An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre

Elaine Aston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415087681
• eBook ISBN: 9781134882243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

At last an accessible and intelligent introduction to the energising and challenging relationship between feminism and theatre.
In this clear and enlightening book, Aston discusses wide-ranging theoretical topics and provides case studies including:
* Feminism and theatre history
* `M/Othering the self': French feminist theory and theatre
* Black women: shaping feminist theatre
* Performing gender: a materialist practice
* Colonial landscapes
Feminist thought is changing the way theatre is taught and practised. An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre is compulsory reading for anyone who requires a precise, insightful and up-to-date guide to this dynamic field of study.

1 BACKGROUND: Feminism and theatre studies

INTRODUCTION

In recent years feminism has proved, and is still proving, a vital and energizing challenge to the male bias of teaching and research across a wide range of academic disciplines. In the theatre academy, more commonly termed theatre studies, the impact of feminism has been felt at a much later stage than in its ‘sister’ disciplines, such as English studies. This is largely due to the way in which theatre studies as a discipline is itself a relatively new phenomenon: the first British university drama department opened at Bristol as late as 1947 (see Barker 1994; on earlier pioneering efforts see Thomson 1991; for American details see Case 1990:2, n.2). In general, drama departments evolved out of English departments which were (and in many instances still are) concerned with the teaching of plays as dramatic literature. The brief history of the discipline is therefore a troubled one in terms of its fight for autonomy and the recognition of its practices, which it is still in the process of defining (see Reinelt and Roach 1992:5).

Centrally, however, theatre studies set out to re-frame the study of drama as the study of theatre in its historical, theoretical, and practical contexts. Each of these three key areas has undergone conceptual and methodological shifts in the move towards a ‘new’ theorized field of theatre study. The importance of feminism in recent thinking about theatre history, theory, and practice is considerable. This current study sets out to demonstrate its importance through a survey of the feminist project(s) in theatre studies. The volume is offered as an accessible and practical guide to students of theatre desirous of understanding the ‘stages’ in feminism, and, hopefully, of making their own feminist interventions in the field.

Feminism and theatre history

Writing on the growth of theatre studies in the American context, feminist theatre academic Sue-Ellen Case comments, ‘as the study of theatre within theatre departments developed, it was dominated by the history of theatre, rather than its criticism’ (1990:2). This, on both sides of the Atlantic, was a consequence of the way in which theatre studies sought to re-locate the study of plays within their historico-theatrical contexts. Theatre, studied as dramatic literature in English departments, had been divorced from the context of its production. Theatre studies, however, began to examine the history of playing spaces, performance conditions, audience compositions, and the various artistic, social, and political functions assigned to theatre at different times. In this context, playtexts themselves, once ‘read’ as theatrical as opposed to dramatic texts, were seen to contain important information about aspects of their contemporary staging.

Moreover, a broad shift in critical thinking from a concern with the interiority of a text to the material concerns of its production called for a re-evaluation of the binary ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture divide. The impact of this on the study of theatre history resulted in the consideration of historical stages which had previously not been deemed worthy of study, on the grounds that they had no ‘great’ dramatic literature to offer (for example, the popular traditions of the nineteenth-century British stage). Examining the material conditions of theatre as a cultural form, a practice recognized as cultural materialism, furthered an understanding of the theatrical and social conditioning of a cultural past to be seen as a continuum of a materially-conditioned cultural present.

Understanding the cultural and material conditions of theatre past (and present) is central to a feminist re-framing of theatre history, which has its own questions to ask about how and why women’s work has been ‘hidden’ or marginalized. Writing in 1981, Nancy Reinhardt observes that ‘women’s studies in theatre criticism…is relatively new and in theatre history only just beginning’ (25). She makes the following suggestions for the theatre historian:

How might feminist thinking be applied to the standard non-verbal (pictorial) evidence that historians use to construct theories about past production? The theatre historian should re-examine this historical evidence with a lens which focuses more closely on the position of women in productions of earlier centuries. The dominant public action both on the stage and in the audience stresses a male world in which women are either kept to the sides, in recesses, or are placed on display for the male viewer.

