Body Mapping as a Feminist New Materialist Intra-vention: Moving-Learning with Embodied Confidence

Abstract

This chapter explores an academic-creative collaboration that formed around ‘The Confidence Project’ led by Untold Dance Theatre, Bristol, UK, to evaluate the engagement of women in somatic movement workshops. I discuss how methods of inquiry such as body mapping, interviews and diaries informed a unique research evaluation process that acted as a feminist intra-vention. Rather than being a separate evaluation ‘of’ the creative project, our methodology was designed ‘within’ the somatic workshop process that experimented with the gendered contours of women’s embodied confidence (including intersections with race, age, sexuality and so on). From this perspective, the research process can be understood as ‘intra-active’ – acting on, with and through the creative relations between researchers, choreographers, participants and the materiality of movement practices. As a feminist intra-vention, our arts-based collaboration sought to mobilise methods of embodied learning to unsettle the gender normativity that often frames women’s lack of confidence as an individualised ‘deficit’. Unlike many physical activity interventions that assume women’s bodies are passive objects requiring interventions, such as instructional movement pedagogies, our project worked through a feminist ethics of engaging the sensory body through experimental movement, as well as drawing-talking about gendered embodiment. Body mapping methods have yet to be used in critical health and physical activity research and hence this project contributes to new approaches to researching gendered movement.