The Feminist Spectator as Critic

5. Cultural Feminism and the Feminine Aesthetic

5 Cultural Feminism and the Feminine Aesthetic Cultural feminist performance art, as we have seen in chapter 4, posits the female body as a radical site of opposition to male models. Many of these artists use nudity as an attempt to fulfill!' ecriture feminine' s proposal that women can articulate their subjectivity by writing with their bodies. Carolee Schneeman. for instance. in Up To and Including Her Limits (1975). which she performs nude, reads from a long scroll she removes from her vagina as a kind of feminine writing drawn from Lacanian lack. I While their performances are meant as what Schneeman calls a gift "of my body to other women: giving our bodies back to ourselves,"2 these performers fail to see that the female body is still a sign which, when placed in representation, participates in a male-oriented signifying practice. There is some disagreement among feminists, however, about such a critique of representation. The apparatus-based theory. influenced by Brechtian aesthetics, is prevalent in materialist feminism, and is discussed in detail in chapter 6. Cultural feminist theatre criticism and practice, on the contrary, tends to retain the theatre-as-mirror analogy as the locus of its theory. These critics and artists propose that if women's hands hold the mirror up to nature, as it were, to renect women spectators in its glass, the gender inequities in theatre practice may be reversed. Continuing to think within the binary opposition of sexual difference, they assume that subverting male-dominated theatre practice with a woman-identified model will allow women to look to theatre for accurate reflections of their experience. Their effort is to define what cultural feminism poses as a feminine aesthetic, which reflects sexual difference in both form and content. The question of feminist aesthetics is somewhat debatable because of the prescriptive implications of "an aesthetic"-many practitioners fail to address the normativizing implications of aesthetic criteria, feminist or not. Aesthetic criteria, as we have seen, are the basis of canon-formation, and canons are by 84 Cultural Feminism and the Feminine Aesthetic definition exclusionary. Yet the importance of defining models for feminist artistic practice has persisted as an issue. The feminist debate over aesthetics is in some ways a response to realism as the dominating form of modern American theatre. Realism is prescriptive in that it reifies the dominant culture's inscription of traditional power relations between genders and classes. Its form masks the ideology of the author, whose position is mystified by the seemingly transparent text. Catherine Belsey suggests that in conventional readings of realist texts, the reader is identified as the subject position from which the text is made intelligible . Belsey says that "classical realism interpellates subjects in certain ways" and that "certain ranges of meaning ... are 'obvious' within the currently dominant ideology, and certain SUbject-positions are equally 'obviously' the positions from which these meanings are apparent.") Belsey characterizes classical realism as "narrative which leads to 'closure,' and a 'hierarchy of discourses ' which establishes the 'truth' of the story."4 The crisis that propels the realist plot is resolved when the elements that create the textual disturbance are reinstated within a culturally defined system of order at the narrative's end. Since it is embedded in oppressive representational strategies, realism has come under general attack from feminist critics and theatre makers. The Limitations of Realism The nature of realism as a conservative force that reproduces and reinforces dominant cultural relations has been suspect at other moments in theatre history. Both Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud intended to uncover the political and aesthetic myths of realism by, on one hand, distancing spectators from the theatre's lulling narrative and, on the other hand, by total physical immersion in a theatre experience of sensual gestures free of narrative authority. The feminist stance vis-a-vis realism takes different forms, influenced by the different feminist ideologies. Liberal feminists, and women who argue against the need for establishing new dramatic forms, find nothing to fault in the traditional well-made play and the psychological acting practices that give it voice. Rosemary Curb writes that since liberal feminism "accepts the basic social structure and does not call for a radical transformation of consciousness," when "women's theatre groups and playwrights of this generation represent women's struggle, they most often choose realism as their theatrical mode."5 Some liberal feminists argue that it is necessary to master the old forms prior to diverging from them, an argument that...