Aston Elaine, Harris Geraldine (ред.). Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
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16 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
17 Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p.198.
18 Karen Finley, The Constant State of Desire, in Lenora Champagne, ed., Out
From Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1990), p.61.
19 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p.224.
20 See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality,
(London: Routledge, 2000), p.10.
21 Alan Sinfield, ‘Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identities and the Ethnicity
Model’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., Diaspora And Visual Culture: Representing
Africans and Jews (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.95–114,
pp.105–6.
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17
2
Navigating Postfeminism: Writing
Out of the Box
Janelle Reinelt
My focus is ostensibly British and American feminist playwrights, but
what I intend to raise is the appropriateness of the term ‘feminist’ in a
historical moment when the circumlocutions necessary to utilize this
term render ‘appropriate’ usage difficult. Not only is there the question
of whether or not playwrights self-identify as feminist, but also the
responsibility of theatre scholars to characterize the contemporary context
carefully and honestly. However, the ‘contemporary context’ is precisely
one in which it is not clear what the term ‘feminism’ designates.
Reluctantly, I have reached the conclusion that we live in a time of
postfeminism. There is something performatively defeatist about using
the designation ‘postfeminism’ – defeatist in that it seems to give up on
the project of feminism, and performative in that it actively constructs
the present based on a sense of feminism as past or over. I fear that to
speak about it thus might make it true, and dawdle at the keyboard,
avoiding my own prose, as if the word had some magic effect belonging
to childhood. The adult scholar in me acknowledges, as any discourse
theorist knows, the power of rhetoric and repetition to eventually domi-
nate hegemonic conceptual thinking, and thus the fear of the magic is
not completely without basis. Yet I cannot dodge the uncontrovertible
facts that ‘times have changed’.
An overarching umbrella movement of organized social or political
commitment does not exist now at the grass roots or national levels in either
North America or Britain, unlike the heyday of second-wave feminism
(roughly between 1970 and the mid-1980s). Local, individual groups and
political campaigns exist, but the identification of women with a
Movement – the ‘Women’s Movement’ has virtually vanished. Some lesbian
and queer women identify with the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT)
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18 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
Movement, which still has some identifiable status as a Movement,
especially in North America, but the relation between feminism and
this movement is itself historically troubled and in no case is the
assumption of a cross-over justified today. NOW, the National Organi-
zation for Women, is just another North American political pressure
group, and while not irrelevant to national politics in the United States,
it is extremely weak and disunified. A 2003 study in American Sociological
Review reports: ‘There is no such dominant conception [of feminism]
any longer. Rather, the outcome of the various contestations regarding
the meaning of feminism may be a decreasing consensus among younger
cohorts about what identifying as a feminist implies.’
1
The lack of meaning of the term ‘woman’, so well interrogated by the
intellectuals of the Second Wave, has meant that there is no mobilizing
term under which heterogeneous women can identify and organize. By the
mid-1990s, feminism had a hard time forming a focal point because
identifying with any common properties held by all women seemed
impossible. Not only had Julia Kristeva taught us that the signifier
‘Woman’ is a cipher under which real women cannot find a place, but also
concrete criticisms of women of colour and lesbians that white, liberal,
heterosexual women were inadvertently speaking for them combined with
charges of cultural ethnocentrism to divide women sharply. As the notion
of identifying with a group becomes less tenable, the mobilization of
women as a voting block has become even more questionable. In the
US election of 2004, women could be seen to have actually put Bush in
the White House for a second term. The margin of difference between the
number of women supporting Bush compared to those supporting Carey
adds up to one reason why Bush won the White House.
Looking at generational differences, some of the criticisms of second-
wave feminism persuaded young women that feminism was old fash-
ioned or too rigid; for example, the charge of extremism, that feminism
had become old fashioned and intolerant.
2
In Rene Denfeld’s words,
feminism was upholding
a moral and spiritual crusade that would take us back to a time worse
than our mother’s day – back to the nineteenth-century values of
sexual morality, spiritual purity, and political helplessness...