(ibid.: 28–9)

By 1985, the year of the first British academic women’s theatre conference held at Warwick University, a ‘feminist thinking’, or rather re-thinking, of theatre history was shown to be well underway (see end of bibliography for full details of major national British women’s theatre conferences in higher education institutions). Different periods of theatre history from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century were re- examined by feminist approaches. The methodologies used to frame the historical material were a mixture of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. On the traditional side these included the ‘images of women in male-authored drama approach’ derived from feminist literary studies (see next section for further comment), and the empirical research of under/non- documented work by women in theatre. The conference also showed feminist intervention in more recent theoretical positions used to re- frame theatre history: a feminist appropriation of semiotics (see next section for explanation and details) critiqued the images of women in nineteenth-century theatre; feminist-cultural-materialist analysis alienated the representation of women (by men) on the Renaissance stage.

When Manchester University hosted a second major feminist theatre history conference in 1989, focusing specifically on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British stages, it demonstrated that there was now an established and growing body of feminist historico- revisionist activity in the field of theatre studies. The ‘new direction’ in theatre history was exposing the history of male domination of the stage and recovering women’s performance which, like so much of women’s culture, had been ‘hidden’ and silenced by a body of conservative, male criticism.

Feminist critical theory and theatre

Case’s comment, cited above, on the emphasis of theatre history within the theatre academy, is presented in her introduction to Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, where she outlines the resistance from theatre historians to the study of ‘new’ critical theory in theatre studies. She explains how both she and Timothy Murray, as editors of the American Theatre Journal in the 1980s, were criticized for publishing articles both specifically on ‘the feminist critique in theatre studies’, and generally on ‘critical theory in theatre studies’ (1990:1). As Case explains in a footnote to her introduction:

As editors of the journal, Murray and I were severely criticized for the predominance of articles that incorporated theory and specifically political theory into their content. This move was interpreted as a move away from what was perceived as the center of theatre studies—the traditional uses of theatre history. This so- called schism between theory and history beleaguered the journal, its parent organisation and theatre departments during the decade of the 1980s.

(ibid.)

Despite resistance from within the theatre academy, critical theory has continued to gain ground. As Reinelt and Roach explain in the introduction to Critical Theory and Performance, ‘there has been a theory explosion, and it has had important consequences for or both theatre studies and other humanities as well’ (1992:4). This controversial ‘theory explosion’, both in general terms and specifically in relation to feminism, may again be traced to the evolution of theatre studies as a discipline.

Although setting a practical agenda to the study of drama, theatre studies continued to rely heavily on the published playtext. However, in order to avoid the conventional ‘plays-as-dramatic-literature’ approach as practised in English studies, it looked for new ways of ‘reading’ texts. Central to these was and is the field of theatre semiotics. Semiotics offered an understanding of the theatrical text as a sign-system, and, moreover, provided a ‘language’ for the study of plays in performance. In the 1980s, the British theatre journal Theatre Quarterly (subsequently New Theatre Quarterly) published articles on theatre and semiotic theory (for examples see Bassnett 1980; Pavis 1985), although this semiotic ‘explosion’ of the 1980s also met with marked critical hostility (see Aston and Savona 1991:1). In addition to semiotics, there were several other spheres of critical theory in the 1980s which provided important frameworks and methodologies for the study of plays and performance. The field of theatre connected with disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. It was re-examined within the contexts of post-structuralism, post-modernism, and deconstruction; was cross-examined by the new historians, Marxist scholars, cultural materialists, and by the theory and practice of feminism (s).

