At the heart of performance is a conception of life as materially embodied and enacted—a notion that it shares with both the health humanities and feminist approaches to selfhood. Feminist and gender studies have provided new understandings of the body as partaking in ongoing material, relational and affective dimensions. As Sherri L Foster and Jana Funke suggest in their Special Issue ‘Feminist Encounters with the Medical Humanities’: ‘feminist approaches […] have helped to develop alternative understandings of health, illness, and the body, and to identify intersections between the humanities and biomedicine’.