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Lives in Play
Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage
By Ryan Claycomb The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11840-3
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 relatively little explored by their male counterparts." 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."
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 performativity 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 the epistemological and ontological binds posed by notions of an unmediated performance, the traps of essentialist logic, a performing body compromised by voyeurism, and the very impossibility of reliable reference through performance. And, for a time at least, this artistic and political struggle seems to come to rest on an emerging set of ideas about the historically contingent, discursively constructed, performative subject. The argument is a historical one and a formal one, suggesting that these performers were part of a very particular moment in the history of gender culture and performance and at the same time were forcing us as scholars of form to reimagine the possibilities and tenabilities of the self in performance.
Performing the Self: The Feminist and Queer Performance Boom
In their introduction to O Solo Homo, their 1998 collection of queer performance art pieces, David Román and Holly Hughes note a boom in queer performance art, even as funding streams were drying up at a disheartening rate. The same boom can be said to be true of feminist drama and performance (indeed, many of the pieces in both that volume and this study might be said to fit into both categories). Second-wave feminism from the late 1960s into the 1980s found female artists locating forums for performance in unprecedented numbers. At the height of this period in feminist performance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goldberg notes, performance art also took a turn toward theater. As it became more popular, "'new performance' was given the licence to acquire polish, structure and narrative." Even with such developments, the autobiographical turn remained in place for many of these performances: since many of these performers explicitly use their own bodies in space to create art, establishing the self as a component of their performances, even while in most conventional drama, that body is often used to depict a character, a fictive other who inhabits the body of the performer for a time.
Such performances through the 1980s begat a critical attention to the self in performance that took shape in the decade that followed. In his 1996 essay "Performing the Self," Marvin Carlson invokes Eric Bentley's simple "A impersonates B while C looks on" only to revise it as "A impersonates A while C looks on," suggesting at once an equation of actor and character but simultaneously indicating a similar sort of otherness in the term impersonates. Just over a year earlier, John Brockway Schmor is a bit more specific, depicting what he calls "confessional performance" as a form
in which the performer uses often intimately autobiographical text, chance improvisation and ritual to deconstruct or at least deflect traditional notions of identity and social reality. This form emphasizes almost exclusively the actual unmediated event in an inversion of traditional illusionist principles of theatre. Following Brecht, autobiographical performance art breaks theatrical illusion ... but unlike Brechtian theatre, such works disrupt even the illusion of the "real" event by problematizing the identity of the performing self.
Schmor's definition at once evokes the real that, however contested, is at the center of life writing and at the same time recognizes the degree to which that real is always up for debate, for reexamination. What we can say is this: the performer not only claims to be essentially the same as the character but is believed to be so both in the dramatic world and outside the dramatic frame. The identity of the character must referentially indicate the identity of the author/performer, even if it often problematizes it: "A impersonates A (or A', a public or stage self) while C looks on." Here, the tenuous, imbricated relationship between self-asactor and self-as-character becomes a specific site of theatrical play, calling into question the nature of identity and the ability of feminist performers to manipulate notions of identity once thought to be stable.
In the years that have followed, autobiographical performance has become a well-traveled subject; existing scholarship has already at least touched on the appeal of autobiography to feminist writers, the authority offered by the suggestion of presentness made by autobiographical performance, the ways in which the body-as-text and the life-as-construction in tandem reveal the performativity of everyday identity, and the community-building functions of performed autobiographical narrative. These subjects not only help establish the rhetorical power of autobiographical feminist performance but also indicate potential areas of inquiry for other genres of life writing. I am particularly interested, though, in the precise intersection between live performance and life narrative, what makes it so compelling for feminist rhetoric and politics, and what theoretical implications verifiable performing bodies have for constructed narratives of self. What we might seek here is the speaking subject onstage, as well as the agency to speak in public as a vehicle to determine (whether negatively or positively) an identity that the performer chooses to claim.
How that identity is constituted and constructed, however, has historically depended on the critical framework, the cultural moment, and the performance in question. On the one hand, even the earliest live performances of women's life narratives at once make political the personal, fulfilling the charge of that tried-and-true second-wave feminist slogan. Autobiographical narratives grant women the power to write their own stories. And by bringing the self to the stage, autobiographical performers assert themselves as politically viable speaking subjects. Yet because performance makes an object of the performer's body even as autobiography asserts her as the speaking subject, this simplistic notion of live presence as unassailable subjectivity goes inevitably awry. Instead, we see performers undermining their own assumed presence and apparent subjectivity, both by revealing the very constructability of the female body — as performers like Orlan and Kate Bornstein do — and by deconstructing the notion of the life narrative — as performers like Carmelita Tropicana and Bobby Baker do.
Heddon traces this earlier, second-wave-feminist line of thinking — one that tends to essentialize the self to the performing body — and links it explicitly to its political moment.
