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This chapter examines the jianghu and martial ritual performance troupes, and the critical importance of their historical and cultural affinity to the broader efficacy and meaning of Chinese popular religion. It first considers the Military Retainers (Jiajiang), a ritual form unique to Taiwan. Starting in the 1980s, the Military Retainers became notorious in their association with juvenile delinquency, blood spectacle, and other unsavory elements comprising the “dark” (hei) side of popular religion. Closely linked to the Military Retainers, and in recent years increasingly marketed as coordinated performance packages, are groups of possessed, entranced spirit mediums (tangki), who provide the most dramatic and unnerving ritual spectacle of all. In fits of real or feigned trance, these mediums vigorously and skillfully strike their heads and backs with edged and spiked weapons, slice their tongues with knives and ice saws, and pierce their bodies with a variety of sharp-pointed metal rods and needles. The chapter aims to present the perspective and reconstruct the lived experience of the performers themselves, these socially and often economically liminal men who are the dedicated mainstays of, the essential labor pool for, and the ritually indispensable participants in martial ritual performance troupes.

This chapter describes the troupe’s performances. These include a performance before a group of hostile university athletic coaches and their assistants; a performance at a Christian retreat center before twenty-one young women, aged thirteen to twenty-one; and a paid performance at a southern university. The personal narratives of several women are also provided.

This chapter focuses on the aims of the performance troupe. The narrative performances of the troupe seek to raise the issues of violence and abuse. They tell the stories, and then ask the audience to join them in serious contemplation and discussion. The troupe’s goals are achieved when they break the taboo and expose the shame surrounding our cultural responses to violence in the home, in intimate relationships with loved ones who beat us and bring us down.

This chapter focuses on the performers tasked with performing narratives from Elaine’s book, Women Escaping Violence along with their own stories. Elaine also describes her changing roles from ethnographer, volunteer at the shelter, professor, writer, and teacher to performer and autoethnographic writer.

This chapter describes the troupe’s first performance for the University of Missouri’s Campus Task Force against Domestic/Partner Violence. Elaine also recounts her own experiences with domestic abuse, and how she had to learn to perform her own story for the audiences.

This chapter tells the story of how Heather Carver and Elaine Lawless came together to form the Troubling Violence Performance Project to introduce a way of communicating about the complexities of intimate partner violence. They decided to establish a performance troupe of students who would read the stories from Lawless’s book. Each student would tell a different story, one after the other, performing monologues. After the stories had been performed, the stories would be discussed with the audience.