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Abstract
Drama is often used as a tool to investigate experience and to assist people to rehearse for change. Dramatic portrayals, however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for a positivist approach to research through drama to contribute to a pathologising of the subject and to limit the possibility of change. Assumptions are commonly made about the protective nature of the divide offered by the drama, but within the naturalistic tradition, a certain rule-play may confine the role-play, with actors replicating social norms and dominant storylines in order to create a level of believability or verisimilitude. For change to occur one must rupture the assumed and re-imagine what is possible. The paper discusses the way in which poststructuralist approaches to drama can be used to enable participants to grapple with the limiting positions and categories provided in the dominant discourses and to re-imagine their futures. Examples are drawn from a HIV prevention project with the Women's Union in Vietnam. The project aims to equip women and girls to talk openly about sex within a culture in which this is not the norm. Theory is developed which identifies that the selection of genre influences the knowledge that can be represented through the drama, and consequently the possibilities for change that can be fashioned. Multifarious and poly-vocal accounts of the self are needed to re-fashion the shared and gendered identity absorbed as part of culture and to create new storylines within which to enact change.