Feminist Theory Theater: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy
Abstract
This article introduces Feminist Theory Theater (FTT), an experimental reading practice developed by the co-authors. Described most simply, FTT asks a group of co-present readers to put a text “on its feet,” improvising and revising its performance as a mode of ongoing, embodied interpretation. The aim is not to settle on a consensus of what a text means or to work toward a finished performance. Instead of staging a single best performance, FTT invites texts-as-scenes to be interpreted and re-staged by any member(s) of the reading group. We offer FTT as a way to take up York and Conley’s (2019) proposal that the commitments of STS can and should be enacted in practices of pedagogy. Here, we present and analyze multiple scenes of FTT in action to consider the potentials and limitations of critical STS pedagogy. We include our earliest experiments developing FTT in Act I, reading Judith Butler with undergraduates in a university lecture hall in Act 2, and reading a syllabus with incarcerated students in a prison classroom in Act 3. We highlight the empirical ways that FTT resists interpretive closure, centering embodied reinterpretation, arguing that doing so re-embeds text in the world as a way for reading groups to revision both. However, this dynamic, non-teleological mode of reading causes trouble for lesson plans and “learning outcomes” that might support the institutional legitimacy of STS critical pedagogies. This contradiction hinges on the question of who and what teaches. We argue that this trouble is worth staying with as a practical contradiction to be grappled with in further research on and through STS critical pedagogies. We invite readers of this article to take up this question (and others) by trying with, reflecting on, and revising through the situated, open-ended mode of reading together that we call FTT. To that end, we present a free, printable zine, The Feminist Theory Theater Workbook, which can act as both a guide to a first attempt at doing FTT and an archivable trace of that reading.
References
Data Availability
Data published in these article can be accessed in STS Infrastructures at: https://n2t.net/ark:/81416/p4qs3f.
References
Alač, Morana. 2011. Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2020.1907685.
Aushana, Christina. 2021. “Inescapable Scripts: Role-Playing Feminist (Re)Visions and Rehearsing Racialized State Violence in Police Training Scenarios.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 30(3): 284–306.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2020.1907685.
Aushana, Christina, Michael Berman, Yelena Gluzman, and Sarah Klein. n.d. Feminist Theory Theater Reading Room. Accessed September 5, 2024.
https://www.feministtheorytheater.space.
Aushana, Christina, Michael Berman, Yelena Gluzman, and Sarah Klein. 2022. “Feminist Theory Theater Workbook Prototype.” STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography. Accessed September 26, 2024.
https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/feminist-theory-theater-workbook.
Barton, Angela Calabrese. 1997. “Liberatory Science Education: Weaving Connections Between Feminist Theory and Science Education.” Curriculum Inquiry 27(2): 141–163.
de Beauvoir, Simone. [1952] 1974. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books.
Boal, Augusto. 2008. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. London: Pluto Press.
Bowker, Geoffrey C. 2014. “Emerging Configurations of Knowledge Expression.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 99–118.
Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40(4): 519–531.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893.
Cavicchi, Elizabeth. 2014. Learning Science as Explorers: Historical Resonances, Inventive Instruments, Evolving Community.” Interchange 45(3): 185–204.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9235-9
Cipolla, Cyd. 2019. “Build It Better: Tinkering in Feminist Maker Pedagogy.” Women’s Studies 48(3): 261–282.
Downey, Gary, and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak. 2017. “Making and Doing: Engagement and Reflexive Learning in STS.” In The Handbook for Science and Technology Studies, Fourth Edition, edited by Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 223–251.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2019.1593842.
Downey, Gary, and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, eds. 2021. Making & Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Seabury Press.
Giordano, Sara. 2018. “Theorizing Feminist Tinkering with Science Methodologies.” Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education 18(3): 222–231.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42330-018-0027-y.
Goodwin, Charles. 1994. “Professional Vision.” American Anthropologist 96(3): 606–633.
https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100.
Gluzman, Yelena 2017a. “Feminist Theory Theater.” In Imagined Theatres, edited by Daniel Sack. London: Routledge, 80–81.
⸻. 2017b. “Research as Theatre (RaT): Positioning Theatre at the Centre of PAR, and PAR at the Centre of the Academy.” In Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, edited by Annette Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude, and Ben Spatz. London: Routledge, 105–132.
⸻. 2021. “Reflexivity Practiced Daily: Theatricality in the Performative Doing of STS.” In Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, edited by Hannah Rogers, Megan Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kethryn de Ridder-Vignone. London: Routledge, 249–271.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
Halpern, Megan. 2014. Beyond Engagement: Meaningful Relationships Among Experts and Publics in the Performing Arts and Sciences. PhD Diss., Cornell University.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Jungnickel, Kat. 2023. “Speculative Sewing: Researching, Reconstructing, and Re-imagining Wearable Technoscience.” Social Studies of Science 53(1): 146-162.
https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221119213.
Jungnickel, Kat, ed. 2020. Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Klein, Sarah. 2017. Getting Experimental: Performing Cognition in the EEG Lab. PhD Diss., University of California, San Diego.
⸻. 2022. “Between People and Paper: Inhabiting Experiment in a Journal Club.” Science as Culture 32(3): 1-28.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2076587.
Kline, Ronald R., and Trevor Pinch. 1996. “Users as agents of technological change: The social construction of the automobile in the rural United States.” Technology and Culture 37(4): 763–795.
https://doi.org/10.2307/3107097.
Liboiron, Max. 2020. “Exchanging.” In Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research, edited by Kat Jungnickel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 89–108.
Lynch, Michael. 1985. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. London: Routledge.
Myers, Natasha. 2015. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Myers, Natasha, and Joseph Dumit. 2011. “Haptic Creativity and the Mid-Embodiments of Experimental Life.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 239–261.
Novella, Caro. 2017. “Arousing Formlessness: Collaborative Encounters with Chemotherapy.” Performance Research 22(6): 54–56.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1414405.
⸻. 2021. “Scoring Enquiry, Unsettling Ignorance: Moving with Racialized Cancer Uncertainties.” Performance Research 26(4): 110-117.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2021.2005968.
Pérez, Elena, Sophia Efstathiou, and Tsjalling Swierstra. 2019. “Getting Our Hands Dirty with Technology: The Role of the Performing Arts in Technological Development.” Peripeti 16(8): 104–121.
https://doi.org/10.7146/peri.v16iS8.117599.
Philip, Thomas, and Ayush Gupta. 2020. “Emerging Perspectives on the Co-Construction of Power and Learning in the Learning Sciences, Mathematics Education, and Science Education.” Review of Research in Education 44(1): 195–217.
https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X20903309.
Riley, Donna and Lionel Claris. 2009. “From Persistence to Resistance: Pedagogies of Liberation for Inclusive Science and Engineering.” International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology 1(1): 1-25.
Rodríguez, Dylan. 2006. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rogers, Hannah, Megan Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, eds. 2021. Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. London: Routledge.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1990. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.” The Sociological Review 38(S1): 26–56.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1990.tb03347.x.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
York, Emily and Shannon N. Conley. 2019. “STS As Critical Pedagogy NSF Proposal Project Description,” STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography. Accessed September 21, 2024.
https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sts-critical-pedagogy-nsf-proposal-project-description.
Copyright (c) 2024 Christina Aushana, Michael Berman, Yelena Gluzman, Sarah Klein
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.