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Talking About Pornography, Talking About Theatre: Ethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and the Production of ‘Educated’ Audiences of Etta Jenks in Madison

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production of Etta Jenks at the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators. My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1 James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2 In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses to Etta Jenks in my analysis of their reception.