Evoking re-cognition through embodied enquiry: using drama-based methods to re-script storylines of gendered violence. Issue 2 (7th February 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cahill, Helen
• Is Part Of: International journal of qualitative studies in education. Volume 35:Issue 2(2022)
• Page Start: 163
• Page End: 175
• Publication Date: 2022-02-07
• Subjects: Drama methods -- assemblage theory -- critical pedagogy -- gendered violence -- reflective practitioner analysis; Education -- Research -- Periodicals; Éducation -- Recherche -- Périodiques; Sciences de l'éducation -- Méthodes qualitatives -- Périodiques; 370.72
• DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2020.1783709
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0951-8398

Abstract

Abstract: In this paper I analyse the influence of drama-based learning activities in an education encounter exploring an instance of gendered violence. I use data stories to chart the multiple material, social, and historical influences that emanated within a role-played act of violence by a father upon his daughter following her transgression of the standards of pre-marital sexual purity held within a strongly religious community. I call upon Butler's argument, that to understand an act of violence, one must engage with the conditions which permit the act, rather than just the act itself. I use the construct of the assemblage as offered by Deleuze and Guattari to trace the affective forces produced within the learning activities used to examine this enactment. I find that the drama-based activities were productive in opening conditions of possibility when they shifted the genre rules that had limited what it was permissible to feel, say and do as a recognisable masculine subject, and when they offered alternative modalities through which to articulate the multiplicity of possible desires, beliefs, fears and hopes at work within the Father-Daughter relationship.