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The Feminist Spectator
as Critic

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Books by Jill Dolan
The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the
Stage and Screen
A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw,
edited by Jill Dolan
Theatre & Sexuality
Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre
Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice,
Activism and Performance
Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender,
Sexuality, Performance
The Feminist Spectator as Critic


The Feminist Spectator
as Critic
Second Edition
Jill Dolan

The University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor


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Copyright © 1988, 2012 by Jill Dolan
Published by the University of Michigan Press 2012
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
c Printed on acid-­free paper
2015 2014 2013 2012  4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-­0-­472-­03519-­9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-­0-­472-­02899-­3 (e-­book)

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For my students, past, present, and future,
who inspire all these thoughts and
all my work.




Contents
Preface  ix  
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction to the Second Edition   xiii
1. The Discourse of Feminisms: The Spectator
and the Representation   1
2.Feminism and the Canon: The Question of Universality   19
3.Ideology in Performance: Looking through the Male Gaze   41
4. The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in
Pornography and Performance   59
5.Cultural Feminism and the Feminine Aesthetic   83
6. Materialist Feminism: Apparatus-­Based Theory and Practice   99
Afterword  119
Notes  123
Revised and Updated Bibliography   145
Index to the First Edition   165



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Preface
This book is not meant to be a definitive study of feminist performance criticism. Rather, in some ways, it is a historical accounting of the different
methodological and ideological pathways this criticism has taken over the last
twenty-odd years, illustrated here by critical case studies. I do not mean to
neutralize my own critical stance by that caveat; the following pages should be
clearly understood as representing my own methodological and ideological position as a materialist feminist critic.
The book is organized as a series of essays that refract around the central
topic, which is detailed in chapter 1. Taken together, the essays should provide

a cumulative effect, rather than a necessarily linear one. The last chapter,
however, does represent work that I feel is the most stimulating and provocative
of contemporary feminist performance criticism.
Writing for people interested in a feminist approach to theatre and performance is a challenging task, since that constituency is large and varied from
theoretical, political, and ideological perspectives. Any feminist endeavor in
this area confronts the problem-and pleasure--of diversity among its audience.
The Women and Theatre Program of the American Theatre in Higher Education
organization, for example, is charged with appealing to academics and practitioners and a range of women who admit to very different stances vis-a-vis
feminism. Women & Performance Journal-with which I was involved as managing editor and cofounder at its inception in the Performance Studies Department at New York University-worried at the outset about providing a forum
for all women interested in performance.
As I hope to clarify in this study, I believe that such a committedly nonpartisan approach inevitably butts against its own limitations. How can an organization or a journal provide a kind of visionary leadership if it does not take a clear
ideological and political stand on its own issues? In January 1988, the Women
and Theatre Program created formal by-laws that at least set forth the organization's commitment to address and attempt to eradicate sexism, racism, and

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x

Preface

homophobia as part of its charter. This stated intent cannot help but focus,
shape, and lend vitality to the group's future work.
In publication, it seems equally important to take a stand and to state it at
the outset of one's writing. If part of the materialist feminist project is to
demystify ideological authority in performance and in dramatic literary texts, it
is necessary to guard against reinstituting the materialist feminist critic as the
absent, naturalized authority. Demystifying the author and particularizinginstead of idealizing-the reader for whom she writes seems imperative as part
of the critical process.
I have tried continually to clarify my stance and my ideological, political,

and personal investments in the studies that follow. I write from my own perspective as a white, middle-class woman, with every effort to stay aware of and
change my own racism and attitudes about class. As a Jew and as a lesbian, I
also write from my own awareness of exclusion from dominant ethnic and
heterosexual discourse. I hope that readers constituted across a diversity of race,
class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference identities will find the ideas in
these pages useful.
This text is written for practitioners and critics, historians and theorists,
academics and professionals, and myriad other feminist spectators interested in
what it means to combine feminism and performance. I see it as an introduction
to feminist critical and theoretical ideas relevant to theatre and performance.
Still, it straddles a somewhat precarious position in relation to its intended
readership.
On one hand, although it is an introduction, it demands at least a cursory
familiarity with post-structuralism, deconstruction, and semiotics. I have tried
to refrain from needlessly opaque jargon. But formulating new critical theory
demands a new critical language, which I do draw on here. On the other hand,
in addition to introducing these ideas, I would like this work to challenge and
provoke colleagues who are already breaking new ground in the field of feminist
theatre criticism. I hope that both sets of readers will find their way here. With
an eye toward provoking dialogue and debate, both are envisioned in these
pages.


