Violet, white and greenâthese were the suffrage colours resurrected in 2018. On 10 June, thousands of women took to the streets of Belfast (Northern Ireland), Cardiff (Wales), Edinburgh (Scotland) and London (England), participating in a public artwork designed as a nationwide celebration of the centenary year of the Representation of the People Act (1918).1 As women paraded through the cities, they created a human banner in the suffrage colours: marched in lines banded green, white and violet to commemorate the suffragettes who demanded âGive Women the Voteâ. The marches were theatrical and celebratory; feminism symbolically flowed through the streets of each city. But flying under the human banner of suffrage were notes of contemporary protest: commemorating these past feminist struggles, women also were demonstrating that in todayâs socially unjust and equality-resistant neoliberal Britain, womenâs rights are far from achieved. Rather, they still urgently need to be fought for.
Indeed, the age of neoliberal austerity ushered in by the global banking crisis of 2007â2008 has seen entrenched and deepening inequalities. Where the fight for womenâs suffrage can be claimed as the coming of equality, one hundred years later neoliberal Britain aptly deserves the title of Beatrix Campbellâs 2013 manifesto: End of Equality. However, when equality is revoked, then, to quote Campbellâs subtitle: The Only Way Is Womenâs Liberation. Over the course of the last decade, feminism as a social movement has become more high profile than it has been since its second wave of activism in the seventies. Todayâs British feminists loudly chorus an end to the centuries-old âdramaâ of patriarchy and voice commitments to any number of socially progressive struggles, protests and campaigns. They protest the erosion of womenâs rights, demand an end to male violence against women and to oppressions formed by the socio-economic arrangements of a neoliberal order. Of course, as the astute, feminist reader will no doubt be quick to point out, none of these concerns are new. They all reverberate with feminist struggles of the seventies and the principal feminisms deployed to address them: from the liberal-feminist strategies to advance womenâs rights, through radical feminismâs protest against the violence perpetrated by patriarchalism, to the socialist-feminist analyses of the material circumstances of womenâs oppression.
Observing these past-present feminist connections, I also detected a revival of academic interest in second-wave feminism. Previously, in terms of feminist theory, seventies feminism had been widely cast as âthe essentialist decadeâ (Hemmings 2011: 40) and deemed outmoded in the light of subsequent iterations of feminism that seemingly progressed in a linear fashion from identity politics in the 1980s, through the poststructuralist play of differences in the 1990s, to the adoption of intersectional approaches in the twenty-first century. But the renewed feminist struggles have occasioned a critical (in all senses) recycling of the second wave. Victoria Hesfordâs Feeling Womenâs Liberation (2013) offers a seminal re-evaluation of the seventies womenâs liberation movement in the USA that intervenes in how the history of the movement was produced and recorded. Elsewhere, Finn Mackayâs Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement (2015) reclaims radical feminism for contemporary British feminist activism. Equally, writing the foreword to the new edition of Michèle Barrettâs Womenâs Oppression Today, Kathi Weeks concludes: âI would like to consider it an open question whether the Today of the bookâs title refers only to 1980 or if it could also refer to other times, even some that are yet to comeâ (2014: xix).
Restaging Feminisms is inspired by this critical turn to feminismâs pastâby the reassessment of seventies feminism as insightful to the urgency of âfeeling womenâs liberationâ in todayâs climate of anti-democratic neoliberalism. Specifically, I propose a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical and socialist feminisms that proved foundational to pioneering feminist approaches to theatre. Political understanding and application of the principal feminisms was seminal to what Sue-Ellen Case outlined in her groundbreaking Feminism and Theatre as the necessity of finding âways to evaluate theatre work from within feminist politicsâ and to understanding the âconnection between the social [feminist] movement and the stageâ (2008 [1988]: 2). Thus, revisiting the feminisms, I set out to explore the criticality, aesthetics and affective strategies of performances that variously recycle, reclaim or renew liberal-, radical- and socialist-feminist dynamics. In short, three decades after Caseâs landmark publication, Restaging Feminisms re-opens the forensic examination of the feminisms, their renewed relevance to the feminist movement and resonance on the contemporary British stage.
Part I: Reviewing Feminism and Theatre
âThe Hard Road to [Feminismâs] Renewalâ
Booking-ending Caseâs Feminism and Theatre with Restaging Feminisms necessarily invites the question of what happened to feminism in between times. To put this another way: it calls for consideration as to why, prior to the last decade, feminism as a political movement did not gain traction. Why was it such a âhard road to renewalâ?
My signposting of Stuart Hallâs The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988), gestures to Margaret Thatcherâs neoliberal doctrine that she was determined to make hegemonicâpolitically, ideologically and economically. The âswing to the rightâ (Hall 1988: 39), with its neoliberal economics, creed of competitive individualism and the erosion of social welfare, produced the âcrisisâ faced by all left-orientated movements, feminism included. Unable to make the political pendulum swing in the opposite direction, at governmental level the Labour Party was left in disarray. Moreover, it was not only the rise of the right that dismantled the Labour-left, but also the leftâs inability to realign with social movements such as feminism. As Hall puts it in Gramscian terms, this was a failure to grasp how âthe struggle to âremake societyâ has to be fought as a war of position, conducted on many different fronts at onceâ (ibid.: 249). Equally, alongside this, the feminist âfrontâ was also in difficulty. As Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall explain, the rise of identity politics in the eighties made it âclear that the finely balanced tentative democracy of the WLM could not contain the identities that competed for attentionâ (1993: 88). The category âwomenâ could no longer function as a signifier of feminismâs âtentative democracyâ: the recognition of multiple competing identities (of race, class, or sexuality) dismantled the âbasic premiss of feminism, that all women share some common political interestsâ (ibid.: 89).
Going into the nineties without âcommon political interestsâ left the British feminist movement fragmented. As such, it differed from the situation in North America where a third wave of feminism had more âpopular purchaseâ (Evans 2015: 3), albeit in a variety of often contradictory ways, ranging from conservatives such as Katie Roiphe or Naomi Wolf to radical third wavers who set a multiracial agenda (Heywood and Drake 1997). Contrastingly, coming out of the anti-feminist backlash of the Thatcherite eighties, British feminism proved susceptible to the sociocultural mainstreaming of post-feminismââpostingâ tactics designed to outmanoeuvre feminist claims to the unfinished histories of equality. As Angela McRobbie explains, also in a Gramscian-informed analysis, âdisarticulating feminismâ served to rearticulate a ânew kind of regime of gender powerâ, one ...