Shifting Positionalities: Interrogating Cultural Pluralism

COMMENTS ONPROCESS Shifting Positionalities: Interrogating Cultural Pluralism JuIi Burk The Women and Theatre Program (WTP) has spent the majority of its 18 year history exploring gender gaps in traditional patriarchal scholarship, practice , and teaching of theatre. This year's 13th Annual Women and Theatre Conference held at Emory University was devoted to the interstices of race, gender, sexuality and class. In preparation for the conference, participants were asked to read articles from three texts: bell hooks' Yearning, Tania Modleski's Feminism Without Women, and Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller's anthology of essays Conflicts in Feminism. Building on these essays and our general concern over the assimilationist potential of cultural pluralism, conference events ranged from practical workshops on publication and building course syllabi; to the staged reading of Jane Chambers Playwriting Student Award Winner Naomi Wallace's The Fields of Aceldama; to a performance by Jewish American writer and Performance Artist JyI Lynn Felman and African American Writer and Performance Artist Shirley Hayden Whitley titled Eye to Eye: Telling Stories, Breaking Boundaries; to small group discussions on how to apply the ideas raised by this conference in our work as theatre scholars, practitioners, and artists; to formal paper presentations focused around visibility and identity. Adrian Piper's video, Cornered, inspired the presentations of the first panel, "Shifting Positionalities," and continued to inform the discourse of the conference. Through the three days, three important paradigms arose that encapsulate the major issues discussed. The first came from Jennifer Brody, whose presentation at the Kick-off Session explored the paradigm of the hyphen—the space in between—to examine issues of assimilation, evolution and cultural pluralism. Amy Robinson's Comments on Process explores this image. The second paradigm was that of tourism, discussed by Susan Bennett. She delved 'Editor's Note: The following Comments on Process comprise an overview and specific selections from the 1992 Women and Theatre Conference. IuIi Burk oversaw the selction of articles. 71 72 Juli Burk into the delicate issue of cultural archeology, what Trinh T. Minh-Ha calls legitimized voyeurism, asking how scholars, writers, and practitioners of theatre can resist making someone else's identity the site of an 'archaeological' dig. The third paradigm came from Lynda Hart, whose presentation investigated the paradigm of looking as a process of both remembering what we've forgotten and forgetting what we remember in order to underscore the importance of understanding that "race and gender and class can't be theorized discretely" (10). While the many presentations and discussions that took place at the conference were not specifically organized around these three images, they emerged as points of commonality among the concerns and issues raised. Cultural pluralism easily becomes synonymous with the second paradigm , that of the tourist gaze. As Kate Davy argues, it becomes a tool of liberal humanism for assuring the hegemony of whiteness. Examined closely perhaps cultural pluralism naturalizes the position of token, positing it, as Annie Nyman noted, as the only means of inclusion and authority available to the marginalized, hyphenated Other within carefully constructed brackets. Of further concern is that the only authority of the token within this structure is as a tour guide for those from what Rosemary Curb called the dead center of privilege. Recalling the idea of tourism, Curb noted her discomfort with comfort and recommended that "a good guide might be to question every safe and comfortable assumption and perception" (2). Tracy Davis' idea about how to avoid this tour was to use theory to explore instead of trying to tell 'the truth' about what we see. She asks, "Can we tell the 'truth,'" questioning the position from which one garners the authority to confer truth. As feminists, most at the conference long ago relinquished any positivist notion of truth, yet the issue of positionality remains. Miranda Joseph's presentation on the panel, "Representing and Interrogating Cultural Representation /' offered a performative notion of position and community wherein identity is a consequence of participation. The third paradigm, that of looking, traditionally confers identity by visual characteristics, a common means to establish community, participates in establishing locations to tour and attributes to hyphenate. Additionally, it creates categories such as race or gender that...