Acknowledgments
This book in some respects charts my own development as a feminist performance critic, and there are many people who in one way or another helped to
shape my growth and its direction. The editorial board of Women & Performance Journal-which began meeting as an informal feminist support group in
Performance Studies at New York University in Fall 198 I-provided me with
a continual sounding board during my graduate work. The Women and Theatre
Program of the defunct American Theatre Association, now reconstituted as
American Theatre in Higher Education, has given me a supportive forum for

my thinking since I began attending their conferences in 1983. My personal
sense of growth is justly shared by the members of that organization, as we
move together toward a sophisticated, but accessible, political and theoretical,
practice-oriented consideration of feminism and theatre.
Kate Davy's insight into body image and performance, and her comments
on my work on Richard Foreman, were very helpful on initial drafts of chapters
2 and 3. Sue-Ellen Case and E. Beth Sullivan were instrumental in editing and
refining an early version of chapter 4, which appeared in Theatre Journal (May
1987). Elin Diamond's brilliant insight into the possible connections between
feminist poetics and Brecht was a primary inspiration for chapter 6.
The continuing discussions among my feminist colleagues-at conferences,
through their published work, and through our informal but crucial national
network-and my first group of students in feminist theory and theatre at the
University of Washington in Seattle in Fall 1987 provided me with the constant
and final impetus to think and to write this book. I would also like to thank
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Susan Slyomovics, Brooks McNamara, and
Michael Kirby for their comments on the manuscript.
Two people warrant special thanks. Personally, professionally, and politically, Sue-Ellen Case has been a continual source of inspiration. With her
energy, commitment, and sense of purpose, she serves as an invaluable role
model, and has blazed the trail for feminist theatre critics in the academy and
in the theatre profession. Finally, Peggy Phelan's work on this manuscript as


xii

Acknowledgments

editor, advisor, and intellectual watchdog continually prompted me to challenge
myself and to push further. I sincerely appreciate her dialogue with me around
this work.



Introduction to the Second Edition
For the Next Generation of Feminist Spectators: The New Normal
The Feminist Spectator as Critic (FSAC) was written in the mid-­1980s, when
I was finishing my doctoral degree in performance studies at New York University. Thinking back over these last twenty-­five or so years, I’m amazed at
how much has changed in American theatre and performance, the American academy, and other aspects of culture. In theatre, film, television, and
the new media explosion wrought by the Internet, even the most prescient
feminist spectator couldn’t have foreseen how dramatically the forms and
contents through which we imagine our lives might change. In the cultural
landscape of the mid-­1980s, women at best played second banana to male
leads on television, or characters written as sexy but irrelevant girlfriends in
film, and of course played a parade of predictable mothers, virgins, or whores
in theatre. In the twenty-­first century, complicated, central female characters
full of quirky agency have become more and more common. Examples of
women’s advances in popular culture since the mid-­1980s are surprisingly too
numerous to list.1 But the last two and a half decades’ watershed moments offer heartening signs that gender equity is at least progressing in entertainment
and the arts.
But, as I’ll detail in this introduction, we still have a long way to go.
Women’s gains and losses in theatre and performance, in particular, are more
complicated and perhaps, on the aggregate, less positive. And all these culture
changes since I was thinking through what it meant to be a feminist theatre
critic in the mid-­1980s have occurred within a historical moment that’s oscillated wildly across the political spectrum, from a more progressive position at
one end to a much more dangerously conservative place on the other. Despite
how American culture and politics have or haven’t changed around this book,
I hope the strategies it outlines for critical feminist spectatorship remain useful and generative.


xiv   Introduction to the Second Edition


Changing the Discourse of Theatre and the Feminisms
Feminism begins with a keen awareness of exclusion from male
cultural, social, sexual, political, and intellectual discourse. It is
a critique of prevailing social conditions that formulate women’s
position as outside of dominant male discourse. (FSAC, 3)

