Dramatic arenas for ethical stories. (Reflections on Feminist Critical Practices).

Gallagher, Kathleen

In this discussion paper, the author weaves a thread between three kinds of feminist critical projects: theatre, education, and research. Using feminist performances of plays, ethnographic research, and pedagogical spaces in drama classrooms, the paper explores the terrain of the re-imagined by challenging existing aesthetic and discursive representations of self/other on the stage and in the everyday.

Dans ce document de discussion, l'auteure relie trois sortes de projets feministes critiques: le theatre, l'education et la recherche. En employant la mise en scene de pieces de theatre, la recherche ethnographique et 'espace pedagogique utilise dans les salles de classes de theatre, 'article sonde le terrain de ce qui est re-imagine en mettant en cause la representation discursive et esthetique actuelle de soi et de 'autre tel quil parait sur scene et au quotidien.

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In his sixth letter to "those who dare teach," Paulo Freire (1998) claimed that ethics and aesthetics are intimately tied together. I would like to make a start from his claim in this short discussion paper, and reflect upon three kinds of feminist critical projects: theatre, education, and research. "A feminist approach to anything", says Gayle Austin (1998), "means paying attention to women

It means paying attention when women appear as characters and noticing when they do not. It means making some invisible' mechanism visible and pointing out, when necessary, that while the emperor has no clothes, the empress has no body. It means paying attention to women as writers and as readers or audience members. It means taking nothing for granted because the things we take for granted are usually those that were constructed from the most powerful point of view in the culture and that is not the point of view of women. (Austin, p.136)

My world inhabits the domains of theatre, of education, and of research and these arenas inform one another in very specific ways. Drama education in the lives of young women has been central to my conceptions of inquiry and research for several years, that is, the possibilities afforded girls when they construct realities through dramatic roleplay. In the summer of 2000, at Ohio State University, I had the distinct pleasure of engaging with Patti Lather's feminist ethnographic research of women living with HIV/AIDS (a collaboration with feminist psychologist Chris Smithies), as respondent to her keynote address made to the International Drama in Education Research Institute. The enabling crossroads of research, praxis, and aesthetic experimentation have occupied me since that time.

Playwriting and "Other" Narratives

Aphra Behn (1640-1689), it is said, was the first woman to earn her living as a writer, the first woman to insist upon a literary identity of her own and cast aside the claim that she merely scribbled to amuse herself in private hours (Goreau, 1980). The fops, critics, and writers did not, at first, know what to make of this "She-author." As a "real life" character, then, she makes an interesting subject for Canadian feminist playwright Beth Herst. Herst first workshopped her play, "A Woman's Comedy," on the life and artistic contributions of Aphra Behn in 1991. It was nearly impossible, in seventeenth-century London, to earn a living as a woman writer operating without a pseudonym, but to speak a reality unwelcome by most, a reality that was antagonistic to dominant views of social life was a particular hazard for Behn. In the following exchange from Herst's play, her dear friend, actress Betty Lacy, tries to persuade Aphra to "give the audience what they want" and not some other version of "truth":

Betty: He'll read it, you know. But he won't put it on.

Aphra: You don't think it's any good.

Betty: Of course it's good. That's not the point.

Aphra: He helped me before.

Betty: And he will again, as best he can. You can trust him for that. But he can't risk the profits or we'll all go hungry.

Aphra: Would it be such a risk?

Betty: That's not what the public wants. They want fans, and masks, and weddings in the last act.

Aphra: Comedy.

Betty: Or if it is tragedy, then on the grand scale. Not angry, or miserable, or desperate.

Aphra: Is that what my play is?

Betty: Your heroine isn't even an Indian princess. She doesn't take poison, or go mad, or fall on her lover's sword.

Aphra: Every word is true.

Betty: I know. (Brief pause.) You have to write what they want. You can't afford not to. Give them what they want. Only be sure to make them pay. I always do (Behn, p. 68).

Scrutinizing the century before the work of Aphra Behn, another Canadian feminist playwright also challenges existing versions of "reality" by taking on--with humour and skill--the version of "truth" put forward by Shakespeare in two of his great works. In 1990, Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goadnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) troubled the gendered identities/sexual orientations of Shakespeare's characters with a postmodern rejection of totalizing discourses. The heroine, Constance, who is warped back in time and into the lives and fates of Shakespeare's characters, must conceal her sex (and become Constantine the boy) in Romeo's presence in order to save her life. What she does not realize is that Romeo falls in love with this boy "Constantine" she has invented:

Romeo: Speak not of Juliet, 'tis thee I love.