The translation of personal — or autobiographical — material into live performance was inarguably tied to consciousness-raising activities which focused analysis specifically on women's experiences (under the banner of "the personal is political"). ... If subjects of the "everyday" were not normally the matter of politics, neither were they the typical matter of contemporary art of theatre, and the entry of the explicitly personal into the aesthetic should itself be considered a political gesture. ... Consciousness-raising generated self-consciousness on the part of women which allowed an articulation of specifically female (everyday) experiences in art.
Underlying this political consciousness-raising is a theoretical conception of the self as specifically and inextricably linked to the live performing body. That is, the draw of autodiegesis here depends on the degree to which it emphasizes the speaking voice of the woman, the literalization of the vocal metaphor that makes performance even more potent. Writing in 1988, on the cusp of the performative turn in theory and criticism (indeed, in the same volume in which Judith Butler's early "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" appears), Jeanie Forte argues, "Women's performance art has a particular disruptive potential because it poses an actual woman as speaking subject, throwing that position into process, into doubt, opposing the traditional conception of the single, unified (male) subject." She goes on to connect the power of the speaking woman to the idea of the woman's body. According to Forte, presenting the female body as a subject instead of an object of the male gaze "clashes in dissonance with its patriarchal text, challenging the very fabric of representation by refusing that text." Forte not only recognizes the power of the speaking subject to define the actual woman but she also highlights the political importance of speech's ability to do so. The presence of the woman as speaker, woman as agent, woman as presence (as opposed to Lacanian notions of absence) situates feminist autoperformance at a particular political nexus of power that has until recently completely excluded women from speaking. Similarly, Catherine Elwes summarizes this position when she writes, "Performance is about the 'real-life' presence of the artist. She takes on no roles but her own. She is author, subject, activator, director and designer. When a woman speaks within the performance tradition, she is understood to be conveying her own perceptions, her own fantasies, and her own analyses." In this context, when interpreted as the unmediated presence of the woman as speaking subject, it is no wonder that autobiographical performance has been touted as a powerful tool for feminists.
Deconstructing the Unmediated Body as Object
Of course these assumptions, susceptible to charges of second-wave essentialism, draw some naive conclusions about the very possibility of an unmediated performance, conclusions that themselves have problematic implications. Foremost, by privileging the woman's body as a defining characteristic of women's agency, these performances tread dangerously close to an array of essentialist traps. To connect the female body to women's agency to speak in a new way may allow women access to a public space — and in the 1960s and 1970s this access was scarce. But as the relative success of feminist ideology in the 1970s has made women's roles more complex (and more varied), the use of the female body as a conduit to women's speech has itself become limiting. The assumption that "women's speech" is a category separate from male speech and connected exclusively to the female body still sets female speech off in its own corner, allowing that speech to be circumscribed, regulated, and ultimately marginalized once more.
Moreover, despite Forte's assertion that when assigned the subject position the woman's body disrupts the male symbolic order, the audience of autobiographical performance is still liable to objectify the performer — a symptom of both women's performance and autobiographical narrative. Brownley and Kimmich assert, for example, that "reading an autobiography is an act of voyeurism," while any female performer knows the consequences of the objectifying gaze: accounts of Karen Finley's career, for example, contain more than one anecdote about drunken frat boys heckling a naked woman smeared with chocolate. That much of feminist performance of the last forty years has relied on what Rebecca Schneider terms "the explicit body" underscores the body not only as a site of feminist resistance but also as a potential object of the male gaze, especially if viewed as the unmediated, coherent signifier of the self.
And while Elwes's statement about the presence of the self may suggest the potency of performance, it also represents a somewhat naive position on the truth claims that can be reliably forged by the narrative form of autobiography. Following Hayden White's historiographic notion of the narrativity of history, and onward to poststructuralist readings of autobiography by Paul John Eakin and Timothy Dow Adams, the notion of life writing as the sign of authenticity is contested at best, and possibly downright misleading. So while early feminist performance artists relied on personal experience specifically, and women's experience broadly, narratives of this experience are sometimes no more than representations, and therefore subject to a slipperiness of signification that defies authenticity. Furthermore, Sidonie Smith notes, "As it promotes a literary theory of reflectionism and transparency, the celebration of a reified 'experience' paradoxically obscures the influence of determining structures." As such, the very notion of personal experience that seemed initially to undergird the exigencies of feminist performance not only proves to be faulty as an authentic portrayal of women's selfhood but covertly supports the very "determining structures" that mask the operations of power in traditional male autobiographies like those of Saint Augustine and Benjamin Franklin. For these reasons, the appeal of feminist autobiographical performance as a tactic to establish the woman as publicly acknowledged speaking subject seems easily undermined, despite what was, through much of second-wave feminism, a desperate need to establish exactly that. These are the epistemological binds that cohered in particular around the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s: the problems of unmediated performance, gender essentialism, spectatorial (and governmental) voyeurism, and the very impossibility of reliable reference.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lives in Play by Ryan Claycomb. Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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