Staging International Feminisms (Studies in International Performance)

Staging International Feminisms Edited by

Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Studies in International Performance

General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and culture as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS Christopher Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City Joanne Tompkins UNSETTLING SPACE Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre

Forthcoming titles: Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT

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Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–4435–0 (hardback) 1–4039–4436–9 (paperback) (outside North America only)

edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Staging International Feminisms

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978-1-4039-8701-3 hardback ISBN 10: 1-4039-8701-7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case 2007 Individual chapters © the contributors 2007

List of Figures

viii

Series Editor’s Preface

x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

1 Introduction Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Part I

1

Cartographies

7

2 Bloody Aprons: Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner and Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation Elin Diamond 3 Mind Yourself: On Soundwalking, Race and Gender Karen Shimakawa 4 Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms: Pollesch@Prater Katrin Sieg 5 The Queer Globe Itself Sue-Ellen Case

Part II

9 23

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Interventions

65

6 Actress Stories: Binodini and Amal Allana Bishnupriya Dutt

67

7 Stockholm Interventions: Feminist Activist Performance Tiina Rosenberg

76

8 Women’s Writing for Performance Project: ‘Making’ a Feminist Intervention Elaine Aston

86

9 Reconstructing a Diasporic Female Self in O Kyong-Sook’s Dictee – A Speaking Woman Jung-Soon Shim

95

v

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Contents

10 Giving Back to Judith: Laura Curino’s Una stanza tutta per me / A Room of My Own Roberta Gandolfi

104

11 Anticipating Globalisation: Rosamond Gilder and the International Theatre Institute Charlotte Canning

113

12 Exile and the Elusive Qualities of Time Julie Holledge 13 Cultural Memory in El Séptimo Cielo: An Inter-cultural Staging of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine Noelia Hernando-Real 14 Stretching Medea to Postmodern Sensibilities Elizabeth Sakellaridou 15 A Journey towards Sensitisation and Empowerment: Feminist Performance and Intervention Theatre in the City of Jaipur Asha Pande

121

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16 The Demon’s Nuns: Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Mexico) Diana Taylor

161

Part III

169

Manifestos

17 Reflection on the Work that is Being Done within FOMMA with Respect to Women, Gender and Patriarchy, Change, New Generations and New Technologies Isabel Juárez Espinosa

171

18 MAKE SOMETHING: A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

174

19 Pakistani Muslim Theatre at Home and Abroad: A Critical Manifesto for a Feminist Homecoming Fawzia Afzal-Khan

184

20 Reflections on My Literary Performance Theatre: A Manifesto for Nigerian Women 194 Irene Isoken Salami-Agunloye

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vi Contents

21 A Manifesto for an Israeli She Monster Yael Feiler

203

22 Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto Jill Dolan

212

Bibliography

223

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Contents vii

1. Binodinis young (Swarpa Ghosh) and old (Selima Raza) encountering their past. Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana. 2. The Baboo’s intrusion as patron and exploiter on a young Binodini (Natasha Rastogi). Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana. 3. Catti Brandelius as Miss Universum. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler. 4. Catti Brandelius as Professoran. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler. 5. Vayu Naidu’s performance storytelling workshop, Lancaster University. Photograph courtesy of the Women’s Writing for Performance Project. 6. Split Britches workshop with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Lancaster University. Photograph courtesy of Women’s Writing for Performance Project. 7. Chorus members enact the Korean Liberation Movement patriots, executed by the Japanese Imperial Army (Theatre Group Mythos). 8. Actor Kim Min-Jung dances the Salpuri dance under Taegukgi, the national flag of Korea (Theatre Group Mythos). 9. An image of Joan of Arc superimposed on the national flag of Korea, accentuating the theme of oppression (Theatre Group Mythos). 10. Laura Curino, Una stanza tutta per me. The setting: an empty cube on wheels with just a few pieces of furniture. Photograph by Giorgio Sottile, courtesy of Fondazione del Teatro Stabile, Torino. 11. Laura Curino, Una stanza tutta per me. The actress delivering her final speech. Photograph by Giorgio Sottile, courtesy of Fondazione del Teatro Stabile,Torino. 12. Rosamond Gilder in the late 1960s, not long after the US-ITI Center hosted the 1965 annual ITI Congress in New York City. Photograph courtesy of International

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List of Figures

List of Figures ix

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

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113 123 125 126 128 134

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153 155

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13.

Theatre Institute/Martha W. Coigney Collection, *T-Mss 2002–032. Billy Rose Theater Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Tomiko Takai performing Yokohama Noriko in the first part of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore. Tomiko Takai researching for the production of Exile in the South Australian desert. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore. Tomiko Takai performing the Traveller in the second part of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Tony Lewis. Tomiko Takai performing the final section of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore. Stage design for Act 1 of El Séptimo Cielo. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Pascual. Aitor Merino, Malena Alterio, Nathalie Seseña, Javier Gutiérrez and Manolo Caro in a scene from Act 1 of El Séptimo Cielo. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Pascual. Tamilla Koulieva as Medea and Yiannis Mavritsakis as Jason. Rehearsal photograph from the National Theatre production of Medea, directed by Stathis Livathinos (2003). Photograph courtesy of the National Theatre of Greece. MOW: family members overhear the amorous conversation of the Young Woman in the garden. Photograph courtesy of Chingari Theatre Group. MOW: Gandhari curses Krishna. Photograph courtesy of Chingari Theatre Group. Moi L’Interdite. Mouna asks the audience: ‘Why did my mother’s breasts shrivel without shedding a single drop of milk on seeing me?’ Photograph courtesy of Raj Kumar Chauhan. Intervention Theatre. Pre-performance ritual: the artists summoning a crowd in a village school by beating drums and singing folk songs. Photograph courtesy of J. P. Besnard. Intervention Theatre. Domestic violence: a young woman is beaten by her in-laws for not bringing enough dowry. Photograph courtesy of J. P. Besnard. Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (left) and Isabel Juárez Espinosa in The Demon’s Nun. San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Doris Difarnecio.