Constance: What?

[Romeo drops to one knee and seizes her hand]

Romeo: O Constantine, O emperor of my heart!

It is my sex that is thine enemy.

Call me but love, and I'll be new endowed.

Constance: It isn't that--good grief, get up.

Romeo: Then love me!

[He jumps up to kiss her. Constance escapes]

Constance: No, please, I'm not that kind of boy?

Romeo: What kind of boy?

Constance: The kind that can just hop right into bed with any Tom or Dick or...Romeo.

Romeo: Where be these rivals, Tom and Dick?!

Are their sweet lips more to thy taste than mine?

Constance: Oh no, I...suspect you're quite beyond compare.

Romeo: Then kiss me now and prove suspicion true.

Surrender unto Romeo thy lips,

and let him enter at those ruby gates,

forever barred against both Tom and Dick.

(MacDonald, pp.62-63)

Later in the scene Juliet, also smitten with this new "boy Constantine," discloses her amorous heart only to discover the true identity (and gender) of the object of her desire:

Juliet: Now wreak atonement here!

Spear the lie e'en to its bubbling source!

[Juliet grabs the tip of Constance's sword and tries to plunge it into her heart.

Constance resists.]

Constance: Hang on! There's no need to over-react!

[Constance manages to wrest the sword from Juliet and tosses it over the balcony]

Juliet: And I cannot rejoice upon thy sword,

I'll die upon my dagger, so!

[Juliet takes a dagger and winds up to stab herself Constance intervenes]

Constance: No!

[Constance wrests the dagger from Juliet, flings in over the balcony, and pins Juliet down]

Now listen here. There's something you don't know. For safety did I first secrete my sex,

I mean! - I'll have to trust you with the truth.

My name is Constance. I'm a woman.

Juliet: Oh.

Constance: That's right. So that's that.

Juliet: And art thou of Cyprus?

Constance: Not originally.

Juliet: Then art thou of Lesbos?!

Constance: What?! I've never been there in my life.

Juliet: Oh most forbidden love of all!

Constance: Oh no.

Juliet: Unsanctified desire, more tragic far than any star-crossed love 'twixt boy and girl!

Constance: Now wait.

Juliet: Once more I am a virgin maid.

Oh take me to thine island's curv'ed shore,

and lay me on the bosom of the sand;

there sing to me the psalm that Sappho wrote;

her hymn to love will be our Song of Songs.

Constance: I'm not up on Sappho. (MacDonald, pp. 76-77)

These two scenes, briefly replayed here, serve as illustrations of the troubling and paradoxical sexual/gendered identities in one situated story, that unfixes our gender constructions, and plays across the spectrum of sexual identity. MacDonald's illustration re-casts and re-imagines previous understandings of fictionalized, "historical" characters. Although Shakespeare was no stranger, himself, to gender-play and notions of fluidity--drawing often on the convention of "mistaken identity"--what is unique in MacDonald's play is that the romances are potentially homosexual in the archetypical heterosexual "love story." In fact, the "Romeo" and "Juliet" of the literary canon are works of imagination that "we" have chosen to believe, while MacDonald's aesthetic experimentation here asks us to consider alternate constructions and relations.

It would seem that the sociological dimensions of these two plays are at least as important as their aesthetic representations. A feminist reading of Aphra Behn contextualizes her "uniqueness" and holds history accountable for its resistance to alternative narratives for women. The other version of "truth" in MacDonald's play suggests that sexual identities, gender constructions, and historical relations of power can be re-made, re-imagined. Jeffrey Weeks, in his 1998 essay on the paradoxes of identity, exposes four key paradoxes: Sexual identity assumes fixity and uniformity while confirming the reality of unfixity, diversity, and difference; identities are deeply personal but tell us about the multiple social belongings; sexual identities are simultaneously historical and contingent; sexual identities are fictions, but necessary fictions.

It is in this set of paradoxes--sexual identities as necessary historical inventions imagined in contingent circumstances--that we have the seeds of many feminist struggles to construct narratives that re-define and oppose (sexual) identities composed within relations of power. "Denaturalizing" them, says Weeks, reveals the coils of power that entangle them, returning identities to the world of human beings, revealing an openness and contingency.

