Turning Red and Rescripting Girlhoods: Troubling the Twofold Taboos of Sexuality and Puberty

• In Event: Unapologetically Dramatic About Injustices: Anthro-Performances of Minoritized Children/Childhoods

Abstract

This anthro-performance (Harrison, 1990) focuses on how girl performers make sense of their experiences of being objectified, sexualized, and gendered as girls in the performing arts. This arts and community-based participatory research features innovations in girlhood studies and anthro-performance wherein the ethnographic interview becomes a collaborative script in which girls and girlhoods are brought in from the margins and situated within the context of broader scholarly and popular trends around gender fluidity and the taboos of menstruation, puberty, and girlhood sexualities.

In this project, I bring together young, female-identifying participants to engage in re-envisioning and re-scripting the Disney/Pixar animated film Turning Red, a coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl whose ‘turning red’ refers to her literal transformation into a red panda and an allegory for her onset of puberty and menstruation (Shi, 2022). This anthro-performance creatively engages girl-identifying participants ages 5-11 in dance and theatre workshops with a two-fold purpose: 1) collaborating using community-based participatory and devised theatre methods to re-envision and re-write our own theatrical version of Turning Red (Shi, 2022) and 2) creating a scripted performance ethnography built from multi-modal and multi-sensorial fieldnotes, videos, photos, text, sounds, feelings, memory, movements, media, and more that emerges through classroom and interview encounters with young participants as they collectively explore understandings and experiences of puberty and menstruation.

Theatre-making and scripting practices encourage embodied readiness, produce and activate knowledge, privilege the lived experiences of girl participants, and attune to thinking and moving through performance as a collaborative collective. Participants come together to create a counter-narrative that prompts dialogue about taboo topics and to create new imaginaries amongst participants. In this proposed anthro-performance, I describe methods of ethnographic theatre making to situate my own particular use of devised theatre and dramatic inquiry in my performing arts workshops.

In my years of experience as a performing arts instructor, I have come to see how young girl performers are troubling and breaking with educative practices that incessantly inscribe and reinscribe cultural and social normative values of what it means to be a performer, what it means to be a girl, what it means to be sexual, and more. I have also come to see how these young performers are creating a space in which their lifeworlds can be examined, critiqued, and historicized and where agency is denied or nurtured (e.g., Allegranti, 2013; Duncum & Springgay, 2007; Madison, 2018).

Aligning with D. Soyini Madison’s (2018) emphasis on performance ethnography as other than a staged performance, ethnographic theatre making enables “radical anthropological knowledge coproduction” (Vidali, 2020, p. 395). For this proposed session, I stage a reading from the ethnographic script of my research. Following this, I will invite interpretation, insights, and understandings from fellow session members and the academic audience to further engage in the shared performance experience and discuss the affordances and drawbacks of this method of research with children.

Author

• Julie Snyder, Pennsylvania State University