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Chapter 1 Kings, Warriors, Magicians, and Lovers Prison Theater and Alternative Performances of Masculinity Jonathan Shailor After thirty years of participating in, directing, and evaluating violence -prevention programs, the noted psychotherapist James Gilligan came to the conclusion that “the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation—a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable and overwhelming.” One of the goals of interpersonal violence, then, is to “replace [shame] with its opposite, the feeling of pride” (Gilligan, 2001, p. 29). According to Gilligan, any social structure that systematically degrades a group or class of people increases the risk that individuals will act violently to redress their feelings of shame. Sources of shame include poverty and unemployment, lower caste status, racism, sexism, homophobia, and age discrimination. Each of these factors can contribute to feelings of isolation, powerlessness, and humiliation so intense that the need to eliminate them overrides considerations of right and wrong, empathy, and even personal survival. James Garbarino, author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them (2000), explains that “those who are shamed are vulnerable to committing violence and aggression because they know that acts of violence against self or others are a reliable method for reasserting existence when life experience has denied it” (p. 132). Throughout my own life, I have seen clearly how shame and humiliation motivate aggression, both in my role as a man among other men, and in my work teaching men at a medium-security prison in Wisconsin. Not only in prisons, but also in schools, workplaces, places of worship, town halls, and private homes, men’s identities and relationships are strongly conditioned by the norms of hegemonic masculinity. In the United States (as in much of the world), hegemonic masculinity— “the most lauded, idealized, and valorized form of masculinity in a histori- 14 Jonathan Shailor cal setting”—is characterized by “male dominance, heterosexism, whiteness, violence, and ruthless competition” (Sabo, Kupers, & London, 2001, p. 5). Hegemonic masculinity reproduces itself by creating structures of division and domination that evoke shame and violence; acts of violence become pretexts for strengthening structures of division and domination. Enter the prisonindustrial complex, which is presented as a logical and necessary response to violence, but which functions as an oppressive regime that intensifies the performance of hegemonic masculinity. In a prison environment, men are subject to practices that degrade, humiliate, and shame through heightened performances of dominance, heterosexism, racism, and violence. The damaged human beings who enter the prison and suffer its inhumane culture generally leave it with a deep-seated sense of shame, and with their reliance on strategies of submission and aggression intact, if not augmented. Instead of focusing on the goal of rehabilitation, prisons function as boot camps for the cultivation of the worst kinds of immature, corrupt, and violent masculine identity. Programs in the arts and humanities, offered within “a pedagogy of hope and empowerment,” can be one of the most effective ways of subverting the prisonindustrial complex’s practices of hegemonic masculinity (Hartnett, 2011b, p. 8). I did not know this in 1995, when I began teaching theater classes at Racine Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in Sturtevant, Wisconsin. All I knew then was that the men I taught, and myself as well, experienced in our classes and workshops a sense of exhilaration, freedom, and hope, a belief that we could recreate ourselves, and perhaps our world, by performing new lives together. Only later, through my meetings and correspondence with artists, educators, and activists, would I develop a clearer picture of what this all meant within a larger social context. For example, I met Buzz Alexander, co-founder and co-director of the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project, and learned about his program, which works with incarcerated youth and juveniles in Michigan prisons and juvenile facilities and is dedicated to exposing the injustice of mass incarceration (Alexander, 2010; PCAP, 1990); and I became involved with PCARE, the Prison Communication, Activism, and Research collective, “a group of scholars, activists, and teachers committed to challenging the continued growth of the prison-industrial complex in America” (PCARE, 2007). My growing connections with educators, scholars, artists, and activists have helped me to understand how important it is to write about this work, and to share it with others, so that we can learn from one another and inspire others, sharing our “roadmaps...

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