American feminist criticism first began to analyze performance through
the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the 1980s by addressing women’s status onstage—­in the stories productions told—­and offstage
and examining the biases against women working in the theatre industry. The
theoretical work of the mid-­to late 1980s in which FSAC took part shifted
focus to analyze the styles, genres, and forms that delivered often oppressive representations of women.2 Feminist performance criticism was quickly
transformed from an investigation of images of women in theatre and the
roles women played in its production into a more theoretical interrogation
of theatre’s representational apparatus and ideological work. Influenced by
the poststructuralist theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and
by French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, feminist performance theory raised questions about how theatre’s contents, forms, and
structures both reflect and shape women’s lives ideologically and politically.
Early in the history of this critique, feminist theorists brought theatrical
realism, the mainstay of mid-­to late-­twentieth-­century traditional American
theatre, under the microscope, examining its operations and diagnosing the
form itself as “lethal” to women.3 Part of the antirealism phase of American
feminist performance criticism came from a strict adherence to poststructuralist theory’s suspicion of power and Marxist criticism’s insistence on linking
form and content to derive meaning from texts. Feminist performance theory
agreed that power and ideology are inevitably written into form. Realism’s
resolutely domestic locales, with its boxed sets; its middle-­class, bourgeois
proprieties; its Aristotelian plotlines, which encouraged psychological identification against women’s own good; and its rising action, crises, and denouements, was bound to marginalize women. Its conservative moralizing against
outsiders who threaten the normative social order demonized those who don’t
fit conventional models of white, male, middle-­class, heterosexual decorum.
To escape the constraints of the realist form, feminist performance theorists
proposed, new contents should be developed in new narrative structures,

more radical representational forms, and subcultural production contexts.4
Because conventional realism dominated Broadway and regional theatre production at the time, popular and mainstream theatre were dismissed with a
quick slash of the feminist theoretical pen.
While the new feminist theatre and performance criticism analyzed the


Introduction to the Second Edition   xv
usefulness of various forms and contents, academics and activists also scrutinized feminism as a hegemonic designation for critical methodologies and
social movements. Second-­wave feminists—­so-­called because those of the
Seneca Falls convention of 1848 were considered the first wave in the United
States—­promoted a broad agenda around gender equity and women’s rights
beginning in the late 1960s, when they splintered from the civil rights movement and the antiwar activism of the New Left. Eventually, commentators
categorized the concerns and practices of this second wave as “liberal,” “cultural,” and “materialist,” which helped to demystify the notion of a unitary
feminism with a coercive, authoritative interpretive perspective. “The feminisms” usefully distinguished social and aesthetic efforts that had sometimes
seemed perplexingly out of sync with one another.
In fact, one of FSAC’s primary contributions was the first chapter’s
explanation of the “discourse of feminisms” and the book’s insistence that
rather than offering a monolithic approach to politics or culture, feminism
should be parsed into various substrands. I structured the book’s argument,
in fact, according to three different strains of feminism. This taxonomy gave
me a much more precise way to discuss the work accomplished by different
feminist theatre and performance artists and critics who approached gender
(as well as sexuality, race, class, and other identity positions) from diverse and
often diverging ideological perspectives.
As I rehearse in this book, theorists align artists’ express commitment to
agitate for women’s equal treatment on-­and backstage with liberal feminist
ideology. Liberal feminists try to make changes from within current social
systems, rather than working for their overturn. For example, a playwright
like Marsha Norman, whose play ’night, Mother I engage in chapter 2, should
of course be part of the canon of good American drama, because according

to liberal feminist values, women should receive equal treatment on the same
terms as men, without necessarily pulling up the roots of the system. Liberal
feminists also hold no quarrel with realism and feel comfortable working in
conventional theatre forms. Cultural feminists, whose performance work I describe in chapters 4 and 5, with their desire for a completely different social
structure, were considered more radical in the 1980s. They argued against
what they saw as explicitly male cultural projects such as waging war, despoiling the earth, letting capitalism run rampant without concern for the poor,
and objectifying women in representation. Cultural feminists believed that
prizing female-­derived ideology would flip the binary—­from war to peace, for
instance—­ameliorate inequality, and hasten the progress of beneficial social
change for all. In theatre, as FSAC suggests, such ideological leanings would
produce fewer realist plays and create instead performance forms structured
more like collective rituals than linear narratives that valorize the exploits of
individual heroes.


