Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
ISSN: 1356-9783 (Print) 1470-112X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/crde20
All gender is a performance, all performance gendered Kathleen Gallagher To cite this article: Kathleen Gallagher (2014) All gender is a performance, all performance gendered, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 19:2, 187-189, DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2014.895615 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2014.895615
Published online: 09 Apr 2014.
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Date: 28 September 2016, At: 13:08
RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2014 Vol. 19, No. 2, 187–189, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2014.895615
POINTS AND PRACTICE All gender is a performance, all performance gendered Kathleen Gallagher* Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Reading the full Research in Drama Education (RiDE) themed edition on Gender and Sexuality, at one go as I have done, makes for an especially interesting experience. One gets an immediate sense of the expanse of the terrain as well as, in this case, an unanticipated coherence across vastly different geographic, cultural and institutional landscapes and theatre practices. There is shared theoretical language – a queer, feminist, post-structural language – introduced by the editors and followed through by several contributing authors. There is also a reflexivity shared by many of the writers contemplating the work they have observed, or engaged in, across both the developed articles and shorter accounts of practice/performance that come at the end of the issue. In these pages, gender and sexuality seemed no longer a special, abstruse ‘lens’, but rather a way of uncovering the scripts of the everyday and our own deep implications in them. I appreciated at the outset that the editors played with the term ‘issue’, as in The Gender and Sexuality Issue, considering that ‘issue’, as a verb, also means ‘to produce or bring about’ something into existence. For my part, I wondered how much of that other sense of ‘issue’, as a point in question or a matter that is in dispute, might also come into play. Within individual works, there was indeed a sense of resistance and contradiction, but my initial impression of overall coherence and a general sturdiness in the field remained throughout my reading. Having taught drama years ago in a girls’ school, gender (and race, sexuality, class, ability) was ‘always already’ a given, an interest, a focus. It is thought-provoking to take the current barometric reading of ‘gender and sexuality’ in the range of contexts reflected in this volume and realise that gender and sexuality are operating in less invisible, more intentional, ways all these years later, in a much wider variety of contexts, and embedded in a greater range of theatre and performance practices. At the centre of all the articles is the body (and identity, social relations, power, subjectivity…). Across the pieces, one reads the body as material, theoretical, imagined, symbolic and pedagogical; a body inside (schools, prisons, drama programmes) and outside (social and sexual relations, roles, habitus) the frame. The pieces position theatre as a deliberate performance space against a sea of unintended or everyday performance spaces. In all instances, whether in dance programmes for boys, process drama for secondary school girls, intergenerational or solo performances and those created by incarcerated women and men, these various
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creation and learning contexts teetered between the possibilities and impossibilities of ‘community’. Across diverse contexts, performances were ‘made up from scratch’ or so the participants liked to believe. Always, already … another revelation to me, because of this collection of articles, is that what has hitherto seemed a socio-political allegory (drag/queer performance) or a political appeal (LGBT or prison or homeless programming) is, in fact, a testament to the intrinsic insight into the human condition that such struggles, communities and practices reflect. For the journal Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, it is unsurprising that most chapters exploring alternative identities, performances and spaces would also be, explicitly or implicitly, exploring alternative pedagogies. What is to be learned from how we create together, how we relate to one another, how we (mis)understand? Perhaps better than most theatre programmes in tertiary institutions, the RiDE journal in this themed issue is accommodating what Schechner (2013) fears remains unresolved in institutions of theatre learning: the pieces in this issue have underscored the ways in which we live in ‘an increasingly performative culture’ (7), where the relationship between the performance of the stage and that in the spaces of everyday life must develop, grow and change in view of one another. Reflecting on our stunted institutional growth, Laura Levin in a forthcoming chapter asks: What would it mean to take seriously the challenges posed by the term ‘performance’ to the idea of ‘theatre’? How can we expand our conception of what might be taught as theatre in our courses, or what could be viewed as theatre within our cities and communities? How might this thinking put theatre more in touch with the many publics that it hopes to reflect and serve?
The Gender and Sexuality Issue has brought forth deeply human questions about the social and theatre performances we sashay between in our everyday and institutional spaces and made the stakes of those manoeuvres clear, for young and old, incarcerated or free. Taken together, they push for room for alternative pedagogies, and identities and relations, for self and other narratives that exceed the boundaries and awake us to the possibilities of both/and. Lee Hicks is a Canadian artist, a public school teacher and an activist. He is also a trans person and the art teacher in my son’s school, a mainstream public school in downtown Toronto. It is the first time, I believe anywhere, that a teacher has transitioned alongside his grade 6 class. Ms Hicks became Mr Hicks over the course of the year. He underwent puberty, becoming a man like many of his pubescent students, over the course of their year together. He had the full support of the school and the parent community. As he took his ‘T’ shots, testosterone lowered his voice, reduced his hips, as his (symbolic, material, pedagogical) body transformed in front of his students’ eyes, becoming the person he always felt he was. My son is in grade 1. Lee was his visual art teacher last year, when he was in senior kindergarten. My son’s visual art work explored what the word ‘brave’ means. Every classroom in the school reflected on the idea of courage, creating artworks in which they painted their ‘brave’. The school spaces were curated with the ‘what is my brave’ artworks for parents to come and see.1 Lee’s is a story to share not just for trans rights but also for human rights. For me, the question of human rights sits at the centre of this volume. Long gone are the
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days of ‘special interest’ when I taught drama to girls in a school and we thought this gave us a special context in which to think gender and sexuality together. Today, gender and sexuality are at play culturally, pedagogically, politically and performatively. And that is the inheritance of Millennials.
Note 1. A short documentary about this alternative, embodied pedagogical space can be found at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/both-and-the-lee-hicks-story.
Note on contributor Kathleen Gallagher is a professor and the Canada Research Chair in Theatre, Youth and Research in Urban Schools at the University of Toronto. Her books include The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities (University of Toronto Press, 2000).
References Levin, L. forthcoming. “It’s Time to Profess Performance: Thinking beyond the Specialness and Discreteness of Theatre.” In Why Theatre Now: On the Virtue and Value of Canadian Theatre in the New Millennium, edited by K. Gallagher and B. Freeman. Schechner, R. 2013. “No More Theatre PhDs?” TDR: The Drama Review 57 (3): 7–8. doi:10.1162/ DRAM_e_00276.
