Performativity in an Theatrical Setting. The Impact of Embodied Gender Awarness on Acror Training
This article uses Judith Butler’s understanding of gender in order to analyze how an embodied feeling of the instability of gender norms can reveal social regulations of gender acts and thus create and achieve new ways of reading the world and our place within it. Butler’s view of change consists more of abstract potentialities than concrete programs or examples. In this article an example is given of a case when this abstract potentiality turns into concrete possibilities. Out of a Swedish system of actor training where heterocentrism and inequality were common practices, educational institutions have emerged where recognition for others has been extended, with increased possibilities for women and for queer stories. The findings show that social criticism concerning the limits and possibilities of gender as culturally and discursively produced was actively connected, through embodied gender awareness, to the normative ideals of compulsory heterosexuality as well as the privileging of the masculine. Using ethnography and acknowledging the performative body as a vessel of meaning, the relation between the body and redefinition of gendered norms can begin to be unraveled.