Description
Adult incontinence pad users and their daily lives are in many ways overlooked in society. This paper presents our reflections on a theatre performance that is based on autobiographical and anonymous "pad stories" written by research participants who either use adult incontinence pads themselves or by people who help others to use them (e.g., care professionals, carers, and personal assistants). The pad stories were re-told by incontinence pads, animated as puppets by the presenters of this paper, who do research around the topic of incontinence and/or incontinence pads in different fields. Because of the taboos and stigmas associated with the subject, our performance is deeply political, and in this way, it relates to a rich tradition of documentary theatre. Our performance protagonists, the puppets, alienate and, at the same time, protect the owners of the stories. Another performance tradition from which we borrow is the reading drama, where the performers read the text directly from the script, meaning that there is no attempt to memorise the lines. In this way, we aim to give attention to the stories themselves. Through the performance, our research team wanted to bring the hidden and silenced everyday stories to the stage. At the same time, we wanted to test alternative ways of sharing information and research results through art. When pads speak on stage about the silenced lives of human society, it may become possible to address the stigma of incontinence and the need for pads in a different way than the way it is told by human characters. This is what we set out to explore in our performance, together with the audience. At the heart of the presentation is, therefore, the question of how to transmit adult incontinence pad users' experiences in an ethical, caring, and reparative manner. Communicating these experiences is also important for the development of incontinence care and for shaping the way we approach incontinence.| Period | 30 Jan 2025 |
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| Event title | Care Ethics Research Consortium: 3rd international conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 3 |
| Degree of Recognition | International |