THE INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: PLAY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Practitioners of the performance form “InterPlay” utilize dance, storytelling and song to build community and generate social change. I elucidate how this community of practitioners conceptualizes “social change.” I argue that the InterPlay social movement organizes around the application of play to performances of self in everyday life. I explore how the InterPlay non-profit corporation, Body Wisdom Inc., employs this technique to address racial justice in its organizational practices. I also examine how practitioners understand their use of this performance play in places of work, concluding that—even in these endeavors—they see social change as a process immanent to both individual people and the systems they create, not as the intervention of an autonomous external power. Ultimately, I argue that, within late capitalism, play should no longer be conceptualized as an activity separate from everyday sociality but as an immanent process of change constitutive of a socioaesthetic domain.

Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting

“Faithful Genres” examines how African Americans adapted the genres of the black church during the civil rights movement. Civil rights mass meetings, as the movement’s so-called “energy machine” and “heartbeat,” serve as the project’s central site of inquiry for these meetings were themselves adaptations of the genre of the black church service. The mass meetings served as the space to draw people into the movement, encourage people toward further activism, and testify to anyone watching that the African American community was working toward desegregation, voting rights, and racial equality. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.” In these weekly or sometimes even nightly meetings, participants inhabited the familiar genres of the black church, song, prayer, and testimony. As they did, they remade these genres to respond directly to white supremacy and to enact the changes they sought to create. While scholars have studied the speeches men and women such as King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fannie Lou Hamer delivered at meetings (Wilson; Selby; Holmes; Brooks), scholars have yet to examine how civil rights mass meetings functioned through a range of genres and rhetors. My study addresses this absence and invigorates this discussion to demonstrate how the other meeting genres beyond the speech—song, prayer, and testimony—functioned to create energy, sustenance, and motivation for activists. Examining these collectively enacted genres, I show how rhetors adapted song, prayer, and testimony toward strategic interventions. I also examine how activists took these same genres up outside the meetings to circulate them in broader contexts for new audiences. By recovering and defining the mass meeting as a flexible repertoire of genres and then examining the redeployment of meeting genres outside the meeting, “Faithful Genres” contributes to histories of civil rights and African American rhetorics, genre studies, and histories of religious rhetorics.

Charging The Net: Social Activism in Women's Professional Tennis

This dissertation is an analysis of social activism within women’s professional tennis. In the 46 years since the women known as the Original 9 began protesting against the pay inequality between men’s and women’s tennis, subsequent cohorts of women have brought different issues and concerns to women’s tennis, expanding its scope and efforts.  Using qualitative research, including interviews with former players and press conference participation at tournaments to access current players, this study shows the lineage of social activism within women’s tennis and the issues, expressions, risks and effects of each cohort. Intersectionality theoretically frames this study, and analyses of performativity appears regularly. Each generational cohort is a chapter of this study. The Original 9 of the Movement Cohort fought for equal prize money. The Bridge Cohort, the era of Evert and Navratilova, continued the Movement Cohort’s push for equal prize money; however, they also ushered in identity politics (including gender, sexuality, and nationality, but with the notable exception of race). The Professional Cohort, the current era, followed the Bridge Cohort and is characterized by its focus on corporatization and mass-marketing. As such, there is a focus among the players on individualism which can seem like a lack of social activism is occurring. However, race, neglected during the Bridge Cohort, emerged during the Professional Cohort. The individualism of this cohort made space for Blackness to show unapologetically, though, within certain constraints. Finally, a few players are working on social justice issues in society at large, as well as trying to institute change within women’s tennis. These players make up the Post-Professional Cohort (or, as Pam Shriver from the Bridge Cohort calls them, “Bridge Throwbacks”).  This study shows the evolution of social activism within women’s tennis, as it reflects larger social change. Though bound together as one unified body, the social activism engaged in by each generation focused on different issues, making each generational cohort distinct from the whole of women’s professional tennis.