3 - Performance Medicine and Radical Pedagogy

Summary

In his essay ‘In Defense of Performance’, Guillermo Gómez-Peña answers a question he is often asked by journalists about the function of performance art: ‘Performance artists are a constant reminder to society of the possibilities of other artistic, political, sexual or spiritual behaviors and this I must say is an extremely important function.’ He adds, ‘It helps others to reconnect with the forbidden zones of their psyches and bodies, and to acknowledge the possibilities of their own freedoms. In this sense performance art may be as useful as medicine, engineering, or law and performance artists as necessary as nurses, teachers, priests, or taxi-drivers’ (2005: 43). Unlike Martha Hall, who wanted her artists’ books to be used in medical education – and although, like Spence, he defines himself as a cultural worker rather than just an artist – Guillermo Gómez-Peña has not used his performances to reach medical professionals. His work has been examined so far in terms of race, border studies and postcolonial theory rather than the medical humanities, which raises the question of what we bring into medical education and why. In envisaging him as an interloper I want to suggest that his work can enrich the medical humanities not only because it adds another artistic form or medium into the field. Rather, as the quotation above shows, and as this chapter goes on to explore, his performances encourage us to open up narrow understandings of the medical and at the same time to counter instrumental educational practices through the development of a more critical or radical pedagogy. While Hall's work has begun to articulate some of these issues – for example, through her commitment to dialogue and critique of superficial forms of empathy, and through a pedagogy of touch – I want to consider here performative/ pedagogical encounters that move beyond the clinical setting and individualised conceptions of health. These encounters also address more explicitly questions of social justice, democracy, human rights and community care which are often missing from medical ethics/ humanities discussions.