Crafting empathy in I Got Your Back: A One(ish) Person Show Exploring Pain, Empathy, and Performance

ABSTRACT

This essay frames the autoethnographic show, I Got Your Back: A One(ish) Person Show Exploring Pain, Empathy, and Performance within scholarly conversations around pain, performance, medicine, and crafting. We operationalize empathy as an action through which the relations between performance and medicine/care, subjectivity and witnessing, and pain and embodiment are made manifest under the inadequate U.S. healthcare model. Through a descriptive analysis of our work as co-writers, co-performers, friends, and director and performer, we propose what we call crafting empathy as a methodological and aesthetic performance practice with aspirations toward the tradition of co-performative witnessing.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• performance autoethnography
• co-performative witnessing
• crafting
• medicine

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jay Allison, Andrea M. Baldwin, Deborah Cunningham Breede, Tessa Carr, Laura Ellingson, Lisa Flanagan, Monica Gallegos, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, Anne M. Harris, Stacy Holman Jones, Steve Johns, David Purnell, Melissa Tindage, and Brianne Waychoff for their guidance and helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For further discussion see Park-Fuller; Rich; Ferris; and Scott.

2 Ahluwalia et al.

3 Fishman.

4 Park-Fuller 21.

5 Park-Fuller 296.

6 Birk 391.

7 Lanzoni also provides useful explanations. She states, “Among [empathy’s] many definitions are: emotional resonance or contagion, motor mimicry, a complex cognitive and imaginative capacity, perspective taking, kinesthetic modeling, a firing of mirror neurons, concern for others, and sometimes, although rarely, aesthetic self-projection, its earliest meaning” (3).

8 Pelias and Shaffer 107–08.

9 “Interview with Anna Deveare Smith.”

10 Smith argues for Medicare for all although insurance companies ensured that they would still be in control, as regulated by each state, of the “marketplace” where people could purchase insurance.

11 IGYB 5.

12 The first author took license with the use of the term “craft master” to describe Jenn’s skill level.

13 McRae and Huber discuss the ways in which craft and performance are related through focusing on pedagogy. They remind us that “craft presents possibilities for enacting performance and critical pedagogy in ways that feature contradiction, disruption, and interrogation” (103). In pairing performance with crafting, instead of enacting pedagogy, we are using crafting as a way to explore and co-create empathy. In addition to allowing us to show care for each other through crafting, crafting also provides an avenue for self-care.

14 For further discussion on crafting communities see Garber; Bratich; Bratich and Brush; Speed; Levine.

15 “craft” in Dictionary.com.

16 As we worked in and through craft, we acknowledge the cultural and etymological histories of crafting embedded in the show. For example, Bratich and Brush point out, “One does not have to go too far back in time to note that cunningcraft referred to a whole series of knowledges and skills associated with women (aka folk knowledges or witchcraft) and that “craftiness” and cunning were inseparable for the Greeks: Ariadne’s thread, the labyrinth, weaving contests” (252).

17 A.B. Movement vocabulary chart in script.

18 Bratich and Brush argue, “The crafty subject is bound up with trickery and artifice, with tactics that make fabriculture part of what Michel De Certeau calls the ‘politics of the popular’” (234).

19 Excerpt from Critical Autoethnography conference abstract.

20 IGYB script 24. In text message chain included as coda: “Jenn: Is it going to be boring? Jade: Not on my damn watch.”

21 Both in the scripting and performing of IGYB, the show moves from symbolic to representative notions of beside and back again. Sedgewick states, “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting aggressing, warping and other relations” (8). Similarly, Jenn and Jade’s bodies, beside each other on stage, their bodies move, mimic, reject, comfort, engulf, are accomplices, even co-conspirators of each other’s bodies.

22 The most recent CDC report shows that non-white patients were more susceptible to health maladies and received lower quality of care when treated (Centers for Disease Control).

23 Madison 827.

24 Madison 829.

25 Webb et al.’s “listening tour” reveals distrust of the healthcare system from its African American participants (Webb Hooper et al. 3280).

26 Geist-Martin and Bell 632.