“The untimely body revealed by durational performance is a body that resists being colonized by structures of time that make human activity predictable, profitable, and efficient.”

- Raegan Truax, Durational Performance, Temporalities of the Untimely Body

Research

Trained as an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, my research spans disciplines of performance studies, dance, gender and sexuality studies, art history, visual culture, and disability studies to explore questions about time, memory, territory, affective exchange, and labor—particularly in regard to queer feminist histories of subversive art and protest.

I am working on my first book Durational Performance: The Untimely Body in Performance Art since 1960 which focuses on women and genderqueer artists who bend, suspend, and manipulate time as a political material.

Book Overview

Durational performance is not easily digestible. It is messy. It leaks and takes up space. It compels bodily resources and energies in excessive, discomfiting, and fascinating ways. It resists quick consumption and cursory glances. It labors but does not produce conventional objects or outcomes. It is a form that displaces linear and fatalistic temporal strictures that are aligned with colonization, the military-industrial complex, and global capitalism. For these reasons and many more, durational performance is a pivotal site for global debates about time, resources, and what a body can do to effect change in the contemporary world.

Durational Performance: The Untimely Body in Performance Art since 1960 brings to this debate a new perspective: instead of arguing for formulated ways to resist the clock as a colonizing tool, it shows at what point durational performance can give rise to spatiotemporal constructs that materialize freedom — essential for the cultivation of an “untimely body” that undergirds a uniquely resourced sensorial world. The book makes the claim that durational performance can offer us a special vantage point to confront structural oppression by tactically sustaining embodied techniques that can extend beyond artistic frames to move us in the direction of a more just world.

To substantiate this claim, Durational Performance provides a detailed and practically informed analysis of durational performance and its most generative practitioners. Bringing gender and sexuality studies and disability studies into conversation with performance studies, I argue it is queer women, BIPOC women, genderqueer artists, and/or artists with disabilities in the US and abroad who, in tandem with claiming space for and radically reconceptualizing their own bodies, develop durational performance as a cogent artistic medium.

Publications

Articles and Reviews

2023. “A Period Piece that Endures: 28 Reflections on Sloughing” co-authored with Alexis Bard Johnson for PRJ: Performance Research 28:1, 77-87.

2022. “Durational Performance and Queer Refrain,” in Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts vol. 16 no. 1: 52-77.

2022. Review of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless. TDR: The Drama Review, 65(4), 184-186.

2019. Review of Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 by Laura Shalson. Modern Drama 62, no. 4: 576-579.

2019. Review of Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance edited by Sondra Fraleigh. Dance Research Journal 51, no. 2: 87-89.

2015. "Queer Divestment: A Response to This is What I Want” in “Baywatch,” edited by The Dance Studies Working Group, UC Berkeley. June 13.

Books and Book Chapters

"Bleeding Pulsing Biding Time: Durational Performance and Trans Temporalities in the work of MC Coble" in The Phenomenology of Bloody Performance Art edited by Chelsea Coon and tjb (Taylor and Francis Routledge, 2023).

“A Politics of Fatigue” in Class Acts: Material Relations and Performance Aesthetics edited by Elizabeth Tomlin (London: Methuen 2024).

“Performance Art and Sexuality” in Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education edited by Breanne Fahs (Palgrave 2022).

We Who Feel Differently by Carlos Motta, Cristina Motta, Jiwon Lee, Pedro Lama, and Raegan Truax. New York: Ctrl+Z Publishing, 2011.

Scholarship About Truax

“Summoning Ghosts: Reflections on Raegan Truax’s Citation” by Alexis Bard Johnson In “Gender and Sexuality” edited by David Mason. Special Issue, Ecumencia: Journal of Theatre and Performance 13.1: 118-124, 2020.  

“The Red Current: On Menstrual Blood as a Matter of Art and Activism” by Rune Gade in Periskop – forum for kunsthistorisk debat, no. 26: 62-81, 2021.

“The Messy Politics of Menstrual Activism” by Chris Bobel and Breanne Fahs In Nevertheless, They Persisted: Feminisms and Continued Resistance in the U.S. Women's Movement, edited by Jo Reger. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp 151-169, 2019.

— republished in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies edited by Chris Bobel, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Hasson, Elizabeth Arveyda Kissling, and Tomi-Ann Roberts. Palgrave Macmillan, pp 1001-1018, 2020.

“Feels and Flows: On the Realness of Menstrual Pain and Cripping Menstrual Chronicity” by Breanne Fahs and Ela Przybylo in Feminist Formations 30, no 1: 206-229, 2018.

“Exchange by Raegan Truax” by Rebecca Ormiston, Performance Studies International #19, 2013.

Education

Ph.D. Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford University

M.A. Performance Studies, New York University

M.A. Interdisciplinary Program in Humanities and Social Thought (Concentration: Gender Politics),  New York University

B.A. English & Creative Writing, Colorado College