This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Maps connections across performances that question the borders of the human whose neurodiverse experiences have been shaped by the diagnostic label of autism, and animal-human performance relationships that dispute and blur anthropocentric edges. The book treats a diverse selection of live performance and archival video and analyzes the ways in which they affect their audiences.