Current feminism would create the very same morally pure yet help-
lessly martyred role that women suffered from a century ago.
3
She refers here to campaigns against sexual harassment, date rape and
pornography, associated with some forms of feminism. Along the
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Navigating Postfeminism: Writing Out of the Box 19
same lines as Denfeld, Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf also claimed
that feminism has portrayed women as victims and that this is self-
defeating and untrue. These arguments against a perceived puritanical
morality and a culture of victimization are persuasive in contempo-
rary North American culture because of their intersections with
certain entrenched traditions of libertarianism and self-sufficiency.
Although having a long history of American Puritanism in its past,
American ideology also contains an impassioned commitment to
personal freedom and First Amendment rights shared by significant
constituencies on the Left and also on the Right of the political
spectrum. This phenomenon has produced odd allegiances between
right-wing Christian groups and feminists on some issues like pornog-
raphy, and has alienated the more libertarian feminists or gay/lesbian/
bisexual feminists for whom the struggle for sexual freedom has been
the highest priority.
The discourse of victimization must be seen against a larger tapestry
of social injustice for poor, non-white people across society. How can
middle-class women claim the status of victim when compared to the
homeless or otherwise downtrodden? However, on the other hand,
conservative politicians have successfully overthrown the appeal to
injustice by treating victims as those who should be held responsible
for their own situation, and have recoded ‘victim’ as a term only
appropriately belonging to victims of crime. In death penalty argu-
ments in the United States, one argument of the pro-death penalty
people is that the victims have a right to witness the retribution for
their injuries in the form of execution. Thus the rhetoric of victims and
victimization is highly volatile. No one wants to be a victim, but if one
is, retribution is the desired outcome. This complicates and
strengthens the perception that feminists indulge in an unwarranted
discourse of victimization.
Young women have moved toward a greater individualism and away
from identity politics, disliking labels and seeing no need to organize.
A survey of college women aged 18 to 34 confirmed this aversion:
The vast majority of campus women surveyed (68 percent) noted
they don’t like being identified by labels that describe their political
party, sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, race, or physical ability.
They dislike labels because they believe they are inaccurate, stereo-
typing, and insensitive; the labels that define sexuality (straight,
lesbian, bisexual, etc.) and ‘feminist’ grated the most.
(Rowe-Finkbeiner, The F Word, pp.5–6)
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20 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
These features – the lack of an energetic and robust political movement,
the lack of an identity ‘woman’ with which to align, and the perception
of restrictive and detrimental positions associated with feminism – have
contributed to bring about the state of postfeminism, a state in which
there is nothing to join and no clear ‘woman’ to be, but in which many
of the concerns of actual women about equality, free expression, power,
respect, and sexual subjectivity are still present and compelling. In the
mid-1990s, for example, men were ten times as likely to hold office as a
member of parliament – an average across all countries of the world. In
first-world capitalist countries, men’s average incomes are approximately
double women’s. R. W. Connell explains that ‘the more familiar
comparisons, of wage rates for full-time employment, greatly understate
gender differences in actual incomes’ because men are more likely to
have shares of stocks and other financial dividends as a result of posi-
tions as head of corporations or major shareholders.
4
In 2002, women
accounted for only 5.2 per cent of top earners at Fortune 500 companies.
Thus the material conditions under which women live show that, using
basic economic and political comparisons, women are still oppressed
under patriarchy.
