The gendered labor of social innovation: Theatre, pedagogy, and the girl-child in India

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Notes

According to the United Nations, in many countries, available indicators show that the girl-child is discriminated against from the earliest stages of life, through her childhood and into adulthood. In some areas of the world, men outnumber women by five in every 100. The reasons for the discrepancy include, among other things, harmful attitudes and practices, such as female genital mutilation, son preference—which results in female infanticide and prenatal sex selection—early marriage, including child marriage, violence against women, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, discrimination against girls in food allocation and other practices related to health and well-being. As a result, fewer girls than boys survive into adulthood (see United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women 1995).

Recognizing that gender oppression can take many forms and affect all genders, including nonbinary genders, this article will examine specifically the historically-bounded gendered oppression of girls under entrenched patriarchal, political, social, and cultural systems.

As the principal investigator in this Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded ethnographic research, I have greatly benefitted from the long-term and profound teaching of my international collaborators to help me understand their contexts in the interest of better appreciating notions of ‘home’ and self-other relations. In this article, I will focus particularly on learning done in Lucknow, India and especially the ways in which forms of pedagogy and aspects of curriculum have shone light upon broader social issues relevant to the global north and south. As will be described, the researchers (a team of graduate students, my playwright collaborator and I) engage actively with the research participants, using theatre as a mode of communication.

For an important exposé on hope as distinct from optimism, see Eagleton (2015).

Unger’s early work precipitated the movement of Critical Legal Studies in the United States, reforming the leftist legal theorists of its time in the interest of a more democratic society. See Unger (1986/2015b).

See Gallagher (2014).

Four members of our local team of researchers spent 10 days at Prerna in March 2016 in which we witnessed the feminist pedagogy of critical dialogues.

According to the United Nations and their extensive international study of gender and education, gender-biased educational processes, including curricula, educational materials and practices, teachers’ attitudes and classroom interaction, reinforce existing gender inequalities.

Please see http://studyhallfoundation.org for further detail.

The girls in the classroom (ages 9–16) spoke in Hindi. Andrew Kushnir and I are White and English-speaking. We could not understand nor speak Hindi, but my graduate student Dirk Rodricks is Indian-born and better understood the girls, though they spoke in a dialect that was less familiar to him. Their teacher was quite fluent in English and translated back and forth between us. For this reason, I proposed some work that involved the students making soundscapes of a recent school trip they had made by train to Rajasthan. For most, this was the very first time they had left their slums in urban Lucknow.

Andrew Kushnir is an award-winning playwright and actor, co-founder of Project: Humanity (http://www.projecthumanity.ca) a socially engaged theatre company. He is an embedded artist in the research project who is creating a cycle of verbatim plays based on the research.

All participant names used are pseudonyms. The school has requested that its real name, Prerna, be used.

The following video is of school founder Urvashi Sahni working with critical dialogues and drama pedagogies on the concept of honor with the young women at Prerna as well as a clip of their performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDGqsq1_duw&feature=player_embedded.

In the interview, we drew upon the excellent translation of Anshu, who had previously worked at the school in various capacities.

Again, the UN reports that girls are less encouraged than boys to participate in and learn about the social, economic, and political functioning of society, with the result that they are not offered the same opportunities as boys to take part in decision-making processes.

For a compelling interview with Prerna Founder and StudyHall CEO Urvashi Sahni, see http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/dr.

For their street play performed at Guari village, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsaNraLt3tw.

“The personal is political” is a political argument that was widely used as a rallying slogan of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s. Strangely, though attributed to an essay by Carol Hanish, under the title “The Personal is Political” in 1969, Hanish herself disavows authorship of the phrase. Other prominent feminist figures have also had the phrase attributed to them, but all have declined its authorship. Instead, it is a term widely used, in early White, Black, and Brown feminisms, the origins of which remain uncertain. Its collective use and power, however, remains uncontested.

For a full review, see http://dailynews.mcmaster.ca/article/henry-giroux-collective-opposition-is-no-longer-an-option-its-a-necessity/.

For an example of their performance against child marriage and for the right to education for girls, please see http://www.studyhallfoundation.org/studyhall-blogs/?p=2459.

Many of these scholars are addressing the proliferation of social media and on-line forms of democratic participation and political organizing. Our multisited ethnography also leverages the strengths of digital communication platforms to “virtually travel” to other sites. We have learned a great deal about this kind of digital research collaboration but for us it remains true that it is a pale version of face-to-face encounters, which we have built into every year of our study. Though much costlier and challenging to carry out over multiple sites, we have found that nothing replaces the experience of human encounter in ethnographic research. Digital communication has facilitated a great deal of conversation and sharing of performance work across our sites, but it cannot compare to live performance and human interaction. But, that is a subject for a separate article.

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Kathleen Gallagher

Kathleen Gallagher is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. She has published many books and articles on theatre, youth, pedagogy, methodology and gender. Her research continues to focus on questions of youth civic engagement and artistic practice, and the pedagogical and methodological possibilities of theatre.