Discourses, Videos and Talk about Sexual Violence: A Multi-Disciplinary Enterprise

Abstract

Over the past few years a number of initiatives against sexual harassment and violence have been launched by large corporations and South African universities, with mixed results. As an active member of one of the first projects of this kind, it became evident to Kottler how severely hampered policy making, education and prevention are by definitional problems and varied gendered and cultural constructions of the issues involved. With a view to addressing some of these an educational campaign at the University of Cape Town was proposed in 1993, part of which involved an attempt at an innovative multi-methodological approach free from the trappings of one particular discipline. Drawing on research using post-modern ideas and social constructionism looking at talk about sexual harassment, a post-graduate drama producer (Peter Hayes) was drawn in. He conducted workshop discussions on sexual harassment with men and women from a wide range of contexts (all audio or video taped), with a view to producing a dramatic piece of forum theatre. The outcome, entitled ONE MAN'S MEAT… IS A WOMAN'S POISON was performed by two women and two men, two white and two coloured at a number of university venues, on occasion to extremely large audiences (1000 at the University of the Western Cape). Requests for additional performances came from a number of unexpected places, for example, Rape Crisis, Cape Town used it as part of their counselling training course in 1994. A 28-minute video of a performance, incorporating audience participation in rescripting and replaying the scenarios was produced by an educational film-maker (Lindy Wilson). Following conference presentations of the video, a number of copies have been sold to other universities and NGOs both locally and overseas. In this article we describe the process leading up to the production of the play and offer an analysis and discussion of the play as it was finally constructed, linking this to some of the text produced at the rehearsals.