Evoking re-cognition through embodied enquiry: using drama-based methods to re-script storylines of gendered violence

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.