Fabien Maltais-Bayda — English

fabien maltais-bayda
Cohort Year: 2020
Education: McGill University, BA 2014; University of Toronto, MA 2016

TAPS/English

I am a joint PhD student in English Language and Literature and Theater and Performance Studies. Drawing on queer theory and ecocriticism, I work across text, film, and performance to consider how bodies are co-constituted with the space-times they inhabit. I'm interested in parsing how marginal bodies – both human and non-human – endure through precarious temporalities and shifting topographies. In particular, my current work attends to overlapping concerns around queer health and environmental degradation in 1990s California. This research focuses on temporal shifts between the chronic and the critical, examining how these dynamics register in a variety of cultural objects including road narratives, New Queer Cinema, HIV/AIDS zines, and durational body art.

I also maintain an interest in the material, sensory, and aesthetic frameworks through which performing bodies are encountered, reflecting on spectatorship, exhibitional approaches to choreography, and practices of intermedial adaptation in dance and visual art. My writing can be found in Canadian ArtCanadian Theatre ReviewThe Dance Currentesse, and Momus, as well as in the the anthology Curating Live Arts (Berghahn Books, 2018), and the catalogue for Derek Liddington’s exhibit the body will always bend before it breaks, the tower will always break before it bends (Art Gallery of York University, 2019).