In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President, Janelle Reinelt, pledged the organization to expand the outlets for scholarly publication available to the membership, and to make scholarly achievement one of the main goals and activities of the Federation under her leadership. In 2004, joined by Vice-President for Research and Publications Brian Singleton, they signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, ‘Studies in International Performance’. Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to those familiar in our home countries, but also in order to be engaged in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to contribute to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation.

International Federation for Theatre Research Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale

x

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Series Editor’s Preface

Fawzia Afzal-Khan is Professor at Montclair State University, New Jersey. She is author of Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in the works of R. K. Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie (1993) and A Critical Stage: the Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (2005). With Kalpana SeshadriCrooks she edited The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (2000) and recently edited the best-selling anthology Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (2005). She has published in NWSA Journal, The Drama Review, Social Text, Womanist Theory and Research, Wasafiri and The Journal of South Asian Studies and serves on the Advisory Board of the South Asian Review. She has held the W. E. B. Dubois Fellowship at Harvard University, a Rotary Fellowship, an American Institute of Pakistan Studies grant and a Fulbright scholarship. She is a performance artist, working in the classical vocal north Indian tradition, and founding member of the theatre collective, Faim de Siècle, with whom she recently performed at the world premiere of Five Streams at Asia Society, in Manhattan. She is also a published poet, twice awarded of finalist status at the Annual Greenburgh Poetry Festival, New York, contributor to the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Eastern Poetry, and is currently completing a memoir, Sahelian: Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK, where she teaches and researches feminist theatre, theory and performance, a field in which she is widely published. Her authored studies include An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995); Caryl Churchill ([1997] 2001); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003). She has co-edited four volumes of plays by women and The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (co-edited with Janelle Reinelt, 2000). Her most recent publication is Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory (co-edited with Gerry Harris, 2006). She currently serves as associate editor of Theatre Research International. Charlotte Canning is Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Feminist Theatres in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience (1996) and The Most American Thing in xi

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Notes on the Contributors

America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (2005). Her articles have appeared in various journals, including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey and Theatre Research International, as well as several anthologies. She is the department’s head of graduate studies and a past president of the American Society for Theatre Research. Sue-Ellen Case is the Professor and Chair of Theater Critical Studies and Director of the Center for Performance Studies at UCLA. Her first book, Feminism and Theatre (1988), was a pioneering text in the field. She has published widely in most of the major journals in the field and served as editor or associate editor of many of them. She has edited numerous anthologies of plays and critical articles, including Performing Feminisms (1990), Split Britches: Lesbian Practice, Feminist Performance (1996) and The Divided Home/Land: Contemporary German Women Playwrights (1992). Her second book, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (1996), concerns gender and new technologies. Her most recent book, Performing Science and the Virtual (2006), traces the performative reception of science from Faust to the internet. Elin Diamond is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New York. She is the author of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (1997) and Pinter’s Comic Play (1985), and editor of Performance and Cultural Politics (1996). Her essays on performance and feminist theory have appeared in Theatre Journal, Elh, Discourse, The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Kenyon Review, Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, Art and Cinema and Maska, and in anthologies in the US, UK, France, South Korea and India. She is currently working on a new typescript on Modernism and performance. Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1989), Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (1993), Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (2001) and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005). She co-edits the ‘Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Drama/Theatre/Performance’ series for the University of Michigan Press. Her articles on performance and gender, sexuality, social change and arts advocacy have been published in Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Modern Drama and Theatre Topics, among many other publications. Dolan is past president of the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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xii Notes on the Contributors

(ATHE) and a past president of ATHE itself. She was executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University, New York. She now heads the Performance as Public Practice MA/MFA/PhD Program at UT, where she is also a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Dolan’s blog, ‘The Feminist Spectator’, can be found at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com. Bishnupriya Dutt is a scholar and practitioner, and currently Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Set up in 2001, the department looks at both visual and performance arts and is the first of its kind in India to look exclusively at theoretical and research perspectives. As one of the two members of the Faculty for Performing Arts, Bishnupriya has played an important role in designing postgraduate courses, initiating research projects and setting up a reference and research-based archive. She is currently conducting a major project for the University Grants Commission on documenting marginalised performance and women performers. Her specialisation includes modern to contemporary theatre (colonial and postcolonial perspectives), research methodology, dramatic critical literature and popular performances and the comic traditions. Her publications include The Jatra, a ‘Theatrical Form’ (forthcoming) and Feminist Performance and Critique in Contemporary Indian Dance and Theatre, co-authored with Urmimala Sarkar (forthcoming, 2008). Yael Feiler teaches at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Stockholm, Sweden. Her main subjects are postcolonial theory and discourse theory. Feiler’s research focuses on theatre viewed within a certain ideological/political context. She has recently been exploring the relationship between feminism and nationalism as it manifests in contemporary Israeli drama, and published Nationen och hans hustru: feminism och nationalism israel med fokus pa[o] Miriam Kainys dramatik [The Nation and His Wife: Feminism and Nationalism in Israel as Seen through the Plays of Miriam Kainy] (2004). She is currently working on a project dealing with audiences’ reception of productions in Sweden and Germany of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and published Shakespeares Shylock och antisemitism [Shakespeare’s Shylock and AntiSemitism (co-edited with Willmar Sauter, 2006). Roberta Gandolfi is lecturer in theatre studies at the University of Parma, Italy. She teaches and researches twentieth-century theatre in Europe, with a focus on women and theatre directing. Her publications 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Notes on the Contributors xiii

