Performative Autoethnography:

an epistemic framework for social change?

Marcia Braundy, PhDJourneywomen Ventures

CSSE, 2007

The Challenge

The central issue is how to bring together scholarship and advocacy in order to generate new ways of knowing that interrupt power imbalances (Lather, 1991, p. 110)

Initial Research QuestionWhat undergirds the fear that

produces in men the resistance and impedance to integrating women into

trades and technical training and work?

Expressing the findings through a performative autoethnography

opened up the possibility for an epistemic framework for social

change.

The decision not to use Augusto Boal’s Forum

Theatre

Boal’s model, performed in Canada by Headlines Theatre:

Audience Intervention taking on the actor’s roles and playing out a new story.

The decision not to use Augusto Boal’s Forum

Theatre

My concern:That rather than engaging in any

reflective practice relating to their own historical performances, the men would jump up to intervene and try to

“solve the problem”

Lynn Dalrymple’s (2006) analysis of the impact of applied theatre

In Theatre for Development in South Africa in the DramAidE projects:

• the notion of self-interest and improved life experience is a key

“…the declared agenda of most applied theatre projects…they are educational, therapeutic and meet the needs of poor and disadvantaged communities (204).”

On deeper reflection

Both Paulo Frerie and Augusto Boal worked to empower the Oppressed.

I was working to change the practice of the Oppressor.

The decision not to use Augusto Boal’s Forum

Theatre

My inclination:

I did not want to reproduce traditional

types of gender relations in my work

Affirmed by Paul Dwyer (2004) as he observed

Headlines Theatre• Watching their play on sexual

harassment, he counted the numbers and types of audience responses.

• Found that men made 52% of the interventions.

• But in 41 out of 48 of those, the men inserted themselves into the female roles to show them how they should act, rather than taking the place of the men to change the dynamic.

The Stop (Appelbaum, 1995) The concept of “the stop” is a useful one:

that moment of respite, alone with one’s self, in which to come to terms with the emotional impacts and reactions to performance.

The stop is not the negation of movement. It is movement itself, a form of movement away

from the entrapment of automatic and associative thought, just as it is a movement toward an embodied awareness. The stop is a

movement of transition (Appelbaum, p. 24)

The Goal

Reflexive Praxis.

The opportunity to experience the the act, observe the results,

reflect on what is achieved, and change the practice if necessary.

Performative Autoethnography

Ethnography: The study of people in situAuto: The self is part of the picture and

part of the settingPerformative: Using theatre as a method of

research representation to provoke a change in the social construct

Theoretical constructs

Performance as Epistemology:

• An epistemic framework for social change(Lather, 1986, 2001; Ellis, 2002)

• Performance as an action site of learning, (Fels, 1998, p. 30)

Theoretical constructs:

Data as Evocation

Performance-based re/presentation of research(Gray, Ivonoffski, & Sinding, 2002; Gray et al., 2000; O'Riley, 2003; Saldana, 2003)

Sharing the stories to evoke an emotional understanding (Ellis, 2000, 2002; Bochner & Ellis, 2002 )

Evocationprovides a ‘space between’

the text and the reader, the actors and the audience,

in which new knowledge can be created and/or integrated.

Even So

A performance authorizes itself not through the citation of scholarly texts, but through its ability to evoke and invoke shared emotional experience and understanding between performer and audience (Denzin, 2003, p. 13).

Theoretical constructs

“Theatre has the potential to present research material in a way that helps to clarify and transform social understandings; where insights occur because of the audience engagement with dramatic material, the potential for positive individual change is heightened” (Gray et al., 2000, p. 138).

Theoretical Constructsbell hooks refers to it as

patriarchal masculinity: men are socialized “to believe that

without their roles as patriarchs they will have no reason for being” (2004, p. 115)

Bob Connell calls ithegemonic masculinity:“Emphasizing the masculinity of industrial labour has been both a means of survival, in exploitative class relations, and a means of asserting superiority over women” (1995, p. 55).

Theoretical Constructs

Patriarchal Masculinity:

Both women and men contribute to its daily

reconstruction and reconstitution

The initial research findings

Themes emerged:• Competency• Socialization• Breadwinner• The need to be essential• Sexuality• Fear of Change• The meaning of tools

Theme: Competency

Theme: Breadwinner

Theme: Fear of Change

A conundrum:The meaning of tools

Taking it on the roadEach time the first words spoken were:“That doesn’t happen here,” or “that came

from the mind of a very angry woman..”(even after they had been told that all the words came from

those in the interview)

Finally someone would say:Well, actually, just last week…”

The ultimate feedback was:“Maybe, perhaps we could use a seminar on

working with female tradespeople.”

The play, Men & Women and Tools (Braundy, 2002) is a pedagogical intervention into the social construction of gender relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

It is only a small step.

The potential result is still far in the future.

And takes its toll on the messenger

I believe its time for the play to go out on its own, for, as Connie says in the play:

“When are men going to start talking to each

other about this shit!”