These concerns make up what I call the feminist residue from the
Second Wave – serious issues have been identified and are still present,
but they are ignored, pushed aside or simply denied. Talk of the progress
of women tends to obscure how difficult the situation really is. Many of
my young women students often show interest in women’s studies or
gender issues while simultaneously insisting with strong conviction they
are NOT feminists. Their view seems to be that the need for feminism is
over, and they are uncomfortable with the term, rejecting I’m not sure
what, but I suspect the stereotyped media image of feminists as man-
hating and bra-burning, the 1970s equivalent of the spinster of earlier
years, the spectre of the unmarried and shrivelled up maiden aunt that
second-wave feminism was at pains to deconstruct as a misogynist
fiction of patriarchy. Ironically Women’s Studies and Gender Studies
have become a legitimate part of most university curricula in North
America and Britain while the movement that made this possible has all
but disappeared. Academics have been accused of forgetting their roots
in activism, and the mounting pressure to increase research productivity
in both American tenure and promotion practices and British research
assessments has made it increasingly difficult to define community
service, outreach or other quasi-organizational activities as legitimate
tasks for the professoriate. Furthermore, the ideal situation, taken for
granted during the Second Wave, combines activism and scholarship to
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Navigating Postfeminism: Writing Out of the Box 21
fuel a genuine movement for social change – which always requires
action and reflection in tandem to succeed.
The theatre world is similarly experiencing a decline in feminist
dramas, although incorporating the significant success of individual
women artists. In 2001–2, of 2000 off-Broadway and regional theatre
productions in the United States, 16 per cent were written by women and
17 per cent had female directors. I suspect these figures would be the
same or lower in the United Kingdom. So much for equality in the
workplace.
Most of the feminist theatre companies, like feminist bookstore
collectives, had disappeared in the United States by the mid-1990s. Not
only is it always difficult for small theatre companies to survive on what
amounts to no fiscal support from the government, it has become even
more difficult to survive in recent years in a conservative climate and
with less and less dollars available for arts funding. Similarly in Britain,
the Thatcher years took a heavy toll on left-wing and feminist theatre
companies, perhaps the most well known casualty of that era being
Monstrous Regiment, who for over 20 years had managed to thrive and
produce many pieces created by and for women with explicit socialist
feminist politics as their artistic mission. Solo performers have perhaps
managed to survive the best – one thinks of Bobby Baker in Britain or
Karen Finley or Holly Hughes in the United States, and most promi-
nently, of Anna Deavere Smith, whose solo work has been widely seen
in the mainstream through television broadcasts of her work and
Broadway and major regional productions at home and abroad.
In Britain, some women playwrights have remained well established
through the 1990s. Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, for
example, are feminist writers from the Second Wave who still write and
are produced in major venues such as the National Theatre and the
Royal Court. As for directors, Ann Bogart or JoAnn Akalatis in the
Unites States and Deborah Warner and Di Trevis in the United
Kingdom have achieved a great deal of critical acclaim and work in the
major professional theatres in both countries. ‘Feminist’, however,
would not be a descriptive term brought easily to their work, although
two of them might self-describe as feminists in their ‘private’ life. Only
Warner consistently thematizes gender issues in her directorial work,
and her perspective is rendered complex by her well-known lesbian
partnership with Fiona Shaw, with whom she has created many
projects, such as the cross-dressed Richard II. These women are now all
significantly senior. In Nicholas Hytner’s semi-miraculous burst of
vitality at the National during his new regime, he has chosen few women
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22 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
as part of his inner cadre, and Katie Mitchell, arguably one of the
insiders, is no longer a ‘youngster’, now herself aged over 40.
One of the early concerns of feminist representation was to get
women in central roles represented as legitimate protagonists of dramas –
not just in order to create more roles for women, but to treat their lives,
in a gloss on the words of Erich Auerbach in Mimesis, as serious subjects,
to ensure ‘the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups
to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representa-
tion’.
5
Along with this objective came the reclaiming of women’s
history. To some extent, these features continue to be present in the
contemporary work of most of the women artists mentioned above, but
they may not be as central or as sufficient as they once were. Di Trevis’s
stunning production of Proust’s Remembrance of Time Past (2001), for
example, foregrounded a gay male imagination, but placed no
particular stress on female representation or feminist features. Ann
Bogart’s tour de force, Bob, is a solo piece about Robert Wilson. It goes a
long way to explaining a great deal about this theatrical artist and his
work, but obviously has nothing to do with women, nor are there any
on the stage.
