This week's Art of Conversation has Teresa Brayshaw as guest speaker. Teresa is a lecturer on performance at Leeds Met. University and on last year's project wowed us with her routes into making conversation a creative (rather than a mundane) act, and her ideas for working with made up languages.
This week I've been considering unfathomable languages, and how they can often be aligned on a gender bias. For example, the Six Nations prompted me to reflect on how the rules of a game can often seem to be written and even spoken in a different language to the one we use on a daily basis, unless you have taken the time to learn it.
I recently learned a new language - becoming pregnant and having a baby opens up a whole new medicalised vocabulary of terms I can honestly say I'd never heard of before (in this context and with new meanings). A 'show' now has the capacity to mean something completely different to 'putting on a performance'. But I wonder how much of this new language was something the baby's father got to grips with, or did the insular nature of the relationship between pregnant women and midwives exclude him from this? And are childless women similarly excluded from the language of birth?
Having a baby also means you have very different conversations with you partner to the ones you had B.B (Before Baby). The ones everyone comments on are the ones to do with excretions - frequency, colour, related pains and reactions - however the one that has interested me the most in terms of the project is naming and labelling. We have begun to discuss what names will be given to her body parts when that time comes. For baby boys it seems straightforward. A straw poll amongst parent friends reveals that people universally use 'willy' for male genitalia. However for girls there appears to be no consensus at all. Some have chosen to opt for whimsical, 'delicate flower' names such as 'tuppence' whilst some have chosen to be more clinical about it and use 'vagina'. I can't see myself using either of these labels - one is far too fey for me, the other almost too clinical and also flawed, in that 'vagina' only really refers to the internal sex organs thus leaving the external female sex ignored and inaccurately described.
We're currently toying with the idea of re-appropriating 'fanny'. To us it seems like the companion term to 'willy'. Suitably (anatomically) vague, harmless and non-threatening.
Can't believe I'm actually about to click 'PUBLISH POST' on this blog but here goes!
******************************************************************************************
This post was written by Amanda and in no way reflects the opinions of either Pigeon Theatre or the greenroom.
And isn't it funny how we whisper these words, mouth them silently, pause before we say them, and raise an eyebrow afterwards, rather than bluntly including them in conversation. Every person in this world has these body parts, so why are we so shy when it comes to speaking about them.
ReplyDeleteI have an interesting concept to present to the group tomorrow, inspired by a conversation I had today with a customer at the coffee shop about another man who ate a bag of crisps whilst on the toilet.
Funnily enough he refused to say the word poo, he skirted round the term and used the phrase 'Well he sat down and he was there a while, so you know what I'm gettin' at' and with one raised eyebrow he slurped the dregs of his espresso and began talking about football and DIY.