Research: Contraception and Performance Practice

Katie Paterson is a theatremaker and PhD researcher at Guildhall School, examining why hormonal contraception is a rare topic in drama and how we might stage experiences with it in a feminist way. Katie shares more about her research below.

Photo by Ali Wright. Katie will be sharing her practice-based research at VAULT Festival in February 2023.

“I had been on the pill for many years when I first started experiencing panic attacks and frequent shortness of breath. There was no medical information to support this being connected to the pill, but I quickly became aware that there was an informal knowledge network among women that validated many of the stranger side effects. I was interested first and foremost in how we felt and spoke about our experiences with hormonal contraception, and how my professional work in theatre might provide a forum for nuanced discussion.

Research into hormonal contraception is very complicated from a scientific perspective, because responses are highly individual - what works well for one person is a nightmare for someone else. It is very difficult to conduct ethical human trials when fertility is at stake and there is no illness to cure. This is compounded by a historic lack of interest and funding when it comes to the health of women and others assigned female at birth. All this to say, there is a lot we simply don’t know when it comes to hormonal contraception and while we wait for medicine to catch up, we have to live with our complex and confounding experiences.

My research methodology invokes cabaret and popular practices to bring humour and the audience relationship to the forefront. This builds on the work of practitioners working in the medical humanities who have long held that laughter is, if not the best medicine, often the key to humanising what has been medicalised.

Many people are quite reasonably confused that this subject is explored through drama; why not a more conventional qualitative research project? The first answer is that I am a practitioner first, and my research always seeks to activate theory through performance. The second is that duality and ambiguity run deeply through hormonal experiences. Individual responses vary profoundly even within the life of one individual (many of us cycle through multiple methods in pursuit of a better fit). Crucially, my rationale for the project is that much of the existing research into hormonal contraception is focused on why people aren’t using particular methods, or on how medical professionals can encourage compliance. This isn’t my focus: I want to examine and amplify our complex experiences for the sake of understanding them better, and trouble the binarised discourse that treats the pill as either miraculous or malign. The beauty of a drama-based enquiry is that theatre is the space of powerful contradictions and embodied encounters. Drama doesn’t force us to reach a place of definiteness.”

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