Performance, Possums, and Photo-Ops, Too: Marginalizing Binaries at the Wausau Possum Festival

Performances can shape realities, perceptions, and meanings. Throughout the performance of the Wausau Possum Festival, possums are (mis)used as performative objects. The festival’s live possum auction serves as an exemplar of such performative functions while also demonstrating the “performer metaphor.” Thus, I argue that the festival’s performance perpetuates a human-over-nature hierarchy through social–natural, subject–object binaries that marginalize the possum. These binaries justify the possum’s objectification within the festival, ultimately reifying the binaries. The transhuman, materialist theory of communication is used to ground and situate my analysis. Implications are offered that call for (re)conceptualizations of our relationship with/in nature.