In both countries, North America and Britain, some individual artists
and groups continue to survive on the margins, playing to faithful and
enthusiastic audiences in small venues or touring sites. Often these are
identified as lesbian or queer performers rather than feminists. Split
Britches, an American lesbian company, and Bloolips, a British gay
company, for example, have collaborated productively across the gay/
lesbian and the US/UK divide, appearing at the WOW café on New
York’s lower east side or at The Drill Hall in London’s fringe. Bobby
Baker has a large following in the United Kingdom, and in the United
States, Lisa Kron has a viable solo performance career that started with
her work as one of the Five Lesbian Brothers. Thus the residue of second-
wave feminism exists in various facets of mainstream and subcultural
performances. To ignore it is to deny both its history and its present
state of play. On the other hand, the work mostly remains on the
margins, and is not any longer as strongly identified with feminism as it
would have been a decade ago (Bobby Baker is an exception as she
continues to work within an explicitly feminist tradition).
Turning to playwrights, we find some British and American women
for whom the claims of the residue of feminism, if not more, can be
made. By examining their work through the lens of longstanding femi-
nist concerns, we can come closer to understanding the important
legacy of second-wave feminism, and the way in which today’s women
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Navigating Postfeminism: Writing Out of the Box 23
grapple with sex and gender even when these are not thematized
directly in their work.
Caryl Churchill is the most straightforward well-known feminist
writer. Her recent work from The Skriker to Far Away at least still involves
women at the centre of the action, and is still concerned with the
quality of women’s lives in contemporary society. Churchill is the great
icon of second-wave feminism in the British theatre because she was a
conscious and insightful commentator on it during the 1980s, and
because her best known plays, Cloud 9, Top Girls, Vinegar Tom, Fen and
Serious Money, became defining texts for theatre scholars seeking to
describe what constituted feminist performances in the theatre. Using a
British epic form familiar from Bertolt Brecht’s work but focused on gender
and sexuality as well as economic and social issues, Churchill became
expert at the feminist gestus, what Elin Diamond has described as those
moments in the play text ‘when social attitudes about gender and sexu-
ality conceal or disrupt patriarchal ideology’.
6
In Cloud 9, for example,
Churchill embodied the Victorian styles of gender on cross-dressed
bodies to reveal gender as an historical construction under pressure,
and in Vinegar Tom, she explored the complicity of the state and reli-
gion in the production of women as perceived deviants and witches
because they threatened the stability of the economy of seventeenth-
century England. In Top Girls, she took on a feminism corrupted by
Thatcherism, indicting individual economic success without socialist
commitment, and continued this analysis in Serious Money, her comic
yet savage portrait of financial traders and stock jobbers in Thatcher’s
second term. These plays managed to succeed in major venues such as
the Royal Court Theatre, Britain’s premiere theatre for new writing.
Churchill still enjoys the prestige of identification as one of Britain’s
most important dramatists, but her work is changing. A Number (2003)
is about cloning, or rather, the demise of identity based on patriarchy.
An extremely interesting and timely play, it has no women in its cast,
and its topic is a crisis in masculinity brought about by interrupting and
changing kinship lineages in the wake of the possibilities of cloning.
Even Far Away, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in
November 2000, is far from being exclusively about women’s issues. Set
in a world of some undisclosed future, it appears to be about species
alienation and warfare, where all God’s creatures are divided into warring
camps. One of the characters explains who the bad guys are: ‘Mallards
are not a good waterbird. They commit rape, and they’re on the side of
the elephants, and the Koreans. But crocodiles are always in the
wrong.’
7
In this Brave New World, conflict is ever-present and loyalties
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24 Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory
keep changing. The one overtly feminist through-line is the development
of the character of the little girl of the first scene, Joan, who raises ques-
tions about immigrants who are being beaten by her uncle. In the course
of the play, she grows up into a world of global species warfare. Consist-
ently through all of Churchill’s work, and often figured specifically as a
child character, there is a concern for the experiences and future of
young girls. What kind of world will they inhabit and inherit? might be
her constant question.
