The Feminist Spectator as Critic

Introduction to the Second Edition

Introduction to the Second Edition For the Next Generation of Feminist Spectators: The New Normal The Feminist Spectator as Critic (FSAC) was written in the mid-­ 1980s, when I was finishing my doctoral degree in performance studies at New York University . Thinking back over these last twenty-­ five or so years, I’m amazed at how much has changed in American theatre and performance, the American academy, and other aspects of culture. In theatre, film, television, and the new media explosion wrought by the Internet, even the most prescient feminist spectator couldn’t have foreseen how dramatically the forms and contents through which we imagine our lives might change. In the cultural landscape of the mid-­ 1980s, women at best played second banana to male leads on television, or characters written as sexy but irrelevant girlfriends in film, and of course played a parade of predictable mothers, virgins, or whores in theatre. In the twenty-­ first century, complicated, central female characters full of quirky agency have become more and more common. Examples of women’s advances in popular culture since the mid-­ 1980s are surprisingly too numerous to list.1 But the last two and a half decades’ watershed moments offer heartening signs that gender equity is at least progressing in entertainment and the arts. But, as I’ll detail in this introduction, we still have a long way to go. Women’s gains and losses in theatre and performance, in particular, are more complicated and perhaps, on the aggregate, less positive. And all these culture changes since I was thinking through what it meant to be a feminist theatre critic in the mid-­ 1980s have occurred within a historical moment that’s oscillated wildly across the political spectrum, from a more progressive position at one end to a much more dangerously conservative place on the other. Despite how American culture and politics have or haven’t changed around this book, I hope the strategies it outlines for critical feminist spectatorship remain useful and generative. xiv   Introduction to the Second Edition Changing the Discourse of Theatre and the Feminisms Feminism begins with a keen awareness of exclusion from male cultural, social, sexual, political, and intellectual discourse. It is a critique of prevailing social conditions that formulate women’s position as outside of dominant male discourse. (FSAC, 3) American feminist criticism first began to analyze performance through the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the 1980s by addressing women’s status onstage—­ in the stories productions told—­ and offstage and examining the biases against women working in the theatre industry. The theoretical work of the mid-­to late 1980s in which FSAC took part shifted focus to analyze the styles, genres, and forms that delivered often oppressive representations of women.2 Feminist performance criticism was quickly transformed from an investigation of images of women in theatre and the roles women played in its production into a more theoretical interrogation of theatre’s representational apparatus and ideological work. Influenced by the poststructuralist theories of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and by French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, feminist performance theory raised questions about how theatre’s contents, forms, and structures both reflect and shape women’s lives ideologically and politically. Early in the history of this critique, feminist theorists brought theatrical realism, the mainstay of mid-­to late-­ twentieth-­ century traditional American theatre, under the microscope, examining its operations and diagnosing the form itself as “lethal” to women.3 Part of the antirealism phase of American feminist performance criticism came from a strict adherence to poststructuralist theory’s suspicion of power and Marxist criticism’s insistence on linking form and content to derive meaning from texts. Feminist performance theory agreed that power and ideology are inevitably written into form. Realism’s resolutely domestic locales, with its boxed sets; its middle-­ class, bourgeois proprieties; its Aristotelian plotlines, which encouraged psychological identification against women’s own good; and its rising action, crises, and denouements , was bound to marginalize women. Its conservative moralizing against outsiders who threaten the normative social order demonized those who don’t fit conventional models of white, male, middle-­ class, heterosexual decorum. To escape the constraints of the realist form, feminist performance theorists proposed, new contents should be developed in new narrative structures, more radical representational forms, and subcultural production contexts.4 Because conventional realism dominated Broadway and regional theatre production at the time, popular and mainstream theatre were dismissed with a quick slash...