Bree Hadley's expansive study begins with the question: why might artists take up and re-perform disability stereotypes? And, how might such performances transform the ‘usually unconscious acts of spectatorship’ (p. 14) that structure encounters with disability in public spaces? The study moves between two poles of analysis: Hadley considers the work of artists in installations, in live and performance art, in online performances and in offline performances with an online response mechanism; and the responses of spectators, from audiences interacting with an installation or production, to groups collected by happenstance encounter with a performance, to Internet commenters. Engaging the Western cultural scripts that usually govern encounters with disability, Hadley argues, public space performances offer possibilities for ‘interrupting the mechanisms of imag(in)ing disability themselves’ (p. 183).

The first chapter attends to three performances – Igneous's Mirage, Noëmi Lakmaier's Exercise in Losing Control and Alison Jones's Portraits by Proxy – that implicate spectators by asking them to attend to their own shifting perceptions of embodiment. Although disabled artists are often expected to work in an autobiographical register, these interactive installations complicate the focus of the spectatorial gaze. Employing objects such as mirror boxes and ‘weebles’ (spheres big enough to encase a human body), and techniques such as data projection and audio description, these performances invite audience members to participate in a reciprocal encounter that highlights the instability of the human body rather than confirming a notion of disability as alterity. The second chapter studies what Hadley terms ‘guerilla theatre’ (p. 29), such as Back to Back Theatre's Small Metal Objects, Bill Shannon's Regarding the Fall and Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello in The Disabled Avant Garde's Assisted Passage. These site-based performances, in a shopping mall or on the sidewalk, work at the ‘brink of visibility’ (p. 81) as the disabled performers restage disability, challenging and conscripting bystanders as ‘unwitting co-performers’ (p. 102) who may not even realize that they are responding to a performance. The interventions offer spectators the opportunity for an improvisatory encounter in the moment, and as the artists record or document the event, the remediation makes possible a kind of ‘deferred performance’ (p. 106) after the fact for secondary spectators, who may be more alert to the disability stereotypes that these performances surface.

The third chapter extends this logic of remediation, surveying Internet comments posted in response to Rita Marcalo's Involuntary Dances, Liz Crow's Resistance on the Plinth, Katherine Araniello's Suicide Messages and Channel 4’s show Cast Offs. Hadley analyses the scripts that emerge from a radically unspecified online spectatorship as commenters interpret these performances, performing their own responses to disability, reacting to other commenters, and debating the distinctions between art, activism and exploitation. The final chapter turns to examples such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña's The Museum of Fetishized Identities, Marie Chouinard's bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS and the television show Glee, considering how these productions employ signifiers of disability, such as crutches and wheelchairs, to explore the capacities of the human body. Hadley asks how such mobilizations of disability by non-disabled artists might trouble easy conclusions about performance, and finds that disability functions at best as one node of a production's complex exploration of identity, and at worst as cripdrag.

Each cluster of examples tracks the risky restaging of disability – the risk of relinquishing interpretive control; of provoking anger, embarrassment and discomfort; or of reinforcing disability stereotypes – to explore the stakes of the ethical encounters these performances initiate. Because, for Hadley, ‘performers’ comprise both artists and spectators, the key term of the book's subtitle (‘unconscious’) occasionally limits conceptual distinctions. A more finely calibrated term might explicate the spectrum of barely, intermittently and hyper-conscious participants in the complex ‘daily social drama of disability’ (p. 30). Yet the study's attention to the constitutive role of spectatorship and the productive range of examples it treats, drawing attention to public space performances that have been a difficult fit with theatre history, make Hadley's work generative for scholars working in and across the fields of disability studies, theatre and performance studies.