In the play, Joan takes a job making hats. She and her co-worker
Todd, later her husband, take pride and pleasure in making them for a
competition culminating in a parade. Joan has trained to make hats in
college. Joan and Todd talk about work conditions in the firm, and
Todd is determined to speak up for improvements, even if it means
risking his job; Joan admires him for this. Eventually, we find out they
are making hats for prisoners, for ‘ragged, beaten, chained prisoners’, to
wear on their way to execution (Far Away, p.24). Joan and Todd do not
even discuss this, however. It is as if they are ideologically blinded to
the uses for which the hats are being made. Churchill is surely lodging a
critique against the transnational mode of production in which
aesthetics are used to occlude material suffering elsewhere. As this scene
is also a heterosexual courting scene, it is also about how a young
woman is socialized into work and sexual attachment through the new
transnational frame.
Is this enough to count as a feminist text? Or is the concern with
globalization, clearly the heart of her play, separate from feminism?
I am myself divided on this question. I think, given Churchill’s full
body of work, it is relatively easy to place this play within the corpus
and see it as inflected with feminist politics. On the other hand, I think
Churchill is addressing some other issues in this work, issues that have
come to prominence recently as a result of global expansion and the
consolidation of world markets, and that gender is taking an appropriate
back seat here to the question of ideological blindness based on the
ability to dissociate from the suffering of others, threatening to lead to
an apocalyptic species warfare.
The second British writer of major prominence I want to consider is
Sarah Kane. Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, has been widely produced,
including a US tour in 2004 of the definitive production directed by
James McDonald. Kane is generally recognized as a great talent; the
power of her writing compares to Edward Bond and even Samuel Beckett.
She was born in 1971, just at the start of second-wave feminism, and
she died of suicide in 1999. Young, gifted and dead. Certainly not a
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Navigating Postfeminism: Writing Out of the Box 25
feminist, but a woman writer. What are we to say of her? Her plays have
been received as shocking because of her depictions of brutality and
violence and the seeming lack of redemption in her imaginary universe.
Critics puzzle about the nihilism of her plays (whether they really are
nihilist or not), and about the style of her expression – poetic, anti-realistic,
dramaturgically unique. They have not written about her much in
terms of feminism, although as this essay goes to press, a number of
graduate students are working on dissertations on Kane.
8
Blasted is often described as Kane’s response to Bosnia – not literally,
not citationally, but depicting the situation of violence and the relative
disengagement of the West. She connects rape, the rape of a young
women in a hotel room, to a scene of civil war. The innocence of Cate
contrasts with the violence and madness of her lover Ian. Later the
contrast extends to a soldier who appears suddenly ‘blasted’ into her
world. This is not a play about gender essentialism, but its categories fit
that epitaph. Cate doesn’t eat meat, doesn’t believe in killing, isn’t
racist – unlike her lover. Ian is suffering from some physical internal
malady, perhaps cancer, which keeps him in a state of protracted pain
while his job as a hired killer keeps him in a state of anxious paranoia.
When the hotel scene is literally destroyed by a blast and shifted to a
war zone, male violence and capacities for evil take over the narrative as
rape and torture are described and enacted. This play, as is common in
Kane’s work, asks if there are any limits to human cruelty and seems to
answer ‘no’. However, Cate tries to save the baby she retrieves from the
war, and in the closing moments, shows compassion for Ian in spite of
his previous brutal treatment of her.
The storm of controversy over Blasted when it was first produced in
1995 is now a well-known story.
9
The staging of savage acts – the soldier
sucks out and eats Ian’s eyes and Ian eats the remains of the dead baby –
seemed sensationalist and brutal to reviewers. Her playwright colleague,
David Greig, writes in the introduction to her collected plays:
[h]er simple premise, that there was a connection between a rape in a
Leeds hotel room and the hellish devastation of civil war, had been
critically misunderstood as a childish attempt to shock. It would not
be until Crave in 1998 that public perceptions of her work would begin
to move beyond the simplistic responses of the Blasted controversy.
10
Looking back on Blasted now, it seems remarkable that no sustained
discussion of the representation of gender in the play emerged. The play
locates behaviour not exclusively in biology but in cultural experiences,
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