Storm Møller Madsen

• Presentation
• Research outputs
• Activities

Research Areas

Research areas include performance art, body-based performance, questions of representation, transgender identity, dramaturgical and curatorial methodologies as well as the relationship between performance and embodiment.

Theoretical interests include performance theory, gender studies, queer theory, transgender studies, affect theory, phenomenology and new materialism.

Current Research

My dissertation “Trans(ing) Body Art - Body art as a practice of embodied indeterminacy and continuous corporeal materialization” is situated between performance studies, queer theory, and transgender studies. As a response to a heightened interest in body art as an artistic medium by contemporary transgender artists, the project coins the genre of trans body art at the crossings of trans identity, trans embodiment, and the genre of body art.

Trans body art proposes an expansion of standing theoretical conceptions on the potential of body art, concerning notions of corporeal explicitness, authenticity, ephemerality, and self-mutilation. It proposes a furthering of theoretical engagements with the transformative power of self-mutilation through the re-opening of gender-affirming surgery scars as acts of self-care and challenges the concept of a knowable or authentic body and the fixity of corporeal identity, through performative acts of corporeal illegibility.

Overall trans body art expands the performative potential of body art as it proposes body art, not as performance with or representation of the body, but as a space of trans embodied labor and corporeal materialization guided by illegibility, disorganization, and material entanglements.

Through the proposals of trans body art and the situatedness of the trans body, this project challenges the theoretical discourse around the performative potential and function of body art and performs a furthering of the theoretical engagements with trans identity, corporeality, and embodiment.

Teaching and Advising

Topics for teaching and advising include the interdisciplinary field of theatre and performance studies, queer theory, gender studies, transgender studies as well as areas of critical curating and dramaturgy.

Teaching; MA-level course Theoretical and Analytical Methods and Contexts, special topics course Bodies of Difference – Corporeal Performance Strategies as well as guest lectures in BA-level course Theatre History. I am also a guest lecturer at The Danish National School of Performing Arts.

I also work as a dramaturg and curator with an emphasis on critical practice and responsible methodology.

Primary fields of research

Theatre & Performance Studies. Transgender Studies. Queer Theory.

Fields of interest

Performance Studies. Transgender Studies. Queer Theory. Performance Art. Body-Based Performance