| Popis: |
Maya Kaqchikel women theater groups in Guatemala emerged in the 2000s in collaboration with Mestiza/o directors to denounce the multiple forms of violence they have historically experienced while simultaneously advocating for personal and collective healing. Drawing from eleven in-depth interviews with Maya Kaqchikel theater-making artists and Mestiza/o directors of two theater groups, this dissertation explores how these women engaging in the theater-making process disrupts colonial scripts of patriarchal violence by performing healing as a form of resistance. In particular, this study analyzes the theater-making process as a healing system rooted in Maya women’s ancestral knowledge of traditional medicine embedded in the transformational power of their performances. The three main stages of performing healing identified in this dissertation are: (a) acknowledging the wound(s), (b) personal experiences of transformation, and (c) remedies as cultural knowledge promoting healing. Based on ethnographic work in Guatemala from June 2019 to June 2020 and performance theory, I suggest that Maya Kaqchikel women's theater groups disrupt colonial legacies of racial, gender, sexual, and class stratification in Guatemala by performing healing as resistance. They overtly disrupt what I call colonial scripts of rapeability. These cultural scripts are rooted in colonial narratives promoting the historical repetition of events, discourses, and images that have survived the test of time, complex legacies of all forms of violence against Indigenous and Mestiza women. Such forms of violence may go from its most normalized and socially accepted expressions, to its most extreme and brutal, including but not limited to femicide. These complex expressions of violence against women living in colonized territories take place in the context of interpersonal relationships and everyday life. These forms of violence against women are often left in impunity, causing its normalization and repetition. Within this context, healing as resistance is not only an individual experience, but rather it becomes a collective expression of resilience and resistance rooted in Maya women's ancestral forms of knowledge. |
