Search

As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement with queer theory and transgender countercultural aesthetics. There is also an investment in a transcendental truth that negates the possibilities of staging the emotive and unknowable dimensions of the gendered subject. Performance ethnography has become a pedagogically exciting methodological form because it can emotionally engage audiences in topics they would normally avoid. However, such topics must incite curiosity and critical questioning, as opposed to definitive truth claims and easy answers. As evidenced by the playQueer Bathroom Monologues(QBM)—my case study—audiences engage, refuse, query, contest, affectively respond to, and ignore, the difficult and disturbing excesses of research about queer and transgender material. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how the gender of professionalism is central to an understanding of occupational closure. Using the social history of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) as an example, the author shows how the executive allegiance to the gender of professionalism incited a moral concern with rural women teachers employed in the elementary public school system in the early twentieth century, and how this concern interfered with the delivery of protective services to country teachers involved in contractual disputes. The model of professionalism was based on a composite portrait of the older masculinised European ideal of professional rationality, and distilled through a feminine ideal of conduct intelligible to white middle- and upper-class women in early twentieth-century Canada. The professional ideal was used as a measure of occupational success and applied as a criterion for granting or withholding protective services. As a result, rural women falling short of the ideal were denied protective services when embroiled in tenure-related disputes and, ultimately, they were excommunicated from the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]