Performing Cultures of Equality

Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González, Suzanne Clisby, Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González, Suzanne Clisby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367755096
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000575095
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the enactment of gendered in/equalities across diverse Cultural forms, turning to the insights produced through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance. It builds on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project and offers both theoretical and methodological analyses of an array of activities and artworks. The performative manifestations discussed include theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts from multiple geopolitical locales. Engaging with the key concepts of re-enactment and relationality, the contributions explore the ways in which in/equalities are relationally re-produced in and through individual and collective bodies. This multi- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays creates fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies, sitting at the crossroads of ethnography, event studies, social movements, visual studies, critical discourse analysis, and contemporary approaches to textualities emerging from post-colonial and feminist studies.

1PERFORMING CULTURES OF EQUALITYEMBODIMENTS, VISUALITIES, INSCRIPTIONS

Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González and Suzanne Clisby

DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-1

Performing with GRACE

March 8, 2019 was a markedly performative day in the shared herstory of the community of researchers in Women's and Gender Studies we affectionately called ‘the GRACE gang’. After four years of intense creative and scholarly labour, the EU-funded project ‘GRACE: Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe’ was coming to an end, and it was time to showcase the work of affiliated researchers, artists, filmmakers, and practitioners. More than 140 delegates convened over the course of three days for the 2019 GRACE Conference, entitled ‘Gender and Cultures of In/Equality in Europe: Visions, Poetics, Strategies’ that took place on March 7–9. Centred around International Women's Day, GRACE's final public event provided participants with the opportunity to explore the themes of this research network through a range of activities, including a series of public talks; the launch of the GRACE feminist Quotidian smartphone app; the opening of the GRACE exhibition Footnotes on Equality; a guest screening of Isabel de Ocampo's You Will Be a Man, with the participation of the filmmaker—which is analysed in Chapter 7 of this volume—and the performance I've Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing by Beatrice Allegranti's Dance Theatre.¹ Although not explicitly disclosed in the title of the conference, the performative engagement with the concept of ‘cultures of equalities’ becomes evident in the line-up of creative formats and interdisciplinary ventures included in the programme. Through dance, film discussions, curated installations, technological devices and discussion panels, cultures of intersectional gender equality and inequality in and beyond Europe were debated, exposed, and experienced verbally, visually, and somatically.

If performative approaches to the enactment of cultures of gender equality were central to the project from its inception, as exemplified by its marked emphasis on advancing the research into the ‘production of cultures of equality that underpin, enable and constrain. . . changing policy and legislative frameworks’ (Clisby and Johnson 2020, 2), the GRACE closing event firmly grounded performance methods and methodologies as key tools for addressing in/equalities in the cultural and social spheres. It did so by, on the one hand, giving prominence to performing and visual artworks as relevant modes of inquiry into the configurations of culture-specific in/equalities; on the other, by showcasing a wide variety of case studies, PhD projects and scholarly interventions that, through the transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses of Gender, Queer and Feminist Studies, debated and experienced the agentive dimensions of cultural practices and artefacts.

During these three days of intense a(e)ffective work, GRACE researchers and their guests performed small gestures of gender equalities across academic, creative, and activist worlds. This volume, Performing Cultures of Equality: Embodiments, Visualities, Inscriptions, is a collective response to the embodied dis/comforts and engaged discussions around in/equalities that materialised in and through the performance of intellectual exchange. In it, GRACE researchers and their extended scholarly network reflect on the agential, performative potential of participatory art (Jacobo, Chapter 10; McNeal, Chapter 2), audio-visual artefacts (Calderón Sandoval and Sánchez Espinosa, Chapter 7; Golańska and Różalska, Chapter 4), activist events (Grabher, Chapter 5; Trillò, Chapter 6), literary texts (Álvarez-López, Chapter 8; Drage, Chapter 9; Jacobo, Chapter 10), and theatrical performance (McNeal, Chapter 2; Prieto López, Chapter 3) for the enactment of gender equalities.

Why Perform(ing)?: Enacting Cultural In/Equalities

In her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008), Tracy C. Davis identifies three main paradigm shifts in the Social Sciences and the Humanities since the 1970s. If the ‘linguistic turn’ has worked to emphasise ‘language's role in constructing perception’, the ‘cultural turn’ has sparked an interest in ‘tracking the everyday meanings of culture, and culture's formative effect on identities’ (1). The subsequent ‘performative turn’ which, in her view, emerged at the turn of the 21st century, has given rise to scholarly endeavours that acknowledge ‘how individual behaviour derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and is manifest as observable behaviour, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective’ (1). This move has forced scholars to refine ‘the rationales for connecting performance to culture’ (2). A renewed understanding of culture as performative (i.e., as producing rather than just reproducing specific social values and belief systems) has opened new avenues for engaging with sociocultural practices. If cultural forms and artworks are not just objects to be enjoyed from a passive outside position but are instead regarded as artefacts co-created in the very act of interacting with them, viewers, spectators, and readers become key agents in the process of artistic and cultural production. Reflecting on the changes that the ‘performative turn’ has brought about in the field of Performance Studies itself, Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera have argued that,

performance has evolved into ways of comprehending how human beings fundamentally make culture, affect power, and reinvent their ways of being in the world. The insistence on performance as a way of creation and being as opposed to the long-held notion of performance as entertainment has brought forth a movement to seek and articulate the phenomenon of performance in its multiple manifestations and imaginings. (2006, xii; emphasis in original)

The performative turn thus emerged from a moment when the notion of culture itself was being reconceptualised and the focus of analysis switched from an exclusive emphasis on artworks as finished products to a broader processual conception of cultural forms. In this context, the definition of what counts as performance expanded to include areas that had hitherto being studied separately. In his now classic conceptualisation, Dwight Conquergood laid the basis that contributed to developing this renewed conception of performance along three criss-crossing lines: ‘(1) as a work of imagination, as an object of study; (2) as a pragmatics of inquiry (both as model and method), as an optic and operator of research; (3) as a tactics of intervention, an alternative space of struggle’ (2002, 152; emphasis in original). His ‘three c's of performance studies: creativity, critique, citizenship (civic struggles for social justice)’ (152) firmly established Performance Studies as a radically multi- and interdisciplinary field, allowing for the emergence of scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities that pushes the boundaries of more traditional approaches to the study of history, literature, education, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and political science, to name a few.

