Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure by Sara Warner (review)

Sara Warner’s Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure is a game-changer. In opposition to queer theorists who insistently characterize lesbian feminism as dour, essentialist, and anti-sex, Warner uses a set of lesbian performances, dating from the 1960s through the early twenty-first century, to expose a lesbian-feminist aesthetic and political strategy that she calls “gaiety.” Warner recovers acts of gaiety—those “embodied practices that are imbued with and generative of affective experiences of joy and jubilation, wishing and longing, felicity and good cheer” (xv)—so as to restore to queer studies a sense of lavender menace and lesbian pleasure. Acts of gaiety, she argues persuasively, have the potential to resist the stultifying effects of both homonormativity and queer negativity (that is, the emphasis within queer theory on negative affects, backward feeling, and a refusal of futurity). In short, Warner recovers past lesbian performances so as to inspire and potentially transform future LGBT activism; in so doing, she deftly places performance studies and theatre history at the center of LGBT studies. Acts of Gaiety will find a place not only in courses on US theatre history and LGBT theatre, but also in courses on queer theory, women’s studies, and LGBT history.

The bulk of Warner’s book consists of five case studies of acts of gaiety, the merry mergings of pain and pleasure within ludic performances of resistance. Warner’s first case study, Valerie Solanas’s “scummy acts,” is a knockout. Through deep archival research and interviews with people who knew Solanas, Warner proves definitively that Solanas wrote her famous SCUM Manifesto as a scenario for a performance. This major discovery relocates a foundational feminist and lesbian text from the realm of print to that of orality, of performance. Warner made this discovery because she noticed that Solanas had included a copyright sign on her early printing of the SCUM Manifesto, and reasoned that the symbol might indicate that she had registered the text legally with the US Copyright Office. The symbol had been easily visible to previous scholars, but none before Warner had followed the breadcrumbs. When Warner investigated the copyrights of both the SCUM Manifesto and Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, she proved that the play preceded the manifesto, and that the manifesto was a variation upon the play—rather than vice versa, as scholars had previously presumed. The manifesto was, in fact, a scenario for a “scummy act”—a performance—Warner confirms, revealing through further discoveries that Solanas had submitted it as a playscript for possible production to the Directors’ Theater and Judson Poets’ Theatre.

Warner made these discoveries because she did not discount the possibility that Solanas, an anarchist, would seek governmental assistance in protecting her intellectual property. Such counterintuitive, generative insights appear throughout Acts of Gaiety and make the book a continual pleasure to read. Warner also corrects the historical record on many points—decisively proving, for example, that Andy Warhol did not lose the only copy of Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, and that she therefore had other motives for attempting to murder him. Furthermore, Warner produces a respectful and compassionate portrait of a woman often dismissed as a deranged criminal. And most important, Warner shows over and over why Solanas matters. For example, she documents that Solanas’s stagings of gaiety predated the essentialist productions that are usually identified as the origins of feminist theatre; thus Warner simultaneously redraws the history of feminist theatre, and shows how radical feminism is rooted in theatre. This is Warner’s hallmark: the startling, illuminating double-move that rewrites the history of theatre and, simultaneously, the histories of feminism and lesbianism.

The second case study—of early lesbian feminist critiques of marriage—is timely, to say the least. In a moment in which same-sex marriage has come to stand in for justice, activism, and civil rights, Warner reminds us...