Abstract: At the intersection of Performance Studies and Visual Studies, POSSESSIONS examines the interrelationship of bodies, objects, and images in European and American 'performances of animation.' Taking seriously the visual cultures of fantasy, I use animation---the endowment of an object with 'life'---as a conceptual lens through which to view several performative imaging practices: dance film, animated film, serial photography, and digital architectural visualization. Animation emerges as a Western cultural preoccupation with the performance of aliveness and the objecthood of the gendered body. POSSESSIONS situates animation within discourses of corporeality and provides a theoretical framework for understanding the proliferation of animated bodies in the contemporary cultural imaginary. This project makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing interest in technology, corporeality, and visual culture within the field of Performance Studies. Moving from performing automata to digital motion capture, POSSESSIONS undertakes an archaeology of the desire for 'life' in modern and contemporary visual media. I begin with Sergei Eisenstein's principle of animation: 'if it moves, then it's alive; i.e. moved by an innate, independent, volitional impulse.'1 POSSESSIONS complicates Eisenstein's formulation by mapping the interplay between stillness, movement, life, and death in performances of animation. Drawing on psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and feminist writing on corporeality as well as theories of movement derived from dance, film, and architecture, POSSESSIONS interrogates the choreographic dimensions of 'life' and illuminates the fraught relationship between mobility and gendered subjectivity. Four case studies serve as cornerstones of the project: the virtual dancers from Ghostcatching, a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones and media artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar; Olympia, the automaton from E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story 'The Sandman' as well as Will Tuckett and the Quay brothers' dance film adaptation; Alice, the heroine from Lewis Carroll's novel as well as several animated film versions; and the World Trade Center as reimagined by Dutch experimental architects. Locating points of convergence between different media, I analyze these sites according to the movements they write and the fragile bodies they bring into being. These mediated bodies illuminate the aesthetic, historical, cultural, and national shaping mechanisms that produce normative corporeality. 1Jay Leyda, ed. Eisenstein on Disney (London: Metheun, 1988) 54.