Many professional theater artists attempt to use live performances in formal theater spaces to disrupt racism and create a more equitable society. Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy examines the impact of such projects, looking at how and why they do and do not intervene in white supremacy. In this incisive study, Dani Snyder-Young examines audience responses to a range of theatrical events that focus on race‑related conflict or racial identity in the contemporary United States. The audiences for these performances, produced at mainstream not‑for‑profit professional theaters in major American cities in 2013–18, reflect dominant patterns of theater attendance: the majority of spectators are older, affluent, white, and describe themselves as politically progressive. Snyder-Young studies the ways these audience members consume the stories of racialized others and analyzes how different artistic, organizational, and programmatic strategies can (or cannot) mitigate white privilege.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and critical ethnic studies and for theater practitioners interested in equity and inclusion.

Stigma is the social process at the heart of discrimination and social abjection. Snyder-Young examines the cultural technologies of power artists and cultural producers employ to manipulate stigma and its resulting affects in performance projects oriented toward the alleviation of social inequalities. This includes performances explicitly and implicitly working to reduce stigma experienced by marginalized communities as well as performances working to stigmatize behaviors aligned with facets of oppressive hegemonic power.

Applied theater projects have been used to reduce the stigma related to many health conditions including bipolar disorder, HIV, suicide bereavement, mental illness, autism, and substance use disorder. Beyond this applied theater tradition, theater and performance studies tends not to use the framework or language of stigma very often. Stigma is a more commonly used framework in social science fields such as health and sociology. However, theater and performance regularly attends to the material and affective violence of stigma power: oppression, dispossession, abjection, objectification, expulsion. Snyder-Young examines a set of activist performance projects attempting to use the force of stigma to redistribute and recenter social power.