The Feminist Spectator as Critic

Afterword

Afterword Envisioning a space-off of representation-that is, Teresa de Lauretis' "view from elsewhere"-leads inevitably to a kind of utopianism. Where do you actually stand when you step outside of representation, and who stands with you? My text ends with the lesbian subject because I believe that personally, artistically, and spectatorially, hers is closest to the view from elsewhere, and offers the most radical position from which to subvert representation. As Nestle's mordant anecdote clarifies, and as the East Village lesbian community continues to exemplify, many lesbians "perform" themselves in everyday life as well as in the performance space. If all the world is in fact a stage-that is, if people are continually caught up in representation and ideology , and if we read the ideology of gender only through its representationlesbians who assert their identity and their right to exist through their selfrepresentations clearly have quite a lot at stake. The danger of representing lesbian sexuality in an era of political intolerance and sexual prudence requires an enormous personal investment from those willing to continue their public, gender-bending masquerades. A lesbian on the street representing a subversion of gender ideology through a butch or femme role is in some ways the perfect illustration of the Brechtian "not ... but," foregrounding for her unwitting spectators the in-betweens of nonpolarized gender identity. How this radical meaning can maintain itself in a more formal representational situation might be the continuing question for feminist performance criticism. How can radicalism be maintained in a representational economy that works to neutralize radical meanings? This question implies a continual consideration of form, content, and context in feminist work. For example, how can the formal experiments with old contents evidenced in the WOW Cafe work truly contribute to cultural change? How radical is the work if it continues to take place in an alternative context in which its spectators are mostly lesbians with a predisposition to the meanings the performances construct? Will the work at WOW, or by Split Britches or 120 Afterword Holly Hughes, be neutralized if it becomes a commodity consumable in a more mainstream economy? Or will it carry its radical meanings to a wider audience? These questions are not moot. Dress Suits jor Hire, a collaborative piece by Lois Weaver. Peggy Shaw, and Holly Hughes, is now under negotiation for an off-Broadway run. It will be interesting and important to trace the ramifications of this step up-----or into-the mainstream theatre hierarchy. The performers and playwright will happily see their income jump, and the production will be available to a much more diverse audience. Selling a lesbian text to mainstream spectators seems incongruous, but in the best of all possible worlds those spectators will come away from the performance thinking differently about their sexuality and gender assumptions. Or maybe not. Perhaps the context will prevail, and the desire to consume the glittery Broadway product that hangs like an aura over that excited group of spectators waiting on the ubiquitous TKTS line in Times Square will obscure the meaning of what they see. Perhaps the precedent set, ironically, by the long off-Broadway run of drag-performer Charles Busch's production Vampire Lesbians of Sodom will allow the spectators to contextualize a truly lesbian performance piece as just another incidence of harmless transvestism. Or maybe because the production does not fulfill spectators' expectations of traditional, realist drama, they will be angered and alienated for the wrong reasons, and will fail to achieve a more Brechtian state of understanding. Time, as they say, will tell. But Dress Suits' move is exemplary of the issues facing feminist theatre, performance, and criticism. The larger question might be, How does social change really happen through cultural production? Theatre in mainstream American culture is supposed to be an entertaining, consumable commodity. The TKTS line is peopled by spectators who do not expect to choose a production that will challenge their fundamental worldview. How, then, might feminist theatre and feminist performance criticism help to create a propensity for change in those mainstream spectators, a willingness to acccpt new forms and contents, and to consider the new meanings they create'? There is an attendant issue here. If the objective-idealistic though it might sound-is social change, what is the position of the feminist critic in relation to feminist cultural production? Economics and context once again loom into the picture. Precarious feminist theatre and performance groups need favorable documentation of their work to persuade funding...