As theatre studies was a late developer and the impact of feminism came much later than in other studies, feminist critical theory in theatre began by ‘borrowing’ from feminist projects in related disciplines. For example, pioneering feminist approaches to literature in English studies had established the deconstructive approaches to male-authored images of women in the canon of ‘classics’. Feminist theatre scholarship was subsequently able to draw on this work to develop a conceptual and methodological framework for critiquing how women are ‘imaged’ in dramatic texts. Unlike its literary ‘sister’, however, the feminist study of theatre had not only to ‘resist’ or re-read the written text, but also needed to find ways of ‘reading’ the performance context. Theatre studies looked to film and media studies where feminist scholarship focused on the construction of ‘woman’ as sign: an approach in which feminism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics was and is being used to understand how women are represented in cinematic texts and other cultural contexts.

The pioneering emphasis on understanding the construction of ‘woman’ as sign in mainstream (male) production contexts gradually gave way, however, to a field more centrally concerned with the theory and practice of women’s texts and performance contexts. Theatre scholarship in America has been the pioneering, driving force behind the theorizations of feminist theatre. Not only did Theatre Journal raise the profile of feminist critical theory and theatre under Case’s committed and admirable editorship, but the early 1980s also saw the founding of the journal Women and Performance, subtitled A Journal of Feminist Theory (for details and discussion see Dolan 1989a). Furthermore, in 1980 the Women’s Theatre Program was established as a sub-group of the American Theatre Association (now American Theatre in Higher Education). The inception of the WTP meant that it was possible to hold a WTP conference before each of the ATA’s annual ‘main’ conventions (see Dolan 1984:5). As Jill Dolan, reporting on the WTP conference in 1983, argues, ‘feminist theatre needs a national platform like the WTP to communicate its theory and work on a wider scale’ (1984:6).

Whilst the WTP offers a ‘national platform’ for women’s theatre in America, national conference networking in Britain has had to rely on the energies of individual women to create forums for discussion. Although slower to develop, feminist critical theory and theatre has begun to play a more central role in the British theatre academy. In 1989 Warwick’s newly formed Women and Theatre Newsletter (now a series of Occasional Papers) provided details of women’s theatre options running in fifteen institutions of Higher Education. Such courses were framed by the growing field of feminist critical theory used to explicate textual and performance analysis. By the time of the next Warwick conference in 1990, it was evident that there was a young generation of British feminist theatre scholars whose diverse paths of enquiry shared the commmon ground of wanting to understand and to theorize women’s creativity in theatre.

Feminism and theatrical practice/s

In so critical a period as today, those women who work in the theatre try, as a transitory step, to reduce the participation of men in their work. They prefer to work on texts written by women, or write or adapt texts themselves… These women even prefer to create their own settings, so that the male imagination cannot sneak back in with flamboyantly erected stage images that silently glorify the phallus.

(Pasquier 1986:197)

Feminist theorization of stage practice has been critical of those realist traditions of performance which work in tandem with dominant and oppressive representations of gender, and ‘glorify the phallus’ centre stage. In terms of contemporary theatrical practice, theatre studies remains centrally informed by the actor training programmes of Stanislavski and Brecht: between the art of ‘becoming’ the character and the work of demonstration. As feminism looked to a theatrical practice rooted in a desire for political change it rejected the Stanislavski- based legacy and found an ally in Brecht—not to adopt his performance methods, but to engage them in the staging of a feminist politics and aesthetics.

Moreover, as theatre studies, as conceived in its university context, had not set out to provide professional training for its students, it suffered from a gap between the academic context of its work and the work of professional theatre practitioners. Recognizing that contact with professional feminist practice is necessary if theatre studies is to participate in the challenge to the ‘male imagination’ which dominates the stage, feminist theatre practice has sought to bridge the gap between the academy and the profession. In America the WTP conferences provide a forum for bringing feminist academics and practitioners together (see Dolan 1984). In Britain the narrowing of the gap between the professional and the academic has been evidenced in the most recent of the women’s theatre conferences. In 1991 the Lough-borough conference was led by speakers and workshop leaders who were all professional women practitioners: directors, playwrights, and performers. At Warwick in 1992 the roundtable discussion on the figure of Medea, which concluded the conference, consisted almost entirely of professional participants (with only Susan Bassnett as Chair, and myself as participant, coming from an academic context). Given that the early women’s theatre conferences were almost entirely academic, in terms of speakers and audiences, this reversal is indicative of the extent to which theatrical practice is moving to the centre of feminist theatre studies.

