City Research Online

Abstract

This thesis argues for the value of cabaret research as a method to explore and express the experiences of people who take hormonal contraception, including myself. Hormonal contraception, generally abbreviated as ‘the pill’, is imbued with many meanings and is variously configured as an agent of liberation or oppression. Despite its widespread use and significant implications for the individual taking it, the pill is rarely represented in performance. This absence suggests that the labour of women and people assigned female at birth is not considered interesting or important enough to represent. Through my queer feminist practice research, I expose the multiplicity and ambiguity that characterises pill stories. Within a cabaret framework, the audience can encounter competing narratives without resolution, an additive rather than reductive process.

I describe the vast array of practice lineages that have informed this project, drawing attention to the use of ‘real’ stories, especially lived experience that is gendered, embodied, and medicalised. I have contributed two distinct strategies to this growing body of performance work, activating the concepts of bio-drag and vulnerable empowerment in cabaret performance. Drawing from multiple approaches, I articulate a scavenging cabaret methodology that facilitates multiplicity in the presentation of pill narratives. This approach is informed by autoethnographic writing, interviews, a roundtable discussion with contemporary theatremakers, and iterative cycles of praxis culminating in the performance of Side FX at VAULT Festival 2023.

I argue that performance rooted in queer feminist practices can express multiple truths, allowing conflicting or contradictory narratives to coexist, locating value and validity in them without imposing coherence. Through my performance and analysis of Side FX I explain the core conceptual lenses that guided the creative process under the headings of Girlhood, the Clinical Encounter, and Bloodwork, playfully scrutinising the ‘intimacy and hostility’ of the clinical encounter and the normalised labour of taking hormonal contraception. The notion of hormones as bio-drag exposes the performativity involved in identity formation through the taking of hormonal contraception.

This enquiry bridges and builds on existing feminist and queer scholarship relating to the construction of female and marginalised bodies, and the historical abuses and erasures of the female body by medicine. I argue for the value of this performance project in complicating pill narratives, expanding performance autoethnography through the creative imbrication of interview materials and using the audience-performer dynamic to scrutinise the clinical encounter. I argue that through this project I have contributed deeper insights into the experiences of contraceptive users in the UK, which are characterised by ambiguity, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Departments:	Doctoral Theses

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