Marissa Fenley
is a Harper Schmidt Collegiate Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is also a dramaturg, puppeteer, and interdisciplinary artist.
Marissa’s current book project, Puppet Theory: Dramaturgies of Personhood, begins from the simple observation that technologies of personification are fundamental to the American puppet theater. American puppetry in the 20th and 21st centuries reconstitutes the category of personhood again and again by materializing new minimal criteria for who counts as a citizen, a consumer, a sexual partner, a self-possessed individual—in other words, a person. Puppet Theory traces the materialist backstories of five puppetry practices—glove puppetry, ventriloquism, marionetting, protest puppetry, and Muppetry—as they mediate particular forms of minimal personhood within specific historical milieux. As the long history of exclusions from American national belonging shows, personhood is not a universal category, but a historically situated construct that shifts across time and places. While we often chart the history of personhood’s reconstitution alongside major paradigm shifts in legal, medical, or economic fields, puppetry directs our attention to the ways that personhood is constantly rearranged across minor scenes of everyday life.