Abstract Brendan Pelsue’s Wellesley Girl, which premiered in the midst of the 2016 U. S. Presidential election, depicts American democracy – as an institution, a mythology, and a practice – as a fundamentally flawed utopian framework that is susceptible to dystopian failure. In this post-apocalyptic community in which every adult is a member of Congress, it becomes clear that American democracy was systematically designed to exclude emotional reasoning – with a few notable, destructive, exceptions – and it therefore enforces performances of reason that tend to exclude women and produce a cognitive dissonance between politics and reality. Wellesley Girl merges its audience’s present with a recognizable dystopian future and implicates them in the decision-making processes of that future in order to render visible the real world consequences of that dissonance – consequences which are already manifest in our collective ecological crisis.

中文翻译：

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韦尔斯利女孩：情感、民主和当代反乌托邦

摘要 布伦丹·佩尔苏 (Brendan Pelsue) 的《韦尔斯利女孩》于 2016 年美国总统大选期间首映，将美国民主——作为一种制度、一种神话和一种实践——描述为一个存在根本缺陷的乌托邦框架，容易遭受反乌托邦式的失败。在这个每个成年人都是国会议员的后世界末日社区中，很明显美国民主被系统地设计为排除情感推理——除了一些值得注意的、破坏性的例外——因此它强制执行倾向于排除女性，并在政治与现实之间产生认知失调。