A generative refusal: body inclusive methods with racialized women in knowledge creation

Abstract

This paper illustrates the moving body’s direct engagement with discursive and material spaces, as well encounters in theatre methods used in knowledge production. Body-inclusive theatre-based methods aim to address two paradoxes. First, the racialised and gendered body in feminist epistemology is often theorised without the body being actively engaged in the methods that produce its theorisations, and therefore neither are body-inclusive methodological practices. This has an impact on feminist epistemologies as corporeal modes of existence, such as lived experiences, self-definition and agency require the presence of and an engagement with the moving body. This knowledge project offers another way of being in knowledge acquisition. It recognises that research often refuses the agency and personhood of the ‘researched’, and it also sets limits on epistemologies (Tuck 2009; Ng 2018; Salami 2020). There is an epistemological refusal taking place in this theatre practice: through the enactment of lived experiences with an aim to transform them; a non-binary way of making meaning of them; creativity as a process of becoming anew; and activating the agency driven human body. In this practice, racialised and migrant women explore their subjugated bodies through kinaesthetic means, namely with, from, and through their bodies. The co-creators explored the playfulness and creativity of their bodies through theatre games, living images and the creation of Physical and Forum Theatre performances (Boal 1992/2005; Lecoq et al. 2000) linked with the experience of having a female, racialised, migrant and othered body.

Forum theatre practice as lived activism

“…Furthermore, such spaces, as they are imbalanced in terms of power dynamics, create tensions in the bodies of those who are racialised. They negate black and migrant bodies' existence by straining and shrinking their bodies and by refusing to include their stories, hence their lived experiences (Kaptani, 2023).…”

“…This way of looking is part of a collaborative process of creation, whilst one is also looking at herself through her own and others' actions, hence creating a dialogical process of meaning-making (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis, 2008). In this dialogical aesthetic process, transformation becomes possible (Kaptani, 2023). Boal's notion of transformation refers to the aesthetic space where 'all actions gain new properties.…”

“…As Arendt (1958, p. 178) mentions, to act is to start something from the beginning, something that was not there before. This can be restorative regarding the racialised and gendered experiences of static objectification, as bodies can move and transform (Kaptani, 2023). Hence, this toposomatic practice opens up an agential space, where the body can move, resist and repair (ibid).…”

“…The transformation is inevitable as this resistive practice foregrounds the black, female, Muslim and migrant body that has been omitted as a carrier of knowledge within the White male and Eurocentric frame of extraction and validation replaying in activism spaces and practices (Ahmed, 2012;hooks, 1994;Kaptani, 2023;Salami, 2020;Zempi and Chakraborti, 2015). It belongs to the negative other of the hierarchy and binary of male white as the subject of a universal knowledge and black, racialised female as the local and cultural object.…”

Practising refusal as relating otherwise: engagements with knowledge production, ‘activist’ praxis, and borders

“…Kaptani situates these different knowledges and ways of making meaning within the particular lived experience of everyday bordering (e.g Yuval-Davis et al 2019). She explores how bordering practices 'block' movement: they "do not only remain within the border control and institutional spaces but rather permeate everyday life through gestures, statements, gazes, and spatial arrangements" (Lafazani 2021in Kaptani 2023also Noble 2005also Noble , 2008. In her article Kaptani (2023, 189) focuses on how gendered and racialised bodies emerge in public spaces and how, "by working with a moving body methodology", the forces creating affective intensities of everyday bordering become visible.…”