2026 American Studies Association Roundtable - Erotics of Improvisation: Experimental Performance at its Own Edge

This roundtable gathers scholars across Black Studies, Feminist Studies, Latine Studies, and performance-based practices to converse with improvisation as a resistant and erotic practice. We engage improvisation as a shared analytic and method, asking how it materializes refusals of heteropatriarchal discipline while opening alternative relationalities and temporalities. Bringing into dialogue Black/Brown feminist, punk, and queer experimentations, the roundtable explores improvisation as both an aesthetic strategy and a practice of everyday survival. Together, we ask: What becomes possible at improvisational thresholds? How do performers and cultural workers move against discipline and toward less bounded, more enduring forms of refusals? What does it mean to inhabit improvisation as a method, rather than an object of study? We draw on varied engagements with performance, sound, embodiment, and critical theory to generate a collaborative discussion. Topics will include dissonance and refusal, experiments with loss and non-repair, and the entanglements of race, pleasure, and value. By placing these approaches in conversation, the roundtable foregrounds improvisation as a site of ongoing, collective theorization.