CONTEST AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING WITHIN THE BTEC

gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again (Butler, 1988, p.526)

For Butler, gender is constituted by “stylised repetition of acts through time” (ibid, p.520). These acts are performative in nature, they are dramatised by embodied actors that give gender a

corporeal style. The dramatisation of gender, in which students acted out assigned gendered

roles, emerged as a contentious and powerful aspect of the BTEC learning environment. Therefore while Butler’s thesis of ‘doing gender’ may be criticised from a corporeal realist position for a tendency to provide an overly constructed notion of the gendered body (Shilling, 2012) her insistence on paying attention to both the body and to the theatrical performances 31 that construct forms of social (inter)action provided a useful vantage point from which to frame Scene 1. This lens put into focus the ways in which individual actors (or embodied students) came to read a script and learn, or resist learning, through the discussions that emerged from points of contest. The incident that follows may act as a useful focal point but it must also be seen as only one episode, of many, that followed similar dynamics.

Is it Acceptable to Cut Off Women's Tongues?: 12th of January 2015. New

year, new term, and a new play. Ground work for the play, as usual, consists of script readings. To introduce the play Sandy suggest that the three main themes are gender, war and violence.


First, characters need to be allocated: Sandy asks the group "Who wants to be first soldier?" Jude quickly snaps up the role, “I do”. No resistance is given - like in previous plays he is the natural choice for the lead male character. Other roles are then discussed and agreed upon before the script reading begins.


While the play is set in contemporary times the style of the dialogue reflects that of Antigone (their previous play). After one especially convoluted line, Jen pauses to seek clarification from Sandy, “Am I saying that he has a small willy?”. Tina adds “Yeah, I think she is telling everyone that he has a small penis”. Sandy clarified the line further by saying “What she is doing is publicly questioning his manhood, she's trying to emasculate him”. There are no further comments for now. Jude and Liam just give each other a sideways glance before the reading continues.


In this publication Butler suggested that “the body becomes its gender through a 31

series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (p.523). This version of ‘becoming’ relies on the “process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” (p.521); so in other words the body becomes gendered through

Once there is a natural break in the dialogue and Sandy reveals more about the plot by telling the students that “while there are very strong female characters, when they speak out of line they get controlled - in the next scene her tongue is literally cut off ”. Both Jen and Tina are visibly shocked and angered by this revelation, “having your tongue cut off must be the worst! Because you are stuck with yourself ” Jen responds. At this point the script reading is abandoned. The actors debate whether the female character (who had been a victim of sexual violence) should speak out against her male perpetrator with the knowledge that this will result in her being silenced - perhaps in a violent way. Or whether, it would have been more sensible to have retracted her comments and stop talking ‘when she was given a clear choice to keep her tongue’. Liam acknowledged that it was “a lose-lose situation for her” whereas Jude was more interested in raising the point that “there are two sides to any story” and that the scene does not provide all the details and facts that surround this confrontation. This line of argument proved too provocative for Jen who responded “what the fuck, he is a psycho”, and the others agreed. To this Jude attempted to act as the male provocateur, “I wouldn't feel sorry for her, she had it coming” (his body exuded strength and confidence while the statement was delivered in an emphatic but somewhat sarcastic tone). Sandy makes a timely intervention asking Jude “do you want a spade? You’re digging yourself a hole!”. This made him notice that he was presenting a minority view that wasn't indulged even in terms of its humorous quality for being outrageous. The response from his audience generates a new awareness as he joins to mock his previous statement before continuing, with a more serious voice, an attempt to try and justify the core principle that underpins his chauvinism. He noticeably becomes less forceful although his views remain mostly intact. To ‘dig himself out of the hole’ he draws on a point that Jen had previously raised, “the thing is, Pankhurst et cetera actually achieved something”. 


Tina does not accept Jude’s mediated position elaborating on one of Sandy's earlier points that activism or speaking out is required for change to happen. In a defeatist tone Jude closes off the conversation by stating “maybe I am just failing to see your point”. Unsatisfied with that as a closing statement, Sandy reopens the discussion by suggesting that "these types of questions are not particularly limited to gender but any type of oppression. In this play women are silenced by rape and men are silenced by death”. A lengthy discussion continues where Jude strives to carve out a performance that straddles what he now sees as polar extremes. For me, this discussion beyond the script provides an interesting example of ‘collaborative learning’, where the performance of gender played a key role. My forming interpretations were solidified by Tina who reflected “who would've thought a play would give up so many messages… doesn't it annoy you that people go ‘why are you doing theatre, it’s useless’”.

