Arrested professional development : some workplace taboobs

This document includes the performance report and script for Arrested Professional Development: Some Workplace Taboobs, a semi-autobiographical play conceived, written, and directed by Kelly Howe in collaboration with many colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and staged in the campus's Winship Drama Building on March 3 and 4, 2006. The performance's dramaturgical process - in many ways a textual analysis of the author's personal experiences relative to the policing of women's bodies at work - engaged feminist theory, Augusto Boal's Image Theatre dramaturgy, reception theory, Foucauldian analysis, sociological theory, critical performative pedagogy, and queer theory. The play and its report stage a variety of intertwining inquiries all connected to one core question: What might be at stake, and for whom, in constructing what constitutes appropriate dress for women professionals, both in academia specifically, and in more generalized public spheres?