popular perception of Down Syndrome as itself characterized by an uncomfortable hybridity between child and adult, between dependence and independence. Second, the production’s staging choices present the performers’ bodies as hybrid, challenging mimesis with irrepressible presence. Finally, it will be shown that the autobiographical form in performance itself expresses a hybridity that unsettles theatricality. Ultimately, autobiographical encounter does not authentically illuminate what it means to be another, but instead confronts the means of encounter, generating productive self-reflexive disruption of ingrained biases about both autobiography and strangers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".