include La prima regista: Edith Craig, fra rivoluzione della scena e cultura delle donne [The First Woman Director: Edith Craig, between Revolution of the Stage and Women’s Culture] (2003) and essays on the Italian actress Maria Melato, collected in Maria Melato: Il mito dell’attrice [Maria Melato: The Myth of the Actress] (2000). She is co-curator of ‘Spectacular Women’, a special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies 11:3 (2004). Noelia Hernando-Real teaches English and American Literature at La Salle College, Madrid, Spain. She works for a research project on Contemporary Literature in English, called ‘Re-figuring the Body: Re-inventions of Transcultural Bodies in British, North-American and Canadian Theatre and Fiction from 1980 to the Present’, at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published in the Journal of Indo-Canadian Studies, and has articles on the work of American dramatist Susan Glaspell in Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text (ed. Barbara Ozieblo and Lola Narbona, 2006) and Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (ed. William Demastes and Iris Smith Fisher, 2007). Julie Holledge is Professor of Drama and Director of the Flinders University Drama Centre, Australia. She began her career as an actor and director in the British alternative theatre movement in the 1970s, and moved to Australia in the early 1980s. She established a research centre for performance at Flinders, which has evolved into the Australian Performance Laboratory (APL). The current focus of the laboratory is intercultural performance and new technologies. Major publications include her groundbreaking study Innocent Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre (1981); her most recent work is Women’s Intercultural Performance (co-authored with Joanne Tompkins, 2000). In addition, Holledge has dramaturged and directed intercultural productions with Filipino and Japanese artists which have appeared in international arts festivals. She is past president of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and the chief investigator of AusStage, a major infrastructure research project funded by the Australian Research Council. Isabel Juárez Espinosa is co-founder of FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya or, the Empowerment of Mayan Women), the Mayan Indian women’s centre in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. FOMMA received a national award from the Mexican Institute of Research on the Family and Population (IMIFAP) in 1999. Isabel performs and writes 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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xiv Notes on the Contributors

Notes on the Contributors xv

Asha Pande is currently Head of the Department of Modern European Languages at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She is vice president of the Association of Indian Teachers of French. She is the founder of the Indo-French Cultural Society, Jaipur (active since 1982), and of Alliance Française, Jaipur (established 1999). She has also produced several plays and has translated Moi l’Interdite and La Cantatrice Chauve into Hindi. Tiina Rosenberg is Professor in Gender Studies and theatre scholar at Lund University, Sweden. She has written extensively on performing arts, queer theory and feminism. Her monographs include Byxbegär [Desiring Pants] (2000) and Queerfeministisk Agenda [Queer Feminist Agenda] (2002) which deal with cross-gender performance, queer theory and feminism. She has published a study of Swedish feminist theatre, Besvärliga människor: Teatersamtal med Suzanne Osten [Troublesome People: Theatre Talks with Suzanne Osten] (2004), and Könet brinner! Judith Butler’s texter i urval [Gender is Burning! A Collection of Judith Butler’s Texts] (2005), and translated Butler’s Undoing Gender into Swedish (2006). With Lena Hammergren, Karin Helander and Willmar Sauter she wrote a history of Swedish theatre, Teater i Sverige [Theatre in Sweden] (2004). Her most recent book is L-Word: Where Have All the Lesbians Gone? (2006), and she is currently working on a project on Zarah Leander as queer diva: If You Want to see a Star of Shame, Look at Zara! Elizabeth Sakellaridou is Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of English, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. She has published extensively on Anglo-American theatre and on the theory and politics of performance, especially in the area of gender studies. Her most recent work is Contemporary Women’s Theatre (2006). Her current research focuses on performativity and melancholia in tragedy. Irene Salami-Agunloye is Professor at the University of Jos, Nigeria, where she is the chair of the Department of Theatre and Communication Arts, and project director of the Gender Equity Project. Among her many other offices she has been national president of the National Association of Women Academics in Nigeria (1998–2004), and is currently resource officer for gender and development in several UN organisations (UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNIFEM) World Bank and ActAid in Nigeria. In 2004–5 she held a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship at 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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plays, and is the author of Cuentos y teatro tzeltales (1994). Her work appears in Spanish and bilingual versions.