xvi   Introduction to the Second Edition
In the third strain of feminism, discussed in chapter 6, critical studies
of the deeper ideological scaffolding of forms, contents, and modes of production were aligned with a materialism linked to Marxism, and to theories
of social constructionism derived from Foucault and the American feminist
philosopher Judith Butler. This materialist feminist focus debunked cultural
feminism and “women’s culture” for their gender essentialisms.5 Materialist
feminist theatre practice tends to demystify the representational apparatus by
calling attention to, instead of masking, lighting instruments and the stage
décor and follows a neo-­Brechtian separation of actor from character.6 These
productions tend to be deconstructive, following poststructuralism rather
than assembling realist or ritual narratives or structures.
The distinct strands of liberal, cultural, and materialist feminism were
initially meant to be descriptive and explanatory. And they did, at first, lend
precision to the political implications of performance. The feminisms helpfully extended the performance critique, providing language that probed
deeply into the apparatus of representation, its modes of production, and

how it generated meaning. But over time several things happened that hardened the feminisms into prescriptive and judgmental rather than critically
generative categories. The critique of cultural feminism became hegemonic,
along with poststructuralism’s insistent (and persuasive) analysis of its attendant gender essentialism.7 Cultural feminist values also came to be aligned
with a vociferous antipornography activism, which some commentators saw
as entirely antisex and censorious. The division between antiporn and “pro-­
sex” feminism helped demonize cultural feminism, especially in the academy,
where materialist feminist theorizing was on the rise. As a result, the pleasures
of women’s culture were associated with the dogmatism of cultural feminism
and derided as exclusive, predominately white, and politically and aesthetically old-­fashioned. “Cultural feminist” became a derogatory label, applied
most often by materialist feminists touting sexier, more radical social interventions. Liberal feminism largely fell off the map of academic study, left
to languish in a theatre profession whose machinations interested fewer and
fewer feminist performance theorists at the time.

How I Came to Champion Materialist Feminist Criticism
Materialist feminist theatre makers . . . are engaged in cultural
production in which character and playwrights are posited in relation
to social arrangements, both in the text and vis-­à-­vis modes of
production. These positions are clearly articulated in materialist
feminist revisions—­influenced by Brecht—­of the performer’s role in
representation. (FSAC, 113)


Introduction to the Second Edition   xvii
When I wrote FSAC’s chapter 4, “The Dynamics of Desire,” the debate between feminists had been inflamed by the notorious 1982 Barnard College
“The Scholar and the Feminist” conference on sexuality, at which staunch
antipornography activists confronted lesbians who practiced S/M. The conference’s polarized debates spilled into the activist movement and contributed
to the fragmentation of American feminism. But the debate also enriched
and nuanced critical work on the politics of representation, providing a lens
through which to study more closely how gendered power and desire circulate
in advertising, films, television, and the rest of American culture.8 My discussion in FSAC was one of the first to place this argument within theatre and

performance, aligning the pro-­sex side of the binary with performers who
toiled in subcultural venues beyond the pale of the antiporn cultural feminism that was then the coin of the realm. For example, performance artist
Karen Finley often performed nude in clubs for mixed audiences, taking female objectification into her own hands by smearing herself with chocolate,
egg yolks, and mashed yams while she yelled angry, incantatory stories indicting male sexual violence. Her utter disruption of the male gaze from within
a conventional viewing paradigm, which I describe in that chapter, allowed
me to consider how the live body, confronted by live spectators, could offer
radical resistance to and intervention in women’s objectification, and a place
where the dynamics of desire—­and power and gender and sexuality—­could
be rewritten and restaged.
Finley performed for predominantly heterosexual audiences in the subcultural clubs and performance spaces springing up all over downtown New
York in the early 1980s. The feminist anger and desire she embodied were
staged simultaneously in a different but equally novel way by lesbian performers at clubs in the East Village, where formal and political experimentation
permeated the scene. Rents were relatively cheap, allowing artists to live in the
neighborhoods in which they created their plays and performances. Before
gentrification, people regularly transformed local dive bars into performance
spaces where they exploded genres with satire, parody, and more architectural
ways of using space.9 In 1984, TDR: The Drama Review, under the structuralist author/performer/director Michael Kirby’s editorship, assigned a group of
writers to scavenge the East Village on one arbitrary evening (November 30)
and to write about the performances they saw at clubs within a few blocks’
radius of one another.10 Club Chandalier [sic], Limbo Lounge, 8BC, and the
WOW Café, among others, were featured in the roundup, which documented
a range of performances with subaltern forms, styles, and contents.
I was then the managing editor of TDR and joined the passel of writers
sent to observe the scene. November 30, 1984, was my first night at the WOW
Café and Club Chandalier, where I wrote about Chit Chat with Carmelita


