Directing Time's Arrow: A Response to Gazed At: Stories of a Mortal Body

In the abstract for their artist statement accompanying Gazed At: Storied of a Логtal Body, the authors gloss their aim to explain how they utilized scripting, performance techniques, and digital art enhancements to invite audiences to engage with fears of mortality and connect this directly to Scotts (2017) concept of hyper-embodiment. In her writing within the artist statement about the temporal dimension of embodiment, Scott emphasizes the pervasive fear of mortality as a limiting factor that distorts our gaze when we engage bodies that, in a range of ways often unconscious or only dimly conscious, remind audience members and interlocutors of our declining and deathly futures (p. 7). The collection of stories/scenes in the performance exemplifies how bold and ingrained the disabled gaze is in our cultural understanding of disability and, in turn, the performance is a vital site of resistance to ablebodiedness. According to Halberstam (2005), queer subcultures create queer temporalities that deviate from the paradigmatic markers of life experiences - birth, marriage, reproduction, and death - on the heteronormative timeline.