xvi Notes on the Contributors

Peggy Shaw is an actor, writer and producer. She co-founded The Split Britches Theater Company with Lois Weaver (www.SplitBritches.com), and the OBIE award-winning WOW Café. She has received three OBIE awards for her work with Split Britches – for performances in Dress Suits to Hire, Belle Reprieve and Menopausal Gentleman, directed by Rebecca Taichman. She also played Billy Tipton in the American Place production of Carson Kreitzer’s The Slow Drag. Peggy recently toured with her show To My Chagrin, which she created through a Rockefeller Map Grant in collaboration with musician and sound designer Vivian Stoll, directed by Lois Weaver; and a revival of Dress Suits to Hire (a collaboration with Lois Weaver and Holly Hughes) for Split Britches’ 25th anniversary. Split Britches is also a part of Staging Human Rights, which works in prisons in Rio de Janeiro and England. Peggy has been a collaborator, writer and performer with Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater. Peggy won the New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Emerging Forms in 1988, 1995, 1999 and 2005; she also won the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award for ‘excellence in making the world a better place for gays and lesbians’ and a 2003 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre. The Foundation for Contemporary Performance recently awarded her the Theatre Performer of the Year. Michigan Press will publish a new book on Peggy, edited by Jill Dolan, which includes the scripts for her three solo shows You’re Just Like My Father, Menopausal Gentlemen and To My Chagrin. Peggy is a freelance teacher of writing and performance around the world. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor in the English Department, Soongsil University, Seoul, South Korea. She is also a theatre critic and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT). She won the Best Critic of the Year Award in 2003 (Korean Association of Arts Critics) and the Yuh Suk-ki Best Theatre Critic Award in 2004 (Korean Association of Theatre Critics). She has published several books and articles on interculturalism, feminism and Korean theatre, including Globalization and Korean Theatre, Volumes 1 and 2 (2003), Sexuality and Popular Culture: A Female Gaze (2000) and Feminism and Korean Theatre (1999). Karen Shimakawa is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. Her research interests include Asian-American 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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UCLA, California. A pioneer of African feminist playwriting, Salami has five major plays in publication: Emotan, Queen Sisters, More than Dancing, Sweet Revenge and Warrior Queen.

performance, critical race theory and intercultural performance. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian-American Body Onstage (2003) and co-editor of Orientations: Mapping Studies of the Asian Diaspora (with Kandice Chuh, 2002). Her current research project is Somatic Citizenship, a study of the embodiment of cultural identities. Katrin Sieg is Associate Professor affiliated with the BMW Center for German and European Studies and the German department at Georgetown University, USA. She is the author of Exiles, Eccentrics, Activists: Women in Contemporary German Theatre (1994) and Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002). Her areas of expertise are twentieth-century German theatre and performance, and feminist and queer theory. She is currently working on a book about German popular culture, gender and globalisation. Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of Theater of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), which won the Outstanding Book Award from ATHE and the Kathleen Singer Kovaks Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2004. She has edited and co-edited seven volumes on Latin and Latino American theatre and performance including Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform; Defiant Acts: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich (a bilingual edition), Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality, The Politics of Motherhood: Activists’ Voices from Left to Right and others. Diana Taylor is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the following foundations: Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon and Whiting. She was also a Salzburg Seminar Presidential Fellow. She is the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a consortium of institutions, artists, activists and scholars dedicated to the exploration of the intersections of performance and politics in the Americas. Lois Weaver is Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Queen Mary University of London and is an independent performance artist, director and activist. She was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre and the WOW Theater in New York and artistic director of Gay 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Notes on the Contributors xvii

Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has been a performer, director and writer with Split Britches since 1980. Her interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, and performance and human rights. She is involved in Staging Human Rights, a People’s Palace Project initiative which uses performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK. She collaborated with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris on three projects: On the Scent, an investigation of the relationship between smell and memory; Lost and Found, a human portrait of urban regeneration; and Dirty Laundry, a video performance commissioned by Franklin Furnace in New York. She was director and dramaturge for Peggy Shaw’s To My Chagrin and Holly Hughes’ Preaching to the Perverted. She was artistic director for Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on the themes of performance and human rights held in London in 2006 and is producing director for East End Collaborations, an annual platform for emerging live artists. Lois tours with her solos Faith and Dancing and What Tammy Needs to Know and is developing a new performance entitled Diary of a Domestic Terrorist.

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xviii Notes on the Contributors

Staging International Feminisms: Introduction Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Feminist Research Working Group: a brief history This anthology celebrates twelve years of collective international scholarship in the Feminist Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). The group convenes its programmes of shared scholarship through annual conferences, internet communications and specially convened meetings. It has met in various cities, including Moscow, Sydney, Puebla (Mexico) and Stellenbosch (South Africa). Over the years the Group has sought to enable a rigorous dialogue of discovery and debate concerning women’s theatre and performance work across cultures. The Feminist Research Group was first formed in 1994 at the IFTR World Congress held in Moscow, when the theatre scholar Christine Dymokwski was approached by the Federation to inaugurate a feminist group. Deciding that the feminist nature of the project should encourage collaboration at its base, Christine invited her colleague Jacky Bratton to co-convene the first meeting, which attracted contributors from Italy, Slovakia, Sweden, the UK and US. In the 18 papers presented, feminist approaches emerged as the predominant method of enquiry, alongside discussions of emerging feminist theories, histories and contemporary performance practices. If there was a key moment in the Group’s first meeting, it was, arguably, when members were presented with Nadezˇda Lindovaská’s paper, ‘Feminism is a Dirty Word in Slovakia’.1 Faced with a presentation about a society and theatre culture that, for complex reasons, did not want to enunciate a feminist agenda, the Group felt moved to consider – or perhaps to rethink – the different national and economic relationships to notions of gender equity. This intervention destabilised the previously untested methods 1

