Staging Psychic Excess: Parodic Narrative and Transgressive Performance

Over the last two decades, performance has become the prevailing metaphor for discourse on gender, due largely to the influence of Judith Butler's ground-breaking work on the topic. In texts published throughout the late 80s and early 90s, Butler lays out a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing how gender is constructed, reified, and potentially disrupted. In the field of performance studies, this framework has been consistently and fruitfully illustrated in the many avatars of performance art, a form effective in part because of its independence from an originary text, and in part because of the rise to prominence of that form as a mode for resistant theatre in the last thirty years of the 20^th century. And yet when applied to more traditional drama of the same period, the question of gender critique is muddied, since, as Butler argues, gender codes are absorbed into the matrices of power by repetition and reproduction. Therefore, for the playwright—feminist and/or queer—working to enact such a critique on the stage, a peculiar bind arises, since dramatic texts execute these very operations in relation to performance. If the dramatic text serves as the reproducible trace of inherently ephemeral performance, how then can the playwright effect the transgression of gender codes without reifying them in her texts?

Many playwrights grappling with this issue in the later years of the century approached this dilemma by employing Brechtian performance tactics to stage critique, and these tactics of alienation and denaturalization often drew upon parodic narrative strategies to facilitate the on-stage performance of gender transgression. Indeed, as social realism drew criticism from these quarters for its phallocentric, heteronormative, and bourgeois tendencies, parody in these years became a common narrative response. Below, I will examine several texts that are exemplary of a constellation of queer and feminist plays of the 1980s and 1990s that actively use parody to propagate radical gender critiques. While Brecht and Butler are often invoked in relation to texts such as these, I argue that the parodic plays of this study represent a radical intersection of Butlerian gender considerations, Brechtian performance tactics, and parodic narrative strategies. Furthermore, these parodic narrative strategies seek to provide precisely the mechanism for constructing dramatic texts that—while they themselves cannot assure gender transgression—do allow for the staging of transgression by resisting the absorption of their tactics into a codified set of repressive gender constructions and by enacting an undoing of gender that may or may not coincide with the agency and subjectivity of a given performer.

Let me begin by parsing out my use of the term "parody" as a term that refers at once to text, narrative, and performance without conflating those concepts: narrative in this instance can be textual and/or performed; parodic performance is not necessarily textual or even narrative; and a parodic narrative text can only write toward performance without ever mandating a specific parodic performance. Moreover, in using the term parody, I reference the work of Margaret Rose and Linda Hutcheon. In Parody// Meta-fiction, Rose defines parody as a critique of representation, and characterizes parody's ideal reader as one who "enjoys the recognition of the hidden irony and satire against the parodied text and the reader sympathetic to it" (27). This suggests a resistance to the original parodied text, or in the case of the plays discussed below, existing codes of gender. For Rose, parody is apolitical and ahistorical, merely a critique of the general ontological problems of fiction. But for Hutcheon, postmodern parody is inextricably politicized, calling attention not only to the texts being parodied, but also to the representational politics of those texts. In this sense, feminist parody inherently positions its audience in opposition to the dominant codes of sex and gender, in terms of both cultural images (general parody) and of individual narratives (specific parody). The parodic image evokes a cultural image already available to an audience, but signifies through its difference from the original its otherness from the dominant codes. This difference creates a narrative of critique, one that accounts for the known original and...