Dr Zoe Tweed

I completed my PhD in March 2024 after the submission of my thesis, ‘Matrix of Shame: A Feminist Reading of Shame, the Body and Radical Disruption in the Performance Work of Marina Abramović, Samuel Beckett and Ana Mendieta’, in December 2023. My research specialism is the intersection between theatre/performance practices, psychoanalytical studies, affect theory and the cultural politics of emotion. My work considers shame’s role in the social categorisation of bodies and the matrices of power that govern them. Taking a specifically female-gendered and socio-political approach to shame, my work reveals its role in marginalising and oppressive systems of power, but paradoxically, when read through these performance works, it offers a reframing of shame as constructive, productive and disruptive of normative social and cultural constructs in radical ways. I look at concepts and theories of the body, trauma, femininity, hybridity, hydro and eco-feminism, disgust, risk and rage.