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of feminist scholarship that assumed a shared canon and what had been assumed as the role of feminist research. At this moment, the Group was made dramatically aware that they were meeting in Moscow – a capital of economic and ideological difference from the West. Rather than producing resistance, the direct experience of cultural difference nurtured a desire for continuing to create international feminist research connections. In 1997 Janelle Reinelt, a member of the IFTR’s Executive Committee, invited Sue-Ellen Case to serve as convenor. Sue-Ellen first convened the Group in Puebla. Scholars from around the world met in anticipation of an international and inter-ethnic feminist dialogue with each other, but in that moment, discovered the possibilities and exigencies of working with local feminist performers and activists. This discovery meant that the conference practice that assumes English as the lingua franca, or the privileged language of communication, could no longer obtain. Instead, two members of the group, Alicia Arrizón and Diana Taylor, volunteered to work as translators for local women in order to facilitate dialogue. As the room filled with local Mexican women, the Group became aware of its relative isolation within an academic environment, produced by the material privilege of subsidised conference travel. At the same time, the potential for feminist encounters beyond the conference format inspired the Group to adopt the practice of local meetings when and wherever possible. In subsequent meetings, for example, the Group interacted with performers at a feminist cultural centre in Amsterdam and with women from the theatre scene in Sydney. Beyond the original format of sharing research papers, the Group then expanded its programme to include meetings with local feminist performers and activists, sessions on current issues for women in crisis in their social and economic situations, the sharing of videos of local performances, discussions of feminist pedagogical practices and, perhaps most important, developing feminist friendships. For many women, who identify as feminist in a context hostile to feminism in their local institutions and cultures, the Group creates opportunities to be in touch with feminist colleagues and helps to sustain their own ongoing research and practice. At the heart of the Group’s research agenda were questions that centred on how, given its international membership, the Group could destabilise the presiding Anglo-American feminist critique, through explorations of different performance practices, national agendas and cultural constructs. This investment in difference called into practice 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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2 Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

feminist interrogations of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World feminisms; studies of inter-ethnic strife, critiques of transnational processes of globalisation, research into varieties of transgender identification and minority sexual practices, and the embrace of the term ‘performativity’, as a way to look beyond the traditional parameters of performance. The research topics of individual scholars were taken up in a collective discussion that interrogated its given cultural assumptions, ultimately situating the study within a heterogeneous field of feminist cultural practices. Continuing to haunt the meetings was the attempt to engage differences in languages, both spoken and embodied. Different traditions of gendered gestural systems, scripts whose words were so culturally-specific they could not be translated, narratives with unfamiliar historical referents and locally specific sexual practices that did not fall into either heteronormative or ‘queer’ categories, all challenged the assumed category of ‘women’. These discussions invigorated both individual and collective scholarship, attracting new members and sustaining a core. By the time of the 1998 World Congress, the Group’s membership had increased significantly while its international scope had grown to include feminist theatre scholars from Egypt, Korea, Malaysia, Japan, China, Germany, Sweden, the UK, US, Italy and India. The size of the group and its energy made it one of the most vibrant Working Groups in the IFTR. A marker of its success was reflected in a special edition of Theatre Research International (1999) on feminist performance scholarship composed of articles from members of the Group, co-edited by Sue-Ellen and Jung-Soon Shim (South Korea).2 More recently, at the Helsinki Congress 2006, the entire IFTR celebrated the feminist agenda the Group represents. In her keynote address, Lois Weaver asked all the members of the Feminist Research Group to identify themselves by standing up. Then she asked everybody in the lecture hall who supported the Group’s goals to stand up. The entire hall rose to its feet.

Introducing this anthology In many ways, this anthology reflects the history of the Feminist Research Working Group and points to its dialogues, discussions and discoveries. While this is, first and foremost, a consolidation and celebration of that history and our academic scholarship, at the same time we have tried to resist the idea that our endeavours are unproblematic in terms of generating an international feminist dialogue. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Introduction 3

