When the Medical Contract Meets Performance’s Imaginative Contract: Introducing Medicine as Theatre: Theatre as Medicine
Speaker: Marlene Goldman (University of Toronto)
Chair: Ariel Dempsey (Faculty of Theology & Religion)
Wednesday 11 March 2026, 3.30pm-4.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome, the event is free, and no registration is required.
This talk introduces Medicine as Theatre: Theatre as Medicine, a new co‑edited volume that argues for a performative future for healthcare (forthcoming Bloomsbury June 2026). Rather than treating theatre as a metaphor for medicine, the book begins from a stronger claim: medicine is already theatrical, and becoming more attentive to its performative dimensions can lead to more responsive, ethical, and sustaining forms of care.
Building on Arthur Kleinman’s critique of narrative medicine, the volume challenges models of care that privilege the physician’s interpretive task while overlooking the embodied, relational, and ensemble nature of illness. It proposes a shift away from monolithic ideals of the physician and curative scripts toward a view of care as an ongoing shared, staged encounter involving patients, caregivers, clinicians, institutions, and communities.
The talk will introduce the book’s core ideas: adopting an embodied, performative approach to align explicit and unspoken objectives in care; making space for what remains invisible or unacknowledged; building flexible repertoires for clinical practice; and accepting the limits of cure by learning how to rehearse failure and respond attentively to long‑term illness and embodied transformation within the ensemble drama of illness.
The final portion of the session will invite participants to workshop these ideas together, drawing on theatre’s imaginative contract to rethink what illness and care ask of us—and what we ask of one another.
Biography:
Marlene Goldman is a Professor of English at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Centre for Global Disability Studies. A leading scholar in Canadian literature, the health humanities, age studies, and disability studies, her research explores the intersections of narrative, illness, aging, shame, and performance. She is the author of Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease (McGill–Queen’s, 2017) and senior editor of Critical Humanities and Ageing (Routledge, 2022). Her recent monograph, The Social, Aesthetic, and Medical Implications of Performing Shame (Routledge, 2023), extends her interdisciplinary focus on affect and embodiment.
Her forthcoming co-edited volume, Medicine as Theatre: Theatre as Medicine (Bloomsbury, 2026), argues that clinical encounters are fundamentally performative, revealing medicine as an ensemble drama in which doctors, patients, and caregivers enact shared, embodied roles that shape healing, presence, and care. Goldman is currently completing a monograph, MAiD in Canada, which examines how the country’s rapid shift from prohibition to one of the world’s most expansive euthanasia regimes has unsettled legal, medical, and ethical norms, revealing profound stakes for public trust, vulnerable communities, and the future of end-of-life care. Her work continues to shape conversations at the intersection of literature, medicine, and performance. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2021), she has received numerous SSHRC grants and national research awards.
Goldman is also an award-winning filmmaker whose Canada Council–funded adaptations of stories by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Souvankham Thammavongsa have screened internationally, earning festival accolades including the Magnolia Award for Best Written Film. For additional information about her writing and filmmaking, please see her website: http://marlenegoldman.ca.
Medical Humanities Research Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