xviii   Introduction to the Second Edition
Tropicana, my first experience of Alina Troyano’s enduring stage persona.
I saw Tammy Whynot, Lois Weaver’s alter ego, for the first time that night,

since she appeared as a guest on Carmelita’s chat show. I was introduced to
the lesbian and feminist antics of the WOW Café when I joined Kate Davy
there for her own writing assignment. Nights were long in the East Village
then. Spectators moved easily from one show to the next, often joined by performers, who mingled in the audiences and often acted in sets at two or three
different clubs each night.
I remember feeling like an outsider during that first visit, standing at the
bar at Club Chandalier waiting for Carmelita to take my drink order. I’d assumed that the club operated like a regular theatre and had dutifully called in
advance to secure two tickets, mispronouncing the name of the act in the process (did I call it Chiquita Banana Chats instead of Chit Chat with Carmelita
Tropicana?). As I waited at the bar, Carmelita shouted to her friends, making
fun of the message I’d left without knowing that I was the caller. I hid my embarrassment and settled in for the show, surrounded by people who knew one
another, all of whom were vaguely recognizable from the performance earlier
that night at the WOW Café just a few blocks away. Experiencing the spirit
of improvisation, flouting the rules, and lesbian irreverence and parody in
the raucous show that night took my breath away. The debate about women’s
sexuality that had been advanced and hardened at the Barnard conference
a hundred blocks uptown was ripe for satire and commentary downtown,
where, as Davy would declare in her 2010 book on WOW, women were laughing again instead of fighting.11
The performances at WOW and the other East Village clubs that produced so much exciting, off-­the-­cuff theatre in those years prompted me to
think through what became FSAC’s application of the feminist typology. The
eye-­opening world of WOW and lesbian performance that borrowed popular cultural forms and contents from television and film and twisted them to
new theatrical purposes made the more earnest, didactic efforts of cultural
feminist theatre pale by comparison. As many scholars and performers have
documented since, the WOW “girls” formed a community attracted as much
by the Café’s social possibilities as its artistic laboratory.12 WOW never aspired to be a legitimate theatre; none of its committed collective members
would have dreamed of applying for city, state, federal, or foundation grants
to support the company’s outrageous lesbian performances. No one at WOW
aspired to legitimacy of any sort, which gilded the work with the artistic and
political freedom of outlaws. In many ways, the WOW girls weren’t thinking about politics when they made their theatre, but instead focused on pleasure. As many of its former denizens insist, WOW was a community theatre.
The Café’s social club aspect meant that its audiences were a known quantity. The performers served as one another’s spectators and vice versa, which



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Introduction to the Second Edition   xix
gave everyone the freedom to be extreme in their onstage efforts. Word of
mouth eventually brought a larger, committed following to the overt, barely
contained sexuality at WOW, which infused every performance with palpable
desire. The Café’s growing audience spoke to the nerve it touched in a subculture hungry for comedy and eager to shrug off the yoke of feminist political
correctness. It offered materialist feminism in action—­all the seams showed,
and a lucid, witty critique of the dominant culture, and dominant feminism,
ruled the day.
When performers like Holly Hughes and companies like Split Britches
began performing outside the Café’s confines, their backgrounds brought
attention to WOW as an incubator for radical acts of an off-­brand lesbian
culture. In true materialist feminist style, the work was raw, “poor theatre,”
without the window dressing of fancy costumes or sets, and the dialogue was
often scripted from improvisation (when it was remembered at all). As Shaw,
Weaver, and Margolin would later attest when their work became central to
the growing feminist performance theory and criticism that FSAC describes,
their content derived from their desire. They fantasized, imagined, and created in a liberating experiment with a form that had never addressed them before. Performance became a space in which they asked themselves and one another what they wanted to be, what they wanted to do, and who they wanted
to love, and then put it together in a mash-­up pastiche of old styles and new
meanings. The rough-­hewn performances thrilled audiences with their verve
and novelty, and moved people with their raw bravery.
The work at WOW and by performers and playwrights who grooved to
its aesthetic became the foundation of materialist feminist critical practice.
A handful of playwrights from the United Kingdom were also exemplary—­
Caryl Churchill and Pam Gems among them—­but the community-­based,
perversely sexy, nearly improvised work at WOW became paradigmatic of
performance that called attention to its modes of production and the representational apparatus on which it commented with irreverence and delight.
I found applications for the tracts of poststructuralist theory I read in the
materialist feminist performance work I saw at WOW.