The reason, of course, why good theatre is so threatening is because it has something powerfully to do with what we believe, and holds in it the potential to know the everyday and live the everyday differently. Some have argued that MacDonald, for instance, has not provided what is the case, but rather what she would like to be the case, as though to say something is "fiction" is to denigrate it. In fact, as Thornton Wilder puts it:

The response we make when we "believe" a work of the imagination is that of saying: This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play, or novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it. (Wilder, 1987, p.7)

In the end, however, very few plays written by women have entered the canon, been studied and anthologized, so that access to other (ethical) versions of "the story"--before one can even begin to resonate with them or "believe" them-- is the first struggle of political and intellectual proportions.

Aesthetic Narratives in the Education of Girls

I began this reflection with two examples of plays that challenge existing aesthetic representations and explore the terrain of the re-imagined. They speak to the kinds of feminist artistic and political projects that have influenced my work in drama education research and provided an enabling lens through which I responded to the research of Patti Lather and Chris Smithies. As a researcher in the area of girls' education, I was well acquainted with the vast literature on girls' learning that commonly seemed to pathologize them and underscore their powerlessness in schools. There was something about doing drama with them that had taught me otherwise. And so I began to look at the kind of worlds imagined by girls in a single-sex environment through dramatic improvisation and reflect with them on possibilities previously unimagined or unexplored.

In my discussions and interviews with a self-selected representative sample of nineteen girls (from 139 in the study), I heard many reverberations of another great "creator of worlds"--Simone de Beauvoir--in her reflections on her adolescent life:

Drawing was no more than copying, and I didn't care for art, all the more so because I was not very good at it: I reacted to the general appearance of an object without paying much attention to its details; I could never succeed in drawing even the simplest flower. In compensation, I knew how to use language and as it expressed the essence of things, it illuminated them for me. I had a spontaneous urge to turn everything that happened to me in to a story: I used to talk freely, and loved to write. If I was describing in words an episode in my life, I felt that it was being rescued from oblivion, that it would interest others, and so be save from extinction. I loved to make up stories, too: when they were inspired by my own experience, they seemed to justify it; in one sense they were of no use at all, but they were unique and irreplaceable, they existed, and I was proud of having snatched them out of nothingness. (de Beauvoir, 1959, pp. 69-70)

Like de Beauvoir, these girls too, could try on different "selves", shift lenses and seek truths in opposites. They repeatedly transgressed the prescriptive images and articulated something very profound about their ability to reimagine stories and bring to the foreground different (hidden or unwelcome) parts of their identities. (1) The collective enterprise of process drama impelled more than mere "empathy" for another perspective; these young women expressed an understanding about the multiplicity of "truths" and the social constructs that shape their versions of truth with a revealing eloquence and sophistication. Rosa expressed her understanding of "being in another's shoes" in this way:

I learned that in every situation everyone views their own story as the truth, builds up their own truth. And through acting out different points of view we understood why everyone wanted their story to be the truth. (Gallagher, 2000, p.50)

"In-role," the work often provided arenas for ethical and contested dialogues. "Out-of-role," the reflection on the work began to expose the tensions between private and public self, and individual and group needs. In reflecting on the nature of the single-sex working environment, Keisha offers:

The way I think of it is, like, girls will be more hush around guys and guys like to show off around girls and they'll be more to impress girls but girls will be more down. With no guys here we're able to project a lot more. I think it's better. (Gallagher, 2000, p. 96)

In drama education, we often grasp what actually is only after imagining what it might be. What feminist pedagogy then, and feminist plays like Mac-Donald's and Herst's can do, is draw attention to the dominant interpretations of the canon and challenge the particular views that have been enshrined, creating a new poetics with woman as subject and actor. These are essential challenges to traditional forms that have historically served to elide women from discourse.

Ethical Dialogues in Research Performance

So what has all of this to do with Lather and Smithies' research on women living with HIV/AIDS? Borrowing from theatre as metaphor, they distill the "truths" of their research participants and recognize their own invested, artistic expression of these truths (Gallagher, 2001). Chronicling the support groups of a diverse population of HIV/AIDS infected women, the researchers pull together the narratives of the women living with/dying from the disease with their own narratives as situated researchers of the epidemic. Lather and Smithies' qualitative research -- like theatre -- documents a "being-with-others" in the world, and it is a being that is troubled, exalting, particular and communal. Its theatre-like economy of expression, its dialogic possibilities and compression of meaning memorializes our own "being-with" the lives we encounter and come to know, as much as we can know them -- or ourselves -- in this arrested moment. In its construction, not only is the potential for false consciousness of the "subje cts" left open for scrutiny, but that of the researchers and "spect-actors" (2) as well. They unmask the obvious and bring into focus the melodramatic and often foreclosed verdicts of HIV/AIDS we cleave to. They bring into even sharper focus our prejudices so familiar we do not recognize them. Like a compelling piece of feminist theatre, their work sets up the promise for emerging narratives to break through.

