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Talking About Pornography, Talking About Theatre: Ethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and the Production of ‘Educated’ Audiences of Etta Jenks in Madison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Stacy Wolf
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Extract

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production of Etta Jenks at the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators.

My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1

James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2 In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses to Etta Jenks in my analysis of their reception.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 29 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1994

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References

Notes

1. Douglas, Kellner, ‘Reading Images Critically: Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy’ in Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries, ed. Henry, A. Giroux (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 63.Google Scholar

2. James, Clifford, ‘Introduction’ to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James, Clifford and George, E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 7.Google Scholar

3. James, Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’. In Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence, Grossberg, Cary, Nelson and Paula, Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 97. I am indebted to Vicki Patraka for calling attention to this image.Google Scholar

4. See, for example, Clifford, , or Giroux, Henry A. ‘Introduction’ to Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics, pp. 1–59.Google Scholar

5. Marlane, Meyer, Etta Jenks. Womenswork, ed. Julia, Miles (New York: Applause, 1989), p. 116.Google Scholar

6. For a discussion of the production, see Jill, Dolan, ‘Gender, Sexuality, and “My Life” in the (University) Theatre’. The Kenyon Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1993.Google Scholar

7. Richard, Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 193.Google Scholar

8. The term, ‘interpretive community’, originates with Stanley Fish, the ‘father’ of reader-response theory. See Is There a Text in this Class! (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

9. Giroux, , ‘Introduction’, p. 54.Google Scholar

10. Other spectators, such as Theatre and Drama students, professors, local feminists, and so on, used the production completely differently than the students whose responses I discuss here.

11. Nancy, Comley, ‘Reading and Writing Genders’. In Reorientations: Critical Theories and Pedagogies, ed. Bruce, Henricksen and Thais, E. Morgan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 180.Google Scholar

12. Dwight, Conquergood, ‘Poetics, Process, and Power: The Performance Turn in Anthropology’. Text and Performance Quarterly 1, 1989, p. 83.Google Scholar

13. Clifford, , The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 10.Google Scholar

14. On cultural capital and its relation to economic and educational capital, see Pierre, Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, R. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

15. Richard, Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Hills, IL: Waveland Press, 1977), p. 27.Google Scholar

16. Susan, Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 76.Google Scholar

17. David, Scholle, ‘Reading the Audience, Reading Resistance: Prospects and Problems’. Journal of Film and Video Vol. 43, Nos. 1–2, Spring-Summer 1991.Google Scholar

18. Peter, McLaren, ‘Schooling the Postmodem Body: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Enfleshment'. In Giroux, , p. 172.Google Scholar