Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

1) What role does the audience play in transformative performance pieces? How can we become more aware audience members? 2) What distinguishes open and closed performances? In what ways can we perform challenging pieces?

Increasingly, a new generation of health communication scholars are drawing our attention to the performative nature of health communication. In our experiences of health and illness; in our interactions with our loved ones in a variety of health contexts; in our interactions with healers and health care providers; in our sharing of our stories of health, illness, healing, and dying with others in our communities; in our participation in social and political processes that seek to address issues of healthcare, we continually perform ourselves. Performance in this sense is both public and private. We perform our selves in health communication interactions; and perform often for others, for the purposes of understanding, sharing, creating community and bringing about change. It is through our performances that we co-construct stories of health that articulate the violence inflicted by oppressive social structures, and suggest avenues for social change.

From my piece on Performativity and the Third World academic Today we were talking about issues of health and gender in South Asia in this one graduate seminar I am attending. The teacher, a recently minted PhD from a midwestern university, a White woman, stood in front of the class and eloquently discussed the primitiveness of South Asian cultures that are steeped in patriarchy and age old values. She talked about how these cultures needed to be changed, and the role of interventions in bringing about such change. She talked about the lack of agency of South Asian women and how they needed empowerment (of course, by the White saviors embodied in the dominant paradigm of development and health communication who only knew too well the so called strategies to develop and uplift). Then she went on to discuss examples of empowerment-based campaigns that have changed the terrain of the Third World, and brought about development. Her triumphant note articulated their (West-centered agents of...