Introduction

Abstract

Over the past four years, the Feminist Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research has developed and refined new cross-cultural research on performance, feminism, and affect in the era we refer to—after Brown (2015), Dardot and Laval (2013), Connell (2010), Foucault (2008/2010), Harvey (2007) and others—as our ‘neoliberal times’. While our international roster of authors specifies local divergences in how neoliberal markets and government policies operate, all agree that neoliberalism has become an ‘order of reason’ that relentlessly translates social, political, and affective life into economic metrics. If that ‘translation’ is erratic and unsystematic across regions, governments, and societies, it is because, as Connell puts it, ‘neoliberal regimes are created by stitching together a coalition of social forces and finding a locally gripping ideological language’ to defend it. (2010: 35).