Seeing our work in the social sciences as intrinsically artistic may be a difficult shift to make, but doing so may help to detect and uproot the often instinctual interpretations that bias us. Research as theatre, then, becomes a "trying out" -- a dramatic arena for ethical dialogue -- if, as Freire asserts and Lather and Smithies have demonstrated, ethics and aesthetics remain closely tied. bell hooks (1988, p.43) reminds us that when we write about the experiences of a group to which we do not belong, we should think about the ethics of our action, considering whether or not our work will be used to reinforce and perpetuate domination. These are the stated imperatives of Lather and Smithies' work. In brief, their research text, like much contemporary theatre, is disjointed rather than linear, grounded instead in their aesthetic experimentation with the "research account" and the self-conscious act of telling. The alienation or distancing effect (3) of the text creates an arena for dialogic possibility bet ween "players" and "audience" wherein the players (researchers, participants) join with the reader as audience to the work so that together, researchers, participants and reader, enter the narrative. As "spectactors," we address our own investments, our uniquely positioned and transient "reader response" to the dialogue left open. Theatrical/research form, here, interplays with content; it is not only another script that the stories of women necessitate, but a different kind of conversation. This re-envisioning through the situated, dialogic presentation of text simultaneously takes account of the (often unmediated) voices/stories of "researchers" and "researched." In the end, the innovative research text brings the curtain up on a study of human performance and our responses to it--researchers, participants, and audience.

Invention, I would argue, is conspicuously not the enemy of research. In fact, Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg (2000) has suggested that the best plan for creative discovery is no plan--except an open mind. For him, necessity is not the mother of invention. Time and again, he says of most major discoveries of medicine, "invention is the mother of our necessities" and the future is not predicted, it is invented. Much feminist art, research, and pedagogies have played with this assumption for a very long time. The work of playwrights like Herst and MacDonald, researchers like Lather and Smithies, and my own praxis and research with adolescent girls, signify dramatic arenas for ethical dialogues and continue to point to the weight and relevance of invention in critical feminist projects in theatre, education and research. Where "ethics and aesthetics are intimately tied" (Freire, 1998), these projects ask us what more we might happen upon, how far we are able to move beyond our original conceptions, and what dist ance we might travel outside our present situations in our proscenium and everyday lives.

Notes

(1.) My recent book, Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities, combines research and praxis to illustrate how through drama girls can explore their particular sexual, cultural, ethnic, and class-based identities in relation to the broader world around them, as they draw on their own lives and experiences in order to create their fictional worlds.

(2.) Boal's term "spect-actor" is used here as it references the active participation of the audience in the theatre event. See Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz, eds. Playing Boal (London: Routledge, 1994).

(3.) See accounts of Brecht's alienation effect in Carol Martin and Henry Bial, eds., Brecht Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Also, Lather and Smithies' presentation of research provides an interesting example of Brechtian aesthetic theories and the complexities of theatre for learning, associated with his practice.

References

Austin, Gayle. "Feminist Theories: Paying Attention to Women." In The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, L. Goodman and J. de Guay, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 136-142.

De Beauvoir, Simone. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. London: Penguin, 1959.

Freire, Paulo. "On The Relationship Between the Educator and the Learners." In Teachers As Cultural Workers: Letters to Those who Dare Teach. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998.

Gallagher, Kathleen. Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

_____. "The Staging of Qualitative Research: Authorship, Ownership, and Artistic Expression in Social Science Inquiry." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall, 2001), pp. 145-156.

Goreau, A. "Aphra Behn: A Scandal to Modesty." In Feminist Theorists, Dale Spender, ed. London: The Women's Press, 1983, pp. 8-27.

Herst, Beth. "A Woman's Comedy." Canadian Theatre Review vol. 69 (1991), pp. 64-86.

hooks, bell. Talking Back. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988.

Kornberg, Arthur. "Invention is the Mother of Necessity." The Globe and Mail, November 4, 2000, p. A15.

Lather, Patti, and Chris Smithies. Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS. USA: Westview Press, 1997.

MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990.

Martin, Carol and Henry Bial, eds. Brecht Sourcebook. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz, eds. Playing Boal. London: Routledge, 1994.

Weeks, Jeffrey. "The Paradoxes of Identity." In The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. L. Goodman and J. de Gay, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 162-166.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker. London: Penguin, 1987.

Kathleen Gallagher is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research and practice focus on questions of inclusion in arts education and the pedagogical possibilities of learning through drama.