Revisiting Culture Feminism and “Women’s Culture”
Far from breaking spectator pleasure into critical distance in the
Brechtian manner, however, the text calls for attention to the ritual
nature of its exchange and implies that the spectator will concur that
the events described have happened to all women. The text breaks
with the mystifying conventions of fourth-­wall realism, but constructs
in its place ritual systems that demand a similar suspension of
disbelief. (FSAC, 90)

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xx   Introduction to the Second Edition
Cultural feminism takes some hard knocks in FSAC’s chapters 4 and 5. In
contrast to what I considered the materialist feminist work at WOW, the cultural feminist theatre work of the moment wanted to reach a community of
women, to find a common theme within the politics of gender that might
provide a site of recognition and further political agitation. While I stand by
my critique of essentialism, I do think that some of my deliberate rejection of
cultural feminist theatre and performance came from the historical context in
which I wrote. Describing and analyzing work by the Women’s Experimental
Theatre (WET) and At the Foot of the Mountain, I accused it of legislating that all women respond to their productions with the same affective and
political investments. This might be a fair assessment of how some cultural
feminist theatre exchanges happened. But much of what I objected to as constraining “ritual systems” came from a historic need for affirmation and community against the harsh reality of a culture that made no room for women
and their histories outside of patriarchal rule. By the time I wrote this book,
“patriarchy” itself was something of an old-­fashioned word, which had been
replaced by the more gender-­neutral phrase “dominant culture” to mark the
axis of social power and ideological control. The WET and At the Foot of the
Mountain, however, were two of the first feminist theatres to use performance
to counter the claims of a society that was openly and arrogantly run by white

men. The ritual “sacraments” to which I objected in this theatre practice came
from a place of real need, it seems to me now, and a real desire to honor
women and their connections underneath a deeply felt, daily, material oppression. That the differences among and between women were soft-­pedaled
to privilege gender was a sign of the times rather than a malicious, intentional
whitewashing or exclusion.
The critique of cultural feminism I launched in FSAC came partly from
my own experiences feeling excluded by some of these performances’ dogmatism. I was honing my proudly poststructuralist critical perspective and
was younger by at least ten years than many of the women whose cultural
feminist theatre work I engaged. I held myself separate from what I perceived
as a rather presumptuous bid for community, attaching myself instead to the
materialist feminist and poststructuralist instabilities of unknowingness and
refusing cultural feminism’s forceful master narrative. I wasn’t alone in feeling
the constraints of a feminism that saw itself as righteous and the only truth
or of performances that blindly assumed everyone would feel only positively
about their mothers, for example. Cultural feminism at the time brooked little
debate or disagreement and tended to chastise those incredulous enough to
want to argue with its values. But when I criticized those aspects of the work,
I neglected to describe its consistent emotional appeal. Standing with a group
of women to share your matrilineage, one of the WET’s performative political
gestures, retains a certain power even now, if only because many women still


Introduction to the Second Edition   xxi
change their names when they marry, erasing their mothers’ and grandmothers’ contributions to their identities.
In 2008 Deb Margolin taught a course on feminism and theatre at Yale
University, in which her students read the WET’s Daughters Cycle Trilogy
(1983). Her undergraduate students were so taken with the play, and found
it so descriptive of their own experience, that they decided to perform the
trilogy’s Electra Speaks section. Sondra Segal and Roberta Sklar, two of the
WET’s three founding artists (with Clare Coss), consulted with Margolin on

the Yale production. Stacy Wolf and I led a discussion with the cast after seeing a rehearsal on our way through New Haven that spring. Watching them
perform and hearing them talk, we could feel the young women’s emotional
and political connection to the play. I was quite moved by history coming full
circle, and by my sense that women’s culture could be reembraced by new generations of young people to whom it might speak once again. Those affective
experiences of being addressed as a subject for the first time, and fully prized
as a human being in all her anger and hope, desire and frailty, were a crucial
part of cultural feminism’s effort to correct the damage inflicted by millennia
of patriarchal rule.13 Seeing this generation make those connections was more
gratifying than I could have imagined.

