When actions challenge theories: the tactical performance of Sue Astin

In the following paper, we attempt to highlight the pedagogical level of certain performances through an analysis of Sue Austin’s production aesthetic. Austin is a multimedia, performance, and installation artist who transforms her life experience in a wheelchair into dramatic codes. The main hypothesis of our reflection is that her performances become a potential “teaching and educational moment” for the spectator, because they rewrite the meaning of disability by processing, comparing, and deconstructing its social images. In fact, her performative practices could be considered as an occasion, first, to take disability itself as a concept of critical aesthetics (Siebers 2010) and, second, to reflect pedagogically on some of the epistemological categories introduced by the artist in the field of the performing arts.