Emily Barasch

Emily Barasch

M.F.A. in Dance

Emily uses the body as a site of exploration to research and create multi-layered experiences. Emily spent the past year as an artist-in-residence in Kassel, Germany, where she began working on her ongoing project of Queering Hysteria. In this research, she explore the gendered historical construction and medical legitimization of hysteria. Emily has been working on abstracting the somatic symptoms of hysteria from their historical and emotional contexts in order to re-appropriate them for a new physical practice of futurity. Grounded in José Esteban Muñoz's offer of Queer Utopia, and Paul B. Preciado's proposal of the Pharmacopornographic Regime, Queering Hysteria attempts to respond to an oppressed history, address the limitations of Eurocentric feminism, and urgently resist the socially constructed regimes ruling our bodies, experiences, and identities. Emily hopes to propose a hysterical utopia that refuses binary thinking, demands intersectionality, and values our ephemeral desires.