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Indigenous Women’s Theatre in Canada
Indigenous theatre critic Michelle La Flamme, for example, has described plays by Indigenous women as “Medicine … that ultimately heals” (La Flamme 2010: 116). Mojica postulates that dramatic representations can be “used to bridge the rupture and impact on audiences, body to body, so that the transformation reverberates” and “changes us” (Mojica and Knowles 2009a: 5). For Mojica, Indigenous women playwrights not only address colonial trauma, but envision new ways of “performing possible worlds into being” (Mojica and Knowles 2009a: 2). When we make a decision to create from a base of ancestral knowledge,” she writes, “we confront the rupture, the original wound” (Mojica and Knowles 2009a: 3). While plays by Indigenous men are by no means less relevant to decolonial movements, Indigenous women’s works confront the gendered nature of colonial violence more directly.
Interpellation, Stereotyping and the Perpetuation of Gendered Violence In his seminal essay, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” political philosopher Louis Althusser argues that ideology functions in such a way as to secure the reproduction of existing social relations and power dynamics through a process of “interpellation” (Althusser 1971: 180). It “can be imagined,” writes Althusser, “along the lines of the most common everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there’ … The hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, she becomes a subject”; the subject then transforms to become a particular social entity because she is recognized as such (Althusser 1971: 174). Ideology — perpetuated indirectly by institutional mechanisms — is responsible for the construction and maintenance of present hierarchies, effectively ensuring that existing social orders are sustained. While Althusser has been critiqued by feminist theorists on the grounds that his understanding of the role of ideology in the social construction of subjectivity and his notion of interpellation provide little space for theorizing subversive agency (Hennessy 1993: 21), his work has also been acknowledged as extremely influential for Marxist, materialist, structuralist and linguistic feminists (Assiter 1990: vii–ix). Without the ability to prefigure resistance through the theorization of subversive agency — imagined rebellion against tyranny — social change is impeded. Criticism of Althusser is thus due. Yet, it is also evident that Althusser’s