In problematising our labour we are also signalling key issues that require ongoing critical care and attention. First, and perhaps most problematic, is the translation of all contributions into English. We understand that this requirement and the choice of an English press to distribute the work of the Group retain traditional colonial trafficking patterns. The hidden labour of translation on the part of many authors in this volume needs somehow to be made visible and honoured. Nevertheless, we feel that a feminist appropriation of the right to publish and to disseminate is crucial to the project of imagining an international feminist dialogue. Second, while a published collection often tends to imply some kind of unifying agenda or concept, we have been resistant to the idea that the anthology should ‘collect’ papers into a seemingly homogenised ‘thesis’ on international feminism, theatre and performance. Rather, our aim has been to capture the critical endeavours, contestations and discoveries that have taken place in the Group’s discussions; to bring differently located feminisms and theatre cultures together – beside, alongside and in critical dialogue with each other, but not at the expense of each other. Having made that point, however, it ought to be noted that a certain traffic in feminist performance becomes evident in the various stagings of playwrights, performance strategies and common theoretical assumptions across contributions. The plays of Caryl Churchill, the image of Virginia Woolf, Western classical drama, legacies of feminist agitprop performances and common critical strategies illustrate an international feminist performance practice and scholarship. Yet these same shared materials and strategies reveal the continuing primacy of the UK/US feminist movements. In a volume such as this, situating that primacy alongside feminist cultures from Nigeria, India or Korea, mirrors the Group’s practice of opening up more familiar forms of Western feminism and theatre to contestation and debate. Our debate commences in Part I, ‘Cartographies’, on feminist critical navigations of the global arena. Contributions test the structures of identification for their racialising, normalising codes. They interrogate the theoretical models that pose a global consciousness, ask feminist questions of social and cultural relations, and challenge the universalising idea of globalisation. In these essays, feminist and queer theorisings of global traffic locate their arguments in a range of theatre and performative contexts – including the theatrical work of René Pollesch, Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner, the virtual staging of subcultural New York in commercially-based ‘Soundwalks’ – as well as queer ‘cruising’ of the globe. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Part II, ‘Interventions’, illustrates the necessity of recording the precise conditions of individual performances. Contributions to this part document some of the ways in which feminists are working in the streets, theatres and institutions of India, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Mexico, Italy, Korea, Greece and the US/UK. Individually and together, these essays reveal how feminist performance plays an activist role in resisting oppressive gender regimes. They reflect different kinds of interventionist strategies and contexts: in specific productions (Dictee/ Korea, Cloud Nine/Spain, Medea/Greece); in the efforts of individual women (Rosamund Gilder/US, Laura Curino/Italy, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa/Mexico), and in both project-based and agitprop interventions (in Jaipur, Stockholm and Lancaster). They detail solo and group performances; street and mainstream theatre – a whole range of theatre work, in short, that in some way or other offers unique and powerful strategies for imagining social change through performance. Finally, Part III, ‘Manifestos’, looks at the feminist possibilities for ‘making’ change. Written out of the experience of particular national cultures – as indeed all of the contributions to this volume are – each manifesto argues for practical, creative strategies or performance examples of theatre-making that help ‘us’ to conceive of a world where the oppression, violence and terror experienced in different places and countries – Nigeria, Israel, US, Pakistan, Mexico – might be imagined as ‘undone’. As with the ‘Interventions’ these feminist manifestos look to an ‘undoing’ that is effective beyond the theatre in bringing about social change. More particularly, while as manifestos these writings aspire to change, they also reflect experiences of having already made a difference – whether through the performance practice of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, founding members of the lesbian theatre company Split Britches, whose work has inspired and sustained feminist scholars, nationally and internationally, or the political and creative work and influence of Irene Isoken Salami-Agunloye in Nigeria, and Isabel Juárez Espinosa in Mexico. Resisting at this juncture the temptation to list the merits and achievements of all of our contributors, we would like to acknowledge that as much as the materials dealt with in all three parts offer important reflections on feminist theatre and feminist theatre research internationally, it is also the case that individual contributors are themselves important to ‘making’ a feminist difference in their academic and professional theatre cultures. While many contributors have been working for decades helping to shape and sustain a body of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Introduction 5

feminist theatre research and practice, others are engaged with bringing feminism to theatre cultures where, without their individual endeavours, there would be no feminist perspective at all. Thinking of the three parts (and our contributors) together, if there is one thing they share, it is a recognition of the necessity for feminism to be at work internationally. This runs counter to a prevalent idea of feminism, in the West at least, as having played out its role, outlived its usefulness. The feminisms as encountered in this volume have urgent stories to tell: of racialised, sexualised oppressions; and of contemporary violence, inequities, injustices, against women. Theatres of feminism ask, if not demand, that those stories are ‘written’, seen, imagined and lived differently. Finally, this volume represents more than the specific individuals and materials collected here. Not just those women writing for this publication, but all of those women who have participated in the Group throughout its existence have made this anthology possible. This volume is dedicated to their feminist generosity.

Notes 1. Subsequently published as ‘“Feminism” is an Insult in Slovakia’, Theatre Journal 47:3 (October 1995): 381–92. 2. Special edition, Theatre Research International 24:3 (1999).

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6 Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Part I

Cartographies

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Bloody Aprons: Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner and Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation Elin Diamond On Wednesday, 19 March 2003, I saw Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York City. With the image of Hester Smith’s bloody apron still in mind, I hailed a taxi for Penn Station. My Lebanese cab driver had his radio on and we both grunted in disgust at the breaking news that George W. Bush, President of the United States, had ordered the bombing of Iraq in arrogant disavowal of months of mass protests around the world. The link between Parks’ play about maternal suffering and revenge, poverty and political violence in a nameless, postcolonial backwater and my feminist optic on Bush’s policy of blood and global disaster was, at the very least, complexly mimetic. Bush disguised violent aggression with patriotic cant and hid from public view the political complexities, economic costs and, as it would develop, the bloodied remains of his war’s victims. Feminist theatre at its best works against such mystifications, exposing social contradictions in order to interrupt critically and subtly the seeming inevitability of acts like the Iraq war (which Bush justified with the never substantiated claim that Iraq’s government was behind the ‘terror attacks’ on New York City and Washington on 9/11). Unlike Bush’s revenge rhetoric, the stage blood in Parks’ Red Letter Plays (Fucking A, 2000 and In the Blood, 1999) and in Deborah Warner’s production of Medea (opening in Dublin in 2000 and New York in 2002) proved to be complexly referential: it signified the irrational causality of the revenge play, but worked dialectically against type, as though the act of infanticide undertaken by women who are mothers had to be understood both as a terrible consequence of converging acts and as a component in the real business of killing – as though events on stage were detachable to other sites and times. 9

