Un/Canning the Victims: Embodied Research Practice and Ethnodrama in Response to War-Rape Legacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina (original) (raw)

This essay explores the potential of embodied research practice among women survivors of rapes committed during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1990s. As similar research in the past has often been subjected to incapability to describe the trauma expressed by research participants in the format of verbal testimonies, this study explores the potentials of turning from words toward the body. Stories are being brought forward by the help of different forms of dramatic tools and body expressions, using movement, voice and visual portrayals. By the time this research practice became personally harmful and traumatizing for me as a researcher, I responded with a performative/performed essay entitled Canned. This one hour-long monologue was staged not aiming to become just another portrayal of war crimes in the Balkans, but rather as a dissemination tool to reflect the research and the position of the researcher in this and similar traumatizing contexts. I explore the potential of ethnodrama as a format for distributing research outcomes in order to display to the audience how certain mainstream narratives have been 'canned' and reproduced by women survivors and their surrounding society but are also preserved and guarded within specific social institutions, including academia.