How to talk about gender equality with a 9 year old: Performing feminist values for children

This paper will look at two performance projects created in order to imbue young girls with feminist values and to facilitate discussion. I will analyse two feminist performative projects: Bryony Kimmings’ That Catherine Bennett show (2014) and Under 10's Feminist Girls and Boys Corner led by Caroline Bird, which has been running during the Women of the World Festival since 2012. Using these performative projects which teach and perform feminist activism within an arts environment, this paper will analyse the challenges that such performativity represents within the wider cultural and historical context of women, art and feminist performance pedagogy. The paper argues that these projects offer new performative strategies to introduce an embodied experience of feminism to young audiences. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article to be published by Taylor & Francis in Performance Research, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13528165.2018.146045