Walking Badly

Taking Bruce Nauman’s video installation Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015/2016) as its starting point, this essay explores the postural, moral, and political implications of walking’s instability, proposing that the instability of walking underwrites its condition. It builds on the feminist scholarship of Adriana Cavarero to challenge the philosophical assumptions of masculine uprightness and to reveal instead the temporal limits of human balance and the essential threat of the misstep.