On Gender
Lesbians “confounded the sign system that denotes woman, because
the representation of gender as representation is based on compulsory
heterosexuality.” (FSAC, 117)

My materialist feminist reading of lesbian subjectivity as the vanguard of
gender disruption in FSAC is influenced by the late French lesbian author
Monique Wittig’s notion that lesbians are “not women,” as she famously pronounced, because they refuse a heterosexual system that dictates not only
sexuality but gendered norms.14 As I discuss in chapter 6, many of the performances at WOW and in much materialist feminist theatre practice seemed
to exemplify and embody Wittig’s claim. However, FSAC was written before
the 1990 publication of Judith Butler’s foundational and highly influential
book Gender Trouble, which rocked feminism both in the academy and in
the social movement.15 Butler’s argument that gender is a social construction
that we recognize only through the sedimented habits and inculcations of culture persuasively demolished cultural feminist notions of gender essentialism.
Butler’s theories are still widely cited in theatre and performance studies’ investigations of gender as “performative,” a catchphrase for what Butler called
the “stylized repetition of acts” that comprises what we see and do as we construct gender alongside and in resistance to social norms. Butler’s work also


xxii   Introduction to the Second Edition
inspired variant gender performances onstage and in everyday life, in which

the mutability and fluidity of “masculinity” and “femininity” opened multiple
avenues for new subjectivities performed outside this tired binary system.
In the years since Butler’s book was published, subaltern communities
of gender rebels have created ever-­evolving mutations of gender performativity and its descriptive labels, including, among others, “genderqueer” and
“transgender.” But because of the historical moment in which I first wrote,
FSAC offers political pride of place to lesbians tweaking the theories and
practices of feminism. In fact, I wrote the book even before the term queer
was reclaimed from its derogatory past and resignified as a label of resistance
and rebellion. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-­UP) had just
formed in 1987, but Queer Nation, the radical activist movement of the 1990s,
had yet to stage its kiss-­ins or make its case for subjectivities beyond “gay”
and “lesbian.” Even the LGBTQ moniker, which includes “bisexual” and
“transgender,” along with “lesbian,” “gay,” and “queer,” hadn’t yet come into
popular use.
As a result, the names I use for the subaltern subjects in this book represent their historical moment. Feminist, in the three different orientations
I explain here, and lesbian as a subject position in which sexuality and gender collide in new permutations, are now much debated as efficacious labels.
Gender-­and sexuality-­based social movements now trumpet the styles and
semiotics of genderqueer and transgendered subjects, who thoroughly rearrange the alignments of conventional binary categories. Some young people
apparently refuse to be called lesbian; in fact, a former student, who taught
for a while in the Five Colleges enclave in Northampton, Massachusetts, told
me that her students considered lesbian an assimilationist, accommodationist
label tainted by neoliberal desires and “homonormative” practices.16 My colleague at Princeton’s LGBT Center, when I sent around a Stonewall Foundation notice about a scholarship for lesbian activists, told me she was sorry the
foundation had used the word lesbian, as so few of the politically oriented
students she works with on campus identify with that term.17
Nonetheless, the lesbian feminist theatre and performances I describe
in these pages in some ways were the harbinger of genderqueer, even though
that language was decades away from circulating in American culture. As I
argue in chapter 6, Garnet McClit, the leading character in Holly Hughes’s
The Lady Dick (1987), demonstrated the Brechtian “not  .  .  . but,” “not
woman” perhaps, but “not man,” either, as she embodied the dissonance of

gender performativity that was then enacted under the exuberant, irreverent,
boundary-­breaking new performance codes at WOW. Likewise, the Five Lesbian Brothers—­Moe Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healy,
and Lisa Kron, whose work had yet to gel as the ensemble they would soon
become when I was writing this book—­chose a name that would also spin


Introduction to the Second Edition   xxiii
the sign system, creating conditions in which social practices and monikers
like “genderqueer” might flourish. This performance work also presaged what
Judith Halberstam termed “female masculinity” in her 1998 book, in which
she considered the performance of traits once considered male on bodies
once considered female. Halberstam popularized “drag kings,” performers
like Dred and Shelly Mars, who performed masculinity in theatrical or club
settings without trying to “pass” as men.18 Diane Torr, on the other hand,
who worked for a short time with WOW, began giving gender workshops in
the early 1980s in which she taught women how to be misrecognized as men
on the street.19

