Editorial Comment

Feminism redux—or, if Sarah Palin is the answer, what was the question?

While preparing this issue of Theatre Journal over the last several months, my eye has often fallen on advertisements for theatre, film, and television in the New York Times and the Washington Post. This morning as I pulled apart the Sunday Times, I was particularly struck by an advertisement for CbS’s “Premiere Monday”: six panels featured eight male and two female actors; the male figures were prominently displayed, while the women receded into the background. In the Post, of thirteen panels advertising the new fall season, only three featured women—and Laura Mulvey might be moved to theorize their representation and reception. I then turned to the Times’s “Theatre Directory” to peruse offerings on, off, and off-off broadway. out of sixty-four entries, my quick scan revealed two female playwrights: Saviana Stanescu, whose Aliens with Extraordinary Skills was enjoying a limited run at the Women’s Project, and Leslie Lee, author of The First Breeze of Summer, which is currently in revival at Signature Theatre. Turning to the Post, I found one play by a woman, Karen Zacarias’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, at Roundhouse Theatre. Although the film section in the Times was somewhat less grim than the one in the Post, flipping through both revealed a host of fathers and sons, men with guns, and men competing with other men for women. Judging by the advertisements, the ratio of leading men to leading women in most films is still about four-to-one—not much improvement on the typical English renaissance tragedy. Is it just the marketing, or have our representational practices really changed so little since the emergence of modern feminism in the united States during the 1960s? I never thought that I would long for a Wendy Wasserstein/Marsha Norman/beth Henley retrospective on broadway, but I am on the verge.

It seems to me that women in the academy have fared somewhat better than women in commercial professional theatre. In the late 1980s, more than one senior woman warned me not to risk my career on feminist scholarship, because it was a red flag for both search and APT committees. If I were lucky enough to be hired, they insisted, I would surely not achieve tenure or promotion. Although some disciplines are more resistant to feminist and gender scholarship than others, in theatre and performance studies, some of those barriers have fallen. The proliferation of conference presentations, journal articles, and booklength studies on women in theatre, alternative sexualities, gender and performance, and performing gender suggests that in certain respects we have come a long way since the 1980s. At least a third of the articles I read for Theatre Journal have a gender component, and although, like Jill Dolan, I am sometimes troubled by the diminished presence of women in the broader study of gender, I am gratified to know that the roots of gender studies are in feminist studies.

Nonetheless, the academy can still be a chilly environment for women. In my own university, women are still locked out of top administrative positions; except in women’s studies and English, the number of female full professors is small; pay inequities persist; and legal dodges pass for fairness. Although, in the interests of “equity,” our season generally includes one female-authored play, the season selection committee is often stumped after its members run through the usual suspects: Caryl Churchill, Wendy Wasserstein, and Marsha Norman. (beth Henley has long since been forgotten.) bardolatry endures, and it is still the job of women on the faculty to know the literature by women. In my youth, a prematurely optimistic Virginia Slims ad asserted, “You’ve Come a Long Way baby”—but what was the destination, and are we there yet? Perhaps the articles in this issue of Theatre Journal can help us to pinpoint our current position.

The two articles that bookend this issue of Theatre Journal are at once retrospective and introspective, and the authors of both care deeply about the state of feminist critique in U.S. theatre and society. In the...