In these two decades of the 21st century, performance has become a central element of social and cultural life, encompassing a broad range of expressive behaviours (Schechner and Lucie 2020). Under this framework, culture comes to be broadly conceived as ‘as the process through which people create and contest the social worlds that they inhabit’ (Clisby and Johnson 2020, 2) and thus becomes a key site for the critique, activist intervention, and imaginative production of material in/equalities. Drawing from a consideration of culture as ‘corporeal knowhow of practice, as the organizing ethos of practice, and as the experienced import of practice’ (Biernacki in Davis 2008, 3), Performance Studies methods and methodologies become key tools for the critical exploration of how gender in/equalities are performatively produced and reproduced in and through cultural practices. By turning to the insights originating through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance, the chapters in this book seek to examine the enactment of gendered in/equalities across cultural forms. Drawing on the conceptualisation of in/equality developed by Suzanne Clisby, Mark Johnson, and Jimmy Turner in Theorising Cultures of Equality (2020), our contributors performatively inquire into the production of cultures of in/equality through two main concepts: those of ‘re-enactment’ and ‘relationality’, which we ground on current feminist and material readings of culture, gender, and equality.

First, gender equalities and inequalities are conceived as always already culturally performed, in the sense that they are specifically (re)produced in the particular context in which the norms that make them possible regulate power relations. Equalities and inequalities are enacted and experienced differently by different people from diverse sociocultural backgrounds, and the ways in which these are done and undone are also culturally specific. The performance of equalities and inequalities are thus interpreted as iterative enactments of the cultural that allow for the emergence of alternative arrangements of gendered equalities. Judith Butler's notion of performativity—discussed in more depth by Eleanor Drage, Orianna Calderón Sandoval and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Barbara Grabher, Paola Prieto López, and Tomasso Trillò in their respective chapters—is of pivotal relevance here, as it bridges some of the insights specifically produced in the field of Feminist and Gender Studies with those in Performance Studies. In Butler's well-known conceptualisation, performativity refers to the ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (1988, 519) that, performed through the body, sustains the fiction of gender. The intersectional and comparative study of the re-enactment of gender identities, experiences, and relations thus provides a vantage point through which to examine the myriad ways in which gender in/equalities are materialised in and through cultural performance.

The second dimension to be considered is that of the relational production of in/equality. If as, Suzanne Clisby and Mark Johnson have argued, ‘studying the production of cultures of equality can be best described as the critical investigation and creative co-production of equalities events and artefacts’ (2020, 5), in this volume, contributors examine the specific ways in which ‘co-production’ occurs in and through performative artworks and events. In line with Richard Schechner's view, performance is interpreted as occurring in various situations which are not always discriminated from each other, and that include, among others, everyday life events, the arts, sports, technology, and rituals (Schechner and Lucie 2020, 31). We argue that the post- and trans-disciplinary methodologies and epistemological groundings embraced by Performance Studies are therefore particularly suitable to the analysis of gender equalities and inequalities, as they allow for nuanced examinations of how these in/equalities are created, sustained, and undone in and through performance practices, values, ideas, tastes, and aesthetics. By doing so, the different chapters critically engage the ‘political potential’ of gender/ed performances (Kunst 2017), as embodied practices occurring in artistic, activist, and/or everyday life sociocultural environments, thus establishing fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies. To this end, some of the central questions this volume tackles include: How does the (re)enactment of equalities feature in and through such performative manifestations as theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts? What does it mean to perform (in)equalities? For whom or by whom are these performed? How does a transcultural analysis of the enactment of in/equalities in performance across geographical lines allow for nuanced understandings of the materialisation of cultures of in/equality? How are gendered in/equalities relationally produced in the inter- and intra-action of the bodies of the performers, audiences, and/or participants in the selected events? Addressing each of these key questions in different ways, contributors offer both theoretical and methodological insights into a wide array of practices, events, and artworks from the first two decades of the 21st century with (trans)cultural links to multiple geopolitical locales (France, Italy, the Philippines, Poland, Spain, the USA, the UK, and Vietnam).

Chapter Contents

The different chapters present a broad range of case studies of gender in/equalities in and through cultural performance which, in line with Dwight Conquergood's conceptualisation, is understood here as encompassing three interrelated dimensions:

1. Accomplishment—the making of art and remaking of culture; creativity; embodiment; artistic process and form; knowledge that comes from doing, participatory understanding, practical consciousness, performing as a way of knowing;
2. Analysis—the interpretation of art and culture; critical reflection; thinking about, through, and with performance; performance as a lens th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements or Credits List
• 1 Performing Cultures of Equality: Embodiments, Visualities, Inscriptions
• Part I Embodying (In)Equalities
• Part II Visualizing (In)Equalities
• Part III Inscribing (In)Equalities
• Index