Race, Gender, and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance

Paulette Richards is an independent researcher and co-curator of the Living Objects: African American Puppetry exhibit at the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum with Dr. John Bell.Hazel Briar is an independent scholar with a PhD in theatre historiography from the University of Minnesota, USA. Her research examines performances of the dead, considering practices involving spiritualism and matter.Alissa Mello is an award-winning editor, scholar, theatre artist, and Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellow (2022–2025) at the University of Exeter, UK. Their interests include women and performance, gender, identity, and practice.Laura Purcell-Gates is a reader in theatre and performance at Bath Spa University in the UK and co-artistic director of Wattle and Daub, through which she conducts practice-based research on puppetry and non-normative bodies.

• Foreword Introduction Part 1: Reframing Puppetry Through Race, Gender, and Disability1. Puppets on Plinths: Disrupting Gender and Hegemonic Narratives with General Baquedano's Monument During the 2019 Chilean Uprising 2. A Real American Wife, a Japanese Object: Critical Puppetry and the Construction of the Orient in Minghella’s Madam Butterfly 3. Performing Emergenc(e)y: Puppetry, Gender, Race, and Madness in Plot 99 4. Global Perspectives to Elevate Diversity in Puppetry 5. The Galilee Deaf Theatre Project Part 2: Negotiating Identities6. Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue: Kids on the Block and the Intersectionality of Oppressions 7. Black Bodies in White Spaces: Reflections on Men/toring in Puppetry 8. Crip Ventriloquism as a Means of Coping with a Hidden Disability 9. Beyond Representation: A Conversation with Jummy Faruq on Decentering Puppetry Practice and Design 10. Pancha la Parda: A New Myth for an Ancient Tradition 11. Colored Feels of Felt 12. The “Other” Karagöz: The Kurdish Qeregoz 13. Resisting Objects: « Refugee » Visibility in Theatre Part 3: Performances of the Other14. What Happened to the Room of Forgotten Voices: Challenging the Flawed Vision of Human and Puppet Movement from the Past That Left Out Disabled People 15. When Goiters Are Your Family Jewels: Maladies and the Grotesque in Regional Heroic Glove Puppet Characters of Northern Italy 16. Intervening with Institutional Patriarchy: Woman Karagöz Puppeteers in Turkey 17. Puppetry, Race, and Identity in The Bluest Eye 18. Remote Representation: A Puppetry Sensitization Project in Nairobi 19. Making Seen/Sounding Difference: Performing Black at a Majority White Institution