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In this chapter, I constellate Deborah Warner’s production of Medea, which I saw in October 2002, and Parks’ Red Letter plays with other sites and times. By ‘constellate’ I echo Walter Benjamin’s notion of constellations as invented critical collages composed of non-identical similars – texts, empirical data, figures – for the purpose of producing new knowledge, illuminating new critical terrain. For Benjamin the past and the present collide in a constellation that ‘flashes up in a moment of danger’, unhinging the past from its givenness and awakening us from modernity’s dream of progress.1 To argue that postmodernists already heavily ironise such progress myths is to miss the experiential depletion that Benjamin addressed in the 1930s and that still weakens us today: the inability to break from the recent past and to re-imagine the present. In the ‘profane illuminations’ Benjamin saw in surrealist art, the impenetrable and the everyday perform a dialectical dance, becoming intimately intertwined.2 In such constellations, what seems at first to be utterly abstracted, reified or mystified breaks down into familiar objects; conversely, what looks everyday and commonplace is shown (through critical labour) to be embedded in mysterious, impenetrable abstract forces. Present/past collisions and the everyday/impenetrable will be our critical tools in exploring Parks’ plays and Warner’s production of Medea. Specifically, the impenetrable refers to the abstract forces of globalisation and the everyday, to the mundane deprivations it produces. The ‘dialectic’, in this Benjaminian context, is not the post-Hegelian construction reiterated by Hardt and Negri – the binary thinking that grounds identity in self/ other, inside/outside formulas – but rather a critical procedure that illuminates concealed interconnections and thus possibilities for resistance.3 The director Deborah Warner and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks are, as it were, self-constellating theatre workers. Warner understands the human face of abstract violence better than any director I know, and Parks loves to take a razor to the tight mesh of American canonicity, opening fictional texts and historical narratives to the rude tactics of ‘repetition and revision’.4 Warner and Parks breathe the same opaque air we all do, experiencing, but not knowing or seeing the web of effects that shape our social reality. In this chapter I want to suggest that what some of us base our scholarly work on – namely, performance by politically aware women – is itself a critical terrain, arguably the most persuasive critical terrain for thinking about, and against, the impenetrable/everyday of globalisation. But first we need to define this massive term. Marx, among others, long ago understood how modernity was uniting the world, how capitalism by its nature produces imperialism through wars of commercial expansion. But it was not until the 1960s that the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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term ‘globalisation’ began to refer to a shift in the scale of social interconnection across the world’s regions and continents.5 Put succinctly, contemporary globalisation refers to the integration of many local and national economies into a single global market, regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO; established as recently as 1995), whose rules supersede the national law of any signatory nation and are rationalised by a distinctive version of liberal political theory called neoliberalism.6 As Alison Jaggar puts it, ‘neo’ may sound ‘novel’, but in fact marks a ‘retreat from the liberal social democracy of the [post-Second World War years] back toward the nonredistributive laissez-faire liberalism of the 17th and 18th centuries, which held that the main function of government was to make the world safe and predictable for the participants in a market economy’ (Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women’, p. 195).7 The WTO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were all established to prevent drastic fluctuations in the global market. And their method, first, last and always, is to perpetuate the myth of free trade. Mandating the end of trade barriers, neoliberalism presses governments to abandon the social welfare responsibilities they have assumed over the course of the twentieth century – allowances for housing, healthcare, education, disability and unemployment. Neoliberalism mandates instead the ‘free flow’ of capital and goods across national borders. Here we meet familiar rhetoric – globalisation means ‘objects in motion’ – used brilliantly and to the point of glibness by cultural studies intellectuals like Arjun Appadurai. Globalisation, Appadurai writes, is a world of ‘flows’ and ‘disjunctures’ (for the vectors of flow are uneven and unstable).8 Ideas, ideologies, people, goods, images, technologies and capital flow across national borders seemingly independent of ‘traditional constraints of information transfer, national regulation, industrial productivity or “real” wealth in any particular society, country or region’ (Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation’, p. 3). Which is why, as Sarah Kane knew so well, global capital’s site is the very temporary, very expensive hotel room, the kind ‘that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’.9 Reserved for globalism’s legal or illegal marketeers, its virtue is its spatial anonymity: no pieces of historical clutter disrupt the delivery and transmission of instant messages or streaming video. Yet, as Saskia Sassen argues, it is just this kind of rhetoric that drastically misleads: When today’s media, policy, and economic analysts define globalisation they emphasize hypermobility, international communication, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation 11

