Gwyneth Shanks discusses the scope of Not a Trump Issue, which privileges resistant actions that are never reducible to nor fully concerned with the Trump Administration’s policies and actions. In the wake of the Administration’s tacit and overt support of white supremacist and sexist ideologies, deregulation, global climate change denial, and attempts at voter suppression and the criminalization of communities of color, “Not a Trump Issue” questions how radical, anti-racist, feminist scholars, artists, activists, and educators can enunciate their own forms of resistance. The issue privileges actions that are engaged with surfacing deeper historical structures of inequity or dispossession; the issues at stake for the authors in “Not a Trump Issue” is not not Trump nor our political present, but always already our collective pasts.
Articles by Gwyneth Shanks
Gwyneth Shanks is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She has a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from the UCLA. Her work is at the intersections of performance and museum studies, and her book project, Waterscapes: Film and Performance in Los Angeles, focuses on the ways gender, race, and labor are revealed in the interplay between performance and urban ecologies. Shanks’s work has been published in X-TRA, Performance Matters, Third Text, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Additionally, her work appears in the anthology Theater/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter.