Beyond visibility: Feminism, performance, and the dramatic text

This study examines the representational strategies of the more marginal yet innovative twentieth-century avant-garde and political women playwrights Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Kennedy, and Laurie Anderson. It focuses on several tropes that characterize feminist attempts to reconfigure the relation among the stage, the body, and the idea of the dramatic text, These include the trope of visibility as it plays through feminist theory and politics and brings into question the limits of dramatic representation, theories of indeterminacy and intermediality, and strategies of multivocality and disembodiment. While generally these represent attempts to merge feminist assumptions about the value of experience with dramatic embodiment as an aesthetic practice that serves political ends, they also make apparent the limits of visibility and embodiment. The first chapter establishes a cultural history of feminism's invocation of the trope of visibility and examines the paradox of feminist theatre as a political medium: a reliance on visibility as a strategy of representation (which reduces identity to corporeality as a means to authenticate a text and/or performance) is crucial to feminist art and theory; however, that strategy is problematic because it reinforces essentialism, reiterates difference, and portrays contexts as transparent and value-free. Subsequent chapters examine how the dramatic work of Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Kennedy, and Laurie Anderson challenge the relationship between representations of the body, presence, and notions of originality and authenticity. Gertrude Stein employs disembodied voices and performative utterances to achieve an immediacy of experience; Adrienne Kennedy engages the endless deferral of a figure or past event to produce absence; and Laurie Anderson uses digital and other mediatized performance to disrupt any assumed alliance between the body and voice. I argue that these women artists make serious political gestures precisely in the ways they problematize and question visibility as well as preserve the aesthetic as a viable political site. Finally, in linking early-century avant-garde and postmodern artistic praxis, this project provides a way to bridge a century of drama and performance by women: theatre is a rich repository of possibility for feminism and thinking about the politics of representation helps us understand the strategies of feminist theatre.