This script was archetypal of the male gaze that sweeps through much of the Performing Arts where “Men act; Women are acted upon” (Gamman & Marshment, 1988, p.1) as Sandy

identified even strong female characters are controlled; their bodies are maimed, their voices silenced. Furthermore, the script reading induced a powerful social encounter brimming with political discourse and contest. As a result the enactment of this script had an educational function in the sense that it brought attention to the importance of feminist struggles within society and within the arts. Conceivably then the activity demonstrated what Burt (2007) understood as the inherent potential of the Performing Arts to transform society and individuals. Certainly the students found the play a stimulating medium to explore social issues. Importantly the performative nature of this scene showed how students engaged in these theatrics bringing to bear their own Weltanschauung (worldviews) that have formed through their embodied histories. Additionally the fieldnote illustrated how students may be pressured to improvise their performances as the social scene unfolds. While the dialogue may seem unstructured it was underpinned by social power that maintained there is a ‘correct position' and accepted performances in relation to this topic.

Sandy was pivotal in steering this process, while Jen and Tina bolstered the legitimate discourse. Of course, Jude was not fully reformed from this exchange alone. To the contrary, his resilience to change political (and oppressive) views on gender was made clear at the end of the session when Liam remarked, “Women aye. You can’t live with them. You can’t live without them”. Prompting Jude to correct him, “Well you can”. In terms of his core beliefs there were no immediate or seismic shifts. He was however advised to adjust, or ‘tone down’ his gendered performance - his chauvinism. And if we accept Butler’s thesis that gender is ‘done’ we can also accept the possibilities that it can be undone as well. There was some limited success here, to a large extent Jude ‘reigned in’ his masculinised performances. Moreover feeling obliged to explain his position Jude was forced, at some level, to reflect on what he perceived to be the ‘merits’ of his intentionally provocative statements. As the scene illustrates, this resulted firstly in a change in Jude’s corporeal style of performance that was in turn accompanied by minor shifts in discourse and reasoning. For others in the group (mainly Jen and Tina) this scene may have been catalytic towards a form of embodiment that actively challenges hegemonic forms of masculine domination. Both developments indicate the potential for some form of gendered transition to be ordered through events like these; events that were not uncommon in the BTEC.

Two further processes can be identified that work against the progress highlighted above. Firstly the BTEC is only one small aspect of students’ education and transition, there are processes of embodiment occurring in contexts other than the BTEC. It is through these contexts that Jude has most likely lived within the influences of an “overwhelming history of patriarchy” (Butler, 1988, p.53). It was my judgement that his doxa had already been formed by this history and his habits (as seen on multiple occasions throughout the fieldwork) reveal the way in which his body has become gendered in predictable ways. Consequently he has assumed the role of the lead male, the first soldier, the Romeo. The way in which student bodies have already been historically formed is intimately related to the second counteractive process, typecasting. According to Tina typecasts existed, “then we were all obviously kind of typecasted which isn’t great… like Liam was the villain and Jen was the moody one - the brat, not in that sense but she was so good at playing bratty parts. And I was a typical Juliet part and Jude was like, yeah, it was always me and Jude - the Romeo and Juliet.”(Tina, 22/01/16).

As shown in this sense, the connection between types of bodies and casting decisions were rarely challenged within the BTEC. Tina thought that this was a very limiting aspect of the course where “it wasn't just me that was stuck. Everyone was stuck” (06/02/16). Being stuck implies that constraints were in place that reduced students exposure to new experiences, new points of view, new roles, new identities. This process was therefore limiting of multiplicities. In other words there was little scope for students to transgress pre given typecasts that were reinforced again, and again, (re)producing stereotypes that were increasingly imprinted on their exterior bodies and shaped their corporeal style. They were stuck in a highly ordered pattern of expected (gendered) performances. Typecasting therefore took away opportunities to change and evolve, or become multiple - instead streamlining and specialising the individuals embodiment. This potentially places limits on the types of gender transitions available to these students.