Blogging on Queer Connections in the Arts and the Five Lesbian Brothers
Rent from DeepDyve- Blogging on Queer Connections in the Arts and the Five Lesbian Brothers
Final Thoughts on Queer Arts Blogging
I know that most blogs are filled with queer self-revelations and dreams, rants and ravings, opining and pleading. I do not think "The Feminist Spectator" will ever participate in that kind of discourse. And yet I have felt, in these last six weeks of writing, that sending my words and ideas out into cyberspace has connected me in sometimes satisfying and sometimes terrifying ways with a large queer (and feminist, lesbian, straight, progressive) public. I am always amazed that people read the blog, even while readers' testimonials about their experiences there do exactly what I had hoped. I have prompted responses, online and off, by discussing plays or performances, television shows, and novels in which I find something hopeful or irritating, something inspiring or frustrating. My blog will be generous with homegrown queer work, in the spirit of collegial criticism that Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Jaclyn Pryor and I have been trying to theorize and practice. Women and lesbians for years have bemoaned the lack of notice given their work in mainstream publications. My brief experience with "The Feminist Spectator" suggests that Web space is commodious right now, there for us to fill with our own creative and critical acuity, our own queer clamorings for the attention that still needs to be paid. Blog on.
- Review of Oedipus at Palm Springs
Notes
1. Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the USA: Staging Women's Experience (London: Routledge, 1996).
2. See Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healy, and Lisa Kron, The Five Lesbian Brothers: Four Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000).
3. Lisa Kron, 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001).
4. See Lawrence Van Gelder, "Arts, Briefly," New York Times, September 28, 2005.
5. See Jill Dolan, "'Lesbian' Subjectivity in Realism: Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology," in Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 159–77.
6. See Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Jaclyn Pryor, and Jill Dolan, "Colleague-Critic: Performance and Queer Collegiality," unpublished manuscript. [End Page 505]
Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama in the Department of Theatre and Dance and heads the Performance as Public Practice graduate program at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1989), Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (1993), Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (2001), and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005). Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Modern Drama, and Theatre Topics, among other publications. Her next project is a critical memoir of lesbian feminism in the United States titled From Flannel to Fleece: A Lesbian of a Certain Age. She coedits, with David Román, the Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/ Queer Drama/Theatre/Performance series at the University of Michigan Press.
Notes
1. See Tim Miller and David Román, "Preaching to the Converted," Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 169–88.
2. Dan Basila, e-mail message to author, October 15, 2005.
3. Jill Dolan, "The Feminist Spectator," www.feministspectator.blogspot.com. [End Page 493]
