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CHAPTER ONE Toward a Feminist Historiography of AmericanAvant-Garde Performance Theories and Contexts Disparate Unities:TheVanguard,the Popular,and the Erasure ofWomen A little over a decade ago, Jill Dolan paused momentarily in the introductory essay that she wrote for Carol Martin’s A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance. In this pause, Dolan re›ected on her own history as a feminist theorist and historian. Her “own history of feminism in the academy,” she recalls, “is about thinking [. . . she would] be the only one,” that is, about going to conferences and worrying that she would be the only feminist or worrying that she would be “the only lesbian” among feminists. This initial anxiety, she notes, ultimately gave way to a delight in discovering not only that she was not the only feminist or lesbian at the conferences she attended but also that at these conferences she “could have conversations and arguments over whatever” she perceived as her “differences.”1 In 1996 as Dolan penned these re›ections, she was writing from a hard-won position within the academy that the collective efforts of feminist scholars like herself had done much to secure, and if as a point of departure I cite one related example of the continued success of those efforts—namely, the 2004 annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research, which supported Research Groups in “Feminist Historiography ” and “Queer Research”—I do so because of the pivotal role that the meeting of the Feminist Historiography Group at that conference had in my own history of feminism, in this project, and in my own subject position as its author. My interest in Dolan’s re›ections rests upon a rather ironic sense of identi‹cation with her anxiousness about “being the only one” in the early years of her work as a feminist theorist and historian. I am far from blind to the larger irony of this identi‹cation, given my own position as a heterosexual male. But my more immediate concerns have to do with the disturbing implications that followed a decision to sit in on what proved to be a highly successful session of the Feminist Historiography Group at ASTR 2004—a decision that much to my dismay positioned me as the “only male” among the forty to ‹fty participants and observers. (One other male joined about midway through the session.) The irony here was that while Dolan’s early experiences of being the “only one” heralded the emergence of new critical methodologies, my experience, I fear, signaled the gravitational pull of old critical habits and socially constructed divisions—a pull that is evident not only in theater studies but across the humanities. Whereas Dolan’s experiences were part of a larger struggle by feminists to ‹nd an acknowledged place at the table, my experience suggested an ironic gendered reversal. It suggested not a struggle by men to ‹nd an acknowledged place at the table of feminist discourse but a disinclination by my male counterparts to take up the invitation that is open to them. If that Research Group had followed something along the lines of a cultural feminist model and had been open exclusively to female scholars, perhaps there would have been little cause for my dismay. Yet the issue here was not the calculated exclusion of men in a solidarity of sisterhood but rather the apparent hesitancy of men to participate. Indeed, as an open session where I was welcomed as a colleague and friend, the meeting of the Feminist Historiography Group left me wondering how such a pronounced gender division in scholarly endeavors was even conceivable today, particularly since feminist-based scholarship arguably has done more than any other movement in the last twenty-‹ve years to reshape understanding not only of theater studies but of virtually every discipline in the humanities. Consequently, my being “the only one,” the only male, hinted at an alarming but subtle retrenchment. It suggested a gendered factional indifference fueled by a pervasive sense that feminist historiography is women’s work and that the widespread institutional recognition of feminist scholarship, ironically, means men can now politically afford to overlook it without facing accusations of bias. Provocative though it may be, translating an anecdote about a particular research group into a broad characterization of the gender dynamics within the humanities may be too much of a generalization, so I want to limit the focus of this characterization to studies of the avant-garde, and in particular to studies...

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