Restaging Feminisms

Elaine Aston

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030405885
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030405892
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Restaging Feminisms offers a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical, and socialist feminisms foundational to establishing feminist approaches to theatre. This lucid account of past-present connections to the staging of feminism assesses the legacies and renewals of all three feminist dynamics as they intersect with austerity Britain, the Weinstein watershed, and the #MeToo movement. Feminist politics, concepts, and the role of affect in the making of political attachments inform an approach that values understanding feminism's past as critical to reanimating and restaging socially progressive, feminist futures. The volume includes case studies of productions staged between 2016 and 2019: Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone; David Greig's version of The Suppliant Women; Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia; Nina Raine's Consent; Townsend Theatre's We Are The Lions Mr Manager; and Laura Wade's Home, I'm Darling. 

From an author with a pioneering and thirty-year-long commitment to the study of feminism and British theatre, Restaging Feminisms is for an intergenerational feminist-theatre readership: for those who are discovering relations between feminism and theatre for the first time and those re-encountering the feminist dynamics and their renewed resonance on the contemporary British stage.     

© The Author(s) 2020

E. AstonRestaging Feminismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40589-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Restaging Feminisms

Elaine Aston¹

(1)

Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Elaine Aston

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter introduces the premise of the study: a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical and socialist feminisms that were foundational to pioneering feminist approaches to theatre. Past-present feminism and theatre connections are introduced and explored in the context of feminism’s significant revival as a social movement. Both the vicissitudes of feminism since the seventies and the shifts in the feminist-theatre landscape are outlined. Part II of the chapter focuses on the legacies and renewals of feminist dynamics within the British theatre industry: the liberal-feminist demand for equality; radical-feminist resistance to sexual harassment in the industry; and the contestation of class and intersectional inequalities.

Keywords

FeminismsFeminist movementFeminist theatreAffectEquality & diversity in British theatre industry

End Abstract

Violet, white and green—these 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 ‘Give Women the Vote’. 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 today’s socially unjust and equality-resistant neoliberal Britain, women’s 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 2007–2008 has seen entrenched and deepening inequalities. Where the fight for women’s suffrage can be claimed as the coming of equality, one hundred years later neoliberal Britain aptly deserves the title of Beatrix Campbell’s 2013 manifesto: End of Equality. However, when equality is revoked, then, to quote Campbell’s subtitle: The Only Way Is Women’s 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. Today’s British feminists loudly chorus an end to the centuries-old ‘drama’ of patriarchy and voice commitments to any number of socially progressive struggles, protests and campaigns. They protest the erosion of women’s 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 women’s rights, through radical feminism’s protest against the violence perpetrated by patriarchalism, to the socialist-feminist analyses of the material circumstances of women’s 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 ‘the essentialist decade’ (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 Hesford’s Feeling Women’s Liberation (2013) offers a seminal re-evaluation of the seventies women’s liberation movement in the USA that intervenes in how the history of the movement was produced and recorded. Elsewhere, Finn Mackay’s 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 Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today, Kathi Weeks concludes: ‘I would like to consider it an open question whether the Today of the book’s title refers only to 1980 or if it could also refer to other times, even some that are yet to come’ (2014: xix).

Restaging Feminisms is inspired by this critical turn to feminism’s past—by the reassessment of seventies feminism as insightful to the urgency of ‘feeling women’s liberation’ in today’s 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 ‘ways to evaluate theatre work from within feminist politics’ and to understanding the ‘connection between the social [feminist] movement and the stage’ (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 Case’s 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

‘The Hard Road to [Feminism’s] Renewal’

Booking-ending Case’s 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 ‘hard road to renewal’?

My signposting of Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988), gestures to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal doctrine that she was determined to make hegemonic—politically, ideologically and economically. The ‘swing to the right’ (Hall 1988: 39), with its neoliberal economics, creed of competitive individualism and the erosion of social welfare, produced the ‘crisis’ 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 left’s inability to realign with social movements such as feminism. As Hall puts it in Gramscian terms, this was a failure to grasp how ‘the struggle to “remake society” has to be fought as a war of position, conducted on many different fronts at once’ (ibid.: 249). Equally, alongside this, the feminist ‘front’ was also in difficulty. As Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall explain, the rise of identity politics in the eighties made it ‘clear that the finely balanced tentative democracy of the WLM could not contain the identities that competed for attention’ (1993: 88). The category ‘women’ could no longer function as a signifier of feminism’s ‘tentative democracy’: the recognition of multiple competing identities (of race, class, or sexuality) dismantled the ‘basic premiss of feminism, that all women share some common political interests’ (ibid.: 89).

Going into the nineties without ‘common political interests’ left the British feminist movement fragmented. As such, it differed from the situation in North America where a third wave of feminism had more ‘popular purchase’ (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-feminism—‘posting’ tactics designed to outmanoeuvre feminist claims to the unfinished histories of equality. As Angela McRobbie explains, also in a Gramscian-informed analysis, ‘disarticulating feminism’ served to rearticulate a ‘new kind of regime of gender power’, one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Restaging Feminisms
• 2. Reviewing the Drama of Liberal Feminism
• 3. Acting Together: A Chorus of Radical-Feminist Protest
• 4. Towards the Great Moving Left Show? Recitals of Socialist Feminism
• Back Matter