The Pall of Censorship
If sexuality is censored, if fantasies are legislated against, if the
feminist movement is allowed to dictate or implicitly condones
governmental legislation of the “proper” expression and
representation of sexuality, the free expression of self and sexuality
will slip into a totalitarian framework. (FSAC, 60)

While much has changed since the mid-­1980s, in the political realm much
has stayed the same. The 1980s were the Reagan years, the beginnings of a
neoconservatism with dire consequences for gays, lesbians, feminists, people
of color, the economically disenfranchised, and people who crossed all these
categories and more. The radical promise of the 1960s social experiments and

the critical energy of 1970s feminism were squelched by the decade of “me”
and greed, in which capitalism reasserted itself as the motor of the American
dream. The figure I call “the ideal spectator” in this book became “the taxpayer” in the American imagination. The white, heterosexual, male, middle-­
class citizen was reasserted as the sole arbiter of appropriate American values,
sweeping away dissent and difference with his state-­approved hegemony. Gay
men began dying from HIV/AIDS, which Reagan willfully ignored throughout his presidency. Abortion rights, hard-­won in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, were
challenged once again, as the Moral Majority and evangelical Christianity
began to assert their conservative claims. Holly Hughes and Karen Finley,
along with gay performers Tim Miller and John Fleck, became the notorious NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) Four, whose federal grants for
solo work were withdrawn by administrators after they had been awarded
by a peer review panel, allowing politics to completely abrogate the vetting
process. The NEA Four were depicted as outrageously perverse performers
whose “offensive” work should not be supported by the hegemonic, normative taxpayer. The New Right attacked the NEA for its awards to solo performers whose work espoused politically progressive views on sexuality, gen-


xxiv   Introduction to the Second Edition
der, and race. They fulminated against the NEA Four’s display of their bodies
in performance, as though the very flesh of gay men, lesbians, and feminists
in live performance was anathema. With the Reagan administration onboard,
congressmen [sic] argued that the agency should be abolished and succeeded
in dramatically reducing the NEA’s annual budget appropriation, which took
years to even partially rebuild. Performance that historically could count on
federal support as seed money lost a valuable source of funding. To this day,
the NEA refuses to fund solo performance.
The NEA debacle—­and even earlier public controversies over artwork
by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, both out gay men—­set the
tone for a general censoring of performance and art by sexual minorities
throughout the 1980s and 1990s that has continued into the twenty-­first century, all framed as referenda on how taxpayers’ money should be spent.20 The
Right still controls the terms of the debate, so the imaginary taxpaying citizen
is never an LGBT person, a person of color, or even a political progressive.

These highly visible controversies over art exhibitions and performance funding helped push gays, lesbians, and feminists out of the sphere of national
influence. If the NEA Four’s work wasn’t eligible for federal support because
they offended the “average citizen,” then people who fell outside the “normal”
were suddenly no longer citizens at all.
Hughes, Miller, Fleck, and Finley spent years embroiled in the court case
over the rescinding of their grants and the subsequent loyalty pledge attached
to NEA funds (a case eventually decided by the Supreme Court). The notoriety deeply affected their careers. In the 1990s Hughes exorcized her demons
by performing Preaching to the Perverted, a one-­woman show that narrated
her experience as a national pariah during the NEA Four years.21 Politically
astute, funny, and emotionally devastating, the performance demonstrated
how state power stripped Hughes of her right not only to self-­expression but
to citizenship. Likewise, Finley described how, in the wake of the damaging
attention she received as what Jesse Helms on the floor of the Senate called
the “chocolate-­smeared woman,” she had to separate herself from the “Karen
Finley” constructed by the congressional funding debate and the press. To
continue to be heard as an artist, she had to create a new persona and perform
in the voice of other notorious women—­Terry Schiavo, Liza Minnelli, Jackie
Kennedy—­to deliver her still trenchant feminist political critique.22
In other words, although we’ve been through several presidential administrations and although American culture seems more open to LGBTQ subjects and to women, the challenges of our political system remain intractable.
Even under Barack Obama’s administration and his history-­making term as
the first African American president, in 2010, Hide/Seek, the first exhibit ever
devoted to LGBTQ portraiture at the Smithsonian, suffered its own censorship controversy. A 1987 video called A Fire in My Belly, by the late gay art-