JISUN MYUNG: PROOF OF LOVE: AN EXPLORATION OF THE MARRIAGE-BASED PERMANENT RESIDENCY SYSTEM IN THE USA THROUGH PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION

Proof of Love

THURSDAY 23 JULY, 10:30 - 10:55 

Lecture Room 2

This thesis forms part of a practice-based doctoral research project examining how love is evaluated within marriage-based immigration processes in the United States and how those attempts (should) fail. Focusing on mixed-citizenship couples and their experience, the study addresses the gap between legal designation of bona fide marriage and the everybody, embodied practices through which relationships are sustained.

Adopting Practice-as-Research (PaR) and qualitative research methodologies, the project combines interview, autobiographic/ethnographic writing, food-based encounters — including planning, making, consuming, and clearing — and performance-making with documentary theatre method. As an outcome of this investigation, a dinner table is staged as a liminoid space in which a performance operates as a mode of inquiry rather than representation. The final installation withholds the physical presence of storytellers and invites the audience to confront the act of judging love under conditions of partial knowledge. In doing so, the research foregrounds how institutional frameworks shape what kind of intimacy are made legible, credible, or excluded altogether.