THE PROJECT

My main objective in this study is, as I have stated, to offer an accessible overview of how and why feminism has been important to theatre studies, and the ‘stages’ of its impact on the discipline. Thus far, the field has been predominantly (although not exclusively) pioneered by American feminist theatre scholarship. The documentation and analysis of feminist theatre groups has been the subject of several full- length American studies (for examples see Brown 1979; Leavitt 1980; Natalle 1985). Important surveyings of the field have been published by feminist theatre scholars Keyssar (1984), Case (1988), and Dolan (1988). The American theatrical canon has been challenged in two volumes edited by Schlueter (1989; 1990). The advances made in the American sphere of feminist critical theory and theatre (as previously discussed) are evidenced in the recent publication of collections of essays edited by Hart (1989) and Case (1990). The work of the American feminist theatre scholars has, therefore, raised the profile of feminist practitioners working in a variety of performance contexts, and has, for example, given attention to American lesbian performers, female performance artists, the theatre created by women of colour, etc.

In a British context important early surveys include Itzin’s sampling of feminist theatre (1980), and Wandor (1986), though these are factual and descriptive rather than analytical. Goodman’s recent study (1993a) offers a more detailed sourcebook of contemporary feminist theatres. However, whilst stronger in the context of feminist theatre history (for examples see Gardner and Rutherford 1992; Howe 1992), the British field remains weak in the areas of feminist critical theory and theatrical practice. This present study, therefore, seeks to strengthen these aspects of the field through a transatlantic surveying of American feminist theatre scholarship, in conjunction with a high profiling of feminist practitioners and playwrights in a British context.

Feminism or feminisms? A note on terminology

Within the scope of this project there is not the space to devote chapters to defining feminism, or indeed defining theatre. Dolan, in the introduction to her study of feminism and theatre, usefully states that ‘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’ (1988: 3). Dolan continues, however, by stating that ‘the routes feminism takes to redress the fact of male dominance…are varied’, and that consequently ‘feminism has in fact given way more precisely to feminisms’ (ibid.). This present study works from the premise that the defining discourse of feminism is its critique of the ‘dominant male discourse’, and is specifically concerned with the identification and analysis of the feminist discourse in theatre. Yet it is also concerned with charting the different ‘routes’ feminism has travelled in theatre studies.

In particular, the study uses the three dominant feminist positions as they are recognized in British and American contexts as a frame of reference: bourgeois, radical, and materialist. Briefly, bourgeois or liberal feminism proposes the amelioration of women’s position in society without any radical change to its political, economic, or social structures, e.g. through legislative reform. Radical feminism locates the oppression of women in the patriarchal domination of women by men, and advocates the abolition of the man-made structures which reinforce genderbased inequality. (Radical feminism has more recently been termed cultural feminism, especially in American contexts. For discussion on this point see Dolan 1988:5–6.) Materialist feminism has now been widely adopted as the nomenclature for the theoretical position which in the 1970s was labelled as Marxist or socialist feminism. This position critiques the historical and material conditions of class, race, and gender oppression, and demands the radical transformation of social structures. (For an early and accessible introduction to these three feminisms see Beechy 1982; for an overview of their evolution linked to a theatrical context see Dolan 1988: Chapter 1). As the study examines these different feminist dynamics in the context of theatre, it charts not only the challenge which feminist theatre poses to the discourse of mainstream (male) theatre, but the dialectics of its own self-reflexive critique: from feminism to feminisms; from feminist theatre to feminist theatres.

The structure

The study is organized into two main parts: Part One surveys feminist approaches to the history, theory, and practice of theatre; Part T...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• AN INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM AND THEATRE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 BACKGROUND: FEMINISM AND THEATRE STUDIES
• PART I: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO THEATRE
• PART II: CASE STUDIES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY