Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage

2. Autobiography and the Rhetoric of the Embodied Self

chapter 2 : Autobiography and the Rhetoric of the Embodied Self While over the last two decades, theories of performativity dominated the academic discourse of gender (and to a lesser extent that of theatrical performance ), feminist performers have been reluctant to embrace the concept quite so thoroughly. In the previous chapter, we have seen the ways in which performance artists have used the concept of performativity to establish gender, sex, and sexuality as constructions of discourse. Yet these uses were never uniform and were frequently posited as rhetorical tactics as much as definitive ontologies of gender, sex, and selfhood. That is, performativity frequently served these artists as a persuasive tactic, one that worked in its historical moment to begin to dismantle the tangled web of obstacles to power. But at the same time, many performers and playwrights —indeed sometimes the very same performers and playwrights— held on to a notion that the body established an anchor point for body, experience , and identity. This preference for presence, for the body as a marker of a preexisting identity in the here and now, has its roots in the beginnings of feminist autobiographical performance, but it, too, has been marshaled in rhetorical service of a more theoretically sophisticated sense of the female body in performance, both in cases where the gendered body’s presence as a historical marker carries discursive political weight and in cases where the experience of the disabled body demands acknowledgment of the relationship among history, self, and society. There is, of course, a long-documented tension between essentialist accounts of the female body in performance as rooted in a deeply embodied experience and expression of the self, and performative accounts of the body as a mere surface on which social discourses of gender, sex, and identity are inscribed and contested. Radical versions of each of these accounts suggest that an essentialist (or a cultural-feminist, second-wave, or 55 biologistic) view is incommensurable with a performative (or deconstructive , materialist, or constructionist) view. I would argue that both approaches have an ontological basis, and I will work from the premise that some at least primal notion of identity can be located in the corporeal body, even as the body itself, as well as a more advanced sense of identity, is subject to the flows of cultural discourse. That is, the performer’s body is both an anchor for and constraint on the many possible iterations of selfhood that are always imbricated with the material body, that are always constructable and contestable within a massively complex matrix of discourse and power. Moreover, I maintain that as a laboratory for the political impact of these competing ontologies of the gendered self, feminist autobiographical performance has consistently implemented both approaches in such a way as to exploit the political potential of each position . While the previous chapter argued for the political uses of a performative approach to gendered identity, here I want to establish the continuing role of the body as an origin point for female and feminist identities in performance. And across a history of feminist autobiographical performance, we can trace four trends in both theory and praxis: one, that an insistence on the embodiedness of the female performer relies on an essentialist underpinning, even when that performer is deconstructing other more insidious essentialisms; two, that the consistent deployment of an embodied feminist self in performance across the last fifty years (and perhaps even longer) amounts to a historical feminist aesthetic of performance; three, that even in highly deconstructive performances, the body of the performer remains an archive of her historical experience in ways that may exceed her intentions as a performer; and four, that the female body, and indeed, perhaps, even the underpinnings of our biological humanness, form the basis for a mutuality on which the establishment of a politicized feminist community in the theater depends. While this chapter locates and examines the tendency of feminist autobiographical performance to deploy essentialist tactics (or even a full-fledged aesthetics of essentialism), I am less interested in arguing for or against the logic of the body as an essential marker of selfhood and more in exploring the conditions and functions of its use. Therefore, in what follows, I want to concentrate on three moments in a history of feminist autobiographical performance, each of which tended to use the body as an essential marker of identity for related but conflicting rhetorical purposes . In the 1960s and 1970s, performers such as Linda Montano, Yvonne Rainier, and...