Intro to Sociocultural Anthropology
On May 28, 2015, we (Aushana, Berman, Gluzman and Klein) worked with Prof. Joe Hankins’ rather large ANTH102 Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology undergraduate class at UC San Diego. Together, using FTT, we read Judith Butler’s classic 1988 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” This session was documented on video by Collin C. Chappelle.
In the vast lecture hall, with raked seats facing a recessed area designed for a lecturer, we began by inviting the assembled undergraduates to use us as performers, directing us to perform gestures, characters and scenes to enact this section of Butler’s essay:
“Consider that there is a sedimentation of gender norms that produces the peculiar phenomenon of a natural sex, or a real woman, or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.”
What happened next is described in our open-access 2024 co-authored essay “Feminist Theory Theatre: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy,” published in Engaging Science, Technology and Society.