In his work, Brazilian theatre practitioner and activist Augusto Boal often drew on the dual meaning of “danger” and “opportunity” found in the Mandarin word for crisis. Since its formalisation in the 1970s, primarily through Boal’s efforts, the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) has been employed to address a wide range of social and political issues across the globe. My doctoral research has focused on investigating the potential of this participatory theatrical practice to engage with questions of gender and sexuality.

The proposed presentation explores some of the findings from my research, suggesting that TO offers both “dangers” and “opportunities” for groups interested in challenging and reimagining harmful, dominant gender binaries in today’s world. While TO has been widely employed as a means of social transformation, its methods—rooted in collective engagement, improvisation, and the active involvement of participants—and its philosophy and dramaturgy have tended to rest on reactionary ideals of political and theatrical action.

I argue that in contemporary contexts, TO allows marginalised voices to question normative gender expectations, engage in dialogue, and enact alternatives. Through this exploration, I reflect on the complexities of using TO to address issues of gender and sexuality, considering the dangers posited by a conceptualisation of political/theatrical intervention which fails to account for insights brought by feminist, queer, and decolonial theorists.

At the same time, I highlight the opportunities TO offers in creating spaces where individuals can collectively reimagine and perform new possibilities for gender identities and expressions. This presentation thus seeks to illuminate how TO can be a critical tool for rethinking and challenging the binaries that continue to shape our understanding of gender in the 21st century.

The voice of women in Iran has been suppressed throughout history in various ways. However, it has always found ways to manifest itself. Restrictions on women were suffocating during the Safavid and Qajar eras; women reduced to black moving objects, in their hijabs. Despite this, they had gained significant rights through a continues fights before the 1979 Islamic revolution. By the establishment of Islamic Republic women lost many of their achievements. The term "voice" holds dual meanings: one referring to vocal expression and the other symbolizing human rights and Iranian women lost their voice in both senses. In this paper, I am particularly concerned with voice as a form of vocal expression. With the rise of the Islamic Republic, women lost their right to sing publicly. According to religious doctrine, anything considered erotic must be eliminated, and a woman’s voice falls into this category. As a result, for the past 46 years, singing has been reserved for men. Women’s voices are allowed only if blended with a man’s or buried within a choral performance. Even this marks progress compared to the early years of the regime. Beyond music, women’s voices have been silenced in a broader sense through the direct and indirect command of "Shh!". Born five years after the 1979 revolution, I belong to the first generation educated under the Islamic Republic’s system. This paper, therefore, is not written from a distant perspective but from lived experience. This is one of my first attempts to break that internalized command for silence. Here, my aim is to go through the meaning of women’s vocal expression and to explore how, despite systemic barriers, women have continued to find ways to make their voices heard, as well as creating some outstanding moments like the recent ‘imaginary’ concert of Parastoo Ahmadi in Iran.

The paper explores how the objectification of women’s bodies in repressive social environments leads to the creation of a “melancholic body,” marked by an ungrieved loss of gender identity, self-hatred, and alienation.

Psychosocial theories examine the relationship between the body, social influences, and objectification, while psychoanalytic theories provide a deeper understanding of the inner dynamics of an objectified body. In these environments, women may come to identify with their objectified bodies, perceiving them as alien and separate from their true selves. Additionally, the female body may serve as a site for projecting repressed anger. This process gives rise to a melancholic body characterized by identity dissociation and emotional fragmentation.

The study also suggests that understanding the unconscious experience of melancholic body unpack various female body disorders, such as body image issues, sexual dysfunction, and psychosomatic symptoms. Then, women can access pathways to healing, ultimately leading to greater emotional and physical well-being.

Abjection is a part of all of us. Though we can repress it, the abject remains at the borders of our identity, as “the place I am not and which permits me to be,” according to Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror. The abject resides somewhere in the liminal space between subject and object, representing the rejected parts that we cannot entirely distinguish from ourselves, evoking a horrifying fascination. Through the lens of abjection theory, we will examine the experiences of feminine midlife crises in The Substance and Babygirl.

The Substance is a feminine body horror movie about a recently dethroned TV aerobics queen, Elisabeth Sparkle, who uses a mysterious biotechnology to reclaim her place in the spotlight. The abject is found in Elisabeth’s ambivalence and disgust toward her aging body, and how she resists being shuffled off the stage of being desired by the Other. Babygirl is an erotic thriller about a high powered CEO of a robotics automation company who puts her career and family on the line for a torrid affair with a much younger intern. Here, the abject can be found in the protagonist Romy Mathis’ own desire, of which she is ashamed but which erupts in animalistic enjoyment when she is finally seen by another.

The protagonists of each film briefly revel in their abjection. However, the experience of watching both is one of growing tension and horror given the untenable nature of abjection spilling over past its boundaries.

We will explore the varying ways these films deal with the abject: how Elisabeth succumbs to it in The Substance and how a glimmer of hope may be found in Romy eventually claiming it in Babygirl. Unless we accept the abject as part of who we are, we cannot emerge from the crisis of our alienation.