title: Negotiating Gender Equity Through Theatre for Development
Creators: name: Mangeni, Patrick
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2007
Subjects: subject: Theatre for development
subject: TfD
subject: gender equity
subject: Uganda
subject: women's empowerment
subject: action research
subject: gender ideology

description: This research investigates some uses of Theatre for Development (TfD) as a concept and method for advancing gender equity in Uganda, focusing on strategies for transformative action, and identifying key themes and issues that the TfD reveals. Having been involved as a researcher and facilitator in previous TfD initiatives aimed at advancing gender equity, I recognised that despite increased attention by development agencies to TfD, the strategies being currently used were prescriptive and informed by a Cartesian conception of gender that was antagonistic to both culture and men, both of which became derogatively identified as the constraints to women’s empowerment. This study recognises the centrality of experience as a point of departure for gender analysis and as the pretext for transformative action. It seeks to contribute to understanding how women and men experience and negotiate gender and the opportunities and constraints of advancing gender equity through TfD. This understanding has implications both for the theory of TfD, and for how practice impacts on that theory. This study is premised on the notion of participation and experience as sites of knowledge. The thesis draws on post-colonial feminist theory and feminist concepts of power as creating capacity to focus consciousness in development (Freire, 1994). I used an action research strategy within a context of TfD workshops to frame and problematise women and men’s experiences of gender. I emphasised both the action and reflection aspects of action research to generate understanding. The fieldwork comprised a series of workshops with gender-mixed adult groups from contexts of hardship and deprivation. The initial strategy involved using story telling to permit the participants to generate their own agenda. This provided a participative interactive space, within which the original stories were subjected to a range of drama workshop techniques, including developing some of the stories into performance text. This problematised the underlying assumptions and attitudes, and permitted the participants to recognise and discuss these in a new light, enabling a shared contextual understanding of women’s oppression as mainly constructed and sustained through gender ideology and for the participants to see previously unrecognised alternatives for action. Privileging experiences as the agenda for praxis facilitated the rehearsal of interventions in a supportive atmosphere enhancing learning and capacity to act against oppression in real life. I posited a circle of relations method as useful in deconstructing stereotypical ways of seeing, enabling reflexivity, creating empathy and transformations based on increased awareness. The problematisation of experiences through cycles of planning, action and reflection provided multiple positions for reflexivity, highlighting similarities in their lived experiences as women and the contradictions between gender ideology and their experiences. The representational context functioned as a laboratory to identify constraints, prepare and test the ingredients of resistance against oppression, and rehearse more egalitarian relations. When they intervened in the fictional space as real people using real experiences, this transformed the theatre space into a liminal space for learning. In this experience, new challenges arising from the interface of the two worlds are constituted as subjects of praxis. The knowledge gained becomes the building blocks for action in real life. The involvement of men in a performative context provided them the opportunity to interact with women and to problematise what they are limited from experiencing by hierarchy and gender ideology. Women and men performed and rehearsed roles beyond what the gender would normally permit. Men’s participation provided understanding of their perceptions and informed action and knowledge upon which one could premise interventions that are contextually relevant. However, an analysis of the men’s responses indicated that prescribing gender as the explicit agenda could elicit some alienation and resistance from men. Nonetheless, the TfD provided a liminal space enabling women and men to generate ‘activity in each other’, and to test the feasibility of their strategies through action. Women gained a sense of accomplishment, experiencing change in their physical wellbeing and an enhanced capacity to perform their daily activities. The process of creating and transforming the characters’ experiences through action and reflection created an empowering dialectical relation between theatre and real life as participants drew from the representational contexts to reflect on their personal experiences and to improve relations in real life contexts. Analysis of the action research revealed that notions of perseverance and desire informed participants’ perceptions of ‘the nature’ of women. Perseverance was perpetuated through the valuation of endurance as power, distorting women’s consciousness and limiting their capacity for reflexivity. While the negative construction of women’s desire was partly culture’s attempt to respond to the vulnerability of women, its construction underscored an ambivalent conception of woman leading to policing of women’s desire and perceiving expressions of women’s sexuality outside the dominant ideological frame as problematic. Poverty emerged as the most significant situation constraining women’s capacity to associate with ‘significant others’ and to quantitatively invest their time and resources. Poverty structured women’s and men’s perceptions of social relations, creating distortions of perception. It constrained women to ‘doing gender’ and competing in performing deference for survival. The study posits that addressing gender-based inequities requires a negotiation strategy that apprehends the complexity of the relations of oppression which are a function of historical interfaces. Theatre as codification executed within action research cycles proved useful in creating critical distancing and for problematising experience and generating knowledge of women’s experiences. The process involved moments of regression arising from fatalism and ingrained gender ideology. This prescribed a need for sustained strategy of action. The findings underscored the need for TfD interventions to recognise consciousness and perceptions as key to development.