Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage

1. Performative Lives, Performed Selves: Autobiography in Feminist Performance

chapter 1 : Performative Lives, Performed Selves autobiography in feminist performance If any art form, theatrical or otherwise, might be said to be the proving grounds for a performative approach to identity, performance art is the obvious first choice. Although performance art itself is a nebulous genre—a loosely bound set of artistic practices that assembles the art object from the actions of the live performing body—the binding focus on the performer’s body as the art itself already underscores some idea that the identity of that body is, like the artist’s canvas or the empty stage, an available space on which to make meaning. Performance art, as RoseLee Goldberg has demonstrated, has a long and rich history that cuts across the twentieth century but was embraced by feminist artists and performers at the peak of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and rolled into the lesbian-feminist heyday of the 1980s and 1990s at venues like the WOW Café and P.S. 122. Examples of feminist and lesbian-feminist performance art span a broad range of practices, from the photographic parodies of Cindy Sherman, the art-world installations of Eleanor Antin, and the Fluxus-inspired work of Carolee Schneeman to the more recent theater -oriented work of Split Britches, Holly Hughes, Terry Galloway, and many others. Performance art scholar RoseLee Goldberg documents this rise and explicitly connects autobiographical performance to the surge of feminist politics: “[C]oinciding with the powerful Women’s Movement throughout Europe and the United States, [autobiographical performance] allowed many women performers to deal with issues that had been rela27 tively little explored by their male counterparts.”1 That an already established tradition of avant-garde performance took this autodiegetic turn with the resurgence of feminism suggests the affinity between this narrative form and feminist ideology. Deirdre Heddon, too, notes this historical convergence, observing that “though the use of autobiography predates the second-wave feminist movement, it was in the early 1970s that the political potential of autobiographical performance was harnessed for the first time.”2 While both Goldberg and Heddon call explicit attention to the convergence of form and politics in autobiographical feminist performance, we can locate a range of explanations for this convergence, some of which, as I have already noted, contradict and countermand one another. Certainly while these performers clearly work on the fringes of what we might call drama, blurring generic boundaries of traditional theatrical practice, they are also blurring the boundaries of the roles and identities that are associated with the category “woman.” Given that these performers —many of whom in conceiving the narratives for their own performances are also playwrights—implicitly and explicitly narrate their own pasts, we must consider their stories within the frames of both their narrative and performance dimensions. In doing so, we can begin to understand a number of specific appeals that life narratives offer to feminist performance. Specifically, these artists bring particular power to their life stories by incorporating their bodies as an element of their narratives both as rhetorical evidence of truth value and simultaneously as a constructible semiotic sign system. At the same time, because they apply unreliable or self-contradicting narratives to these real-time, physically present performances, they call into question the stability of their own gendered identities, thus prodding the seemingly stable concepts that they hope to complicate and explode. Indeed, when we take these concepts together, we might argue specifically that such feminist performance artists perform the self to reveal selfhood as performative, even as they rely on the truth claims of selfhood to ground their critiques. In the three chapters that follow, I will trace the ways in which autobiographical feminist performance, criticism of that performance, and theories of the performed self revolve around questions of authenticity, agency, and presence—how performances variously rely on or deconstruct the notion of an authentic acting agent that can be said to be inherent and resident in the performing body. In this chapter in particular, I will tell a story about the development of a theoretical practice of perfor28 : lives in play mativity that grew on the stages of feminist performance art, just as those theories were being developed and advanced in the pages of academic prose. This is a story about artists working on the margins of the professional theater and art worlds, seeking out resistant expressions of gender, sex, and sexuality while struggling against...