and the neutralization of distance and place. Central to this version are the global information economy, instant communication and electronic markets – all realms within which place no longer makes a difference and where the only type of worker who matters is the highly educated professional.10 That is, ‘the dominant narrative of globalisation concerns itself with the upper circuits of global capital, not the lower ones, and with the hypermobility of capital rather than with capital that is bound to place’ (Sassen, ‘Global Cities’, p. 254). Sassen continues, ‘when we privilege global transmission over the material infrastructure that makes it possible; information over the workers who produce it, whether these be specialists or secretaries; and the new transnational corporate culture over the other jobs upon which it rests, we forget that information technologies and transnational corporations are themselves produce’ (p. 257). By focusing on production and its practices, we acknowledge that while power and hypermobility are the sexiest parts of globalisation, many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile but are, on the contrary, ‘deeply embedded in place’. Sassen charges us to ferret out the ‘geography behind globalisation’ – in particular, the migration of low-wage workers, often women of colour, who travel hundreds and thousands of miles to toil on the periphery of the global system as nursing auxiliaries, maids and nannies, or who, wittingly or no, are sold (‘contracted’ is the euphemism given to parents and to the women themselves) into low-wage or sexual slavery. The critique of Sassen and others is a very familiar kind of materialist criticism, particularly feminist theatre criticism which traditionally scrutinises the theatrical apparatus in order to expose the ideology of theatrical signs, particularly the signs of sexuality, gender, race and other identity positions. I will argue in this chapter that theatre, a conspicuously labour-intensive, site-specific component of a society’s cultural production, is dialectically intertwined with what contradicts it – the flows of people, goods and images generated by, and reproduced in, the global market. By these remarks I do not intend a Luddite appreciation of the authenticity of live performance. Nor am I ignoring the way theatre provides content and techniques for the global entertainment business. I am asking instead for a renovated feminist optic, based in the impenetrable yet everyday practice of instantaneous transmissions that saturate our experience from the moment we hear the birds singing and check our morning email. To say that the eye on the screen is the same eye we bring to the theatre 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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seems crudely to naturalise utterly disjunctured spheres, yet naturalise we do; synaptic memories of instantaneous transmission are wrapped around the same optic nerves attuned to theatrical reception. Arguably a better globalisation critique of the material practices of cultural media would look at television or radio production, media that bear signals everywhere, but are produced by unionised and agitating urban agents in a distinct somewhere. Yet I am arguing for a deeper dialectical intimacy between the relatively fixed bodies and sites of (even the most bourgeoisified) theatre and globalisation’s seamless flows. Both sides of this dialectic contain elements of the everyday/impenetrable (theatre’s real bodies within its mystified aesthetic traditions; globalisation’s real workers within a cyber-marketplace), but it is the dialectical axis of theatre and globalisation that I am pursuing here. The growing numbers of migrating women make this dialectic an imperative focus; indeed, the condition of female migrant labour is one of those rarely told globalisation stories. ‘Women’, write Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, ‘are on the move as never before in history’.11 Over half of the world’s 120 million legal and illegal migrants are believed to be women. Driven by poverty, pulled by First World demand, millions of women, some illiterate, many educated, from the poor countries in the South or from what is known as the ‘post-communist East’, leave their own children to perform the ‘women’s work’ of the North or the First World West as nannies, maids and (sometimes) sex-workers. Since the early 1980s, migratory factory girls have worked in deplorable conditions in the maquiladora industries of the so-called free-trade border zones. Unlike these factory workers who congregate in large numbers, nannies and maids are often hidden behind closed doors in private homes. Because of the illegal nature of their work, most sex-workers are even further concealed, shut off from legal recourse, culturally displaced, kept invisible. An alarming number are trafficked by smugglers and sold, literally, into bondage. ‘In Thailand alone’, writes Kevin Bales, ‘a country of 60 million, half a million to a million women are prostitutes and one out of every 20 is enslaved’ (cited in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Women, p. 10). Our era of globalisation counts as what Benjamin once called ‘a moment of danger’. But how can theatre approach a problem so massive? *** Warner’s Medea threw open the closed doors of the domestic interior, reminding us that Medea was, in her own right, a migratory slave … to 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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love. In the ancient myths, the sorceress Medea, descendant of the Greek sun-god Helios, murders her brother and destroys her father in order to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece. Euripides’ play adds two elements to the mythic story: it makes Medea a foreigner, a barbarian from Colchis, and it makes her an infanticide.12 Given Euripides’ subversive dramaturgy (he won only five prizes for his plays, compared to Aeschylus’ 13 and Sophocles’ 18), his loathing of war (Medea was written in 431 BCE at the beginning of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars), and his own eventual self-exile, scholars have found justification in looking beyond the melodrama of revenge to the violent patriarchy that exploits and humiliates Medea – a patriarchy represented by Creon, the Corinthian king who banishes her, and Jason, who abandons her and their sons to marry Creon’s daughter. The sorceress Medea can hardly be thought of as defenceless against this adversity, but Euripides makes every effort to underscore her dangerous alterity in Greek culture and her felt isolation. He has her explicitly complain about the marriage marketplace where women must find strangers to marry them, and of the bondage that follows: ‘With an excess of wealth it is required for us to buy a husband and take for our bodies a master, for not to take one is even worse.’ Medea tells the Chorus: ‘You have a country. Your family home is here. You enjoy life and the company of your friends. But I am deserted, a refugee, thought nothing of by my husband – something he won in a foreign land.’13 Warner accentuated the isolation of the outsider by placing her in a set that looked like a half-built McMansion in a subdivision for upscale executives. Medea’s defiled home is a construction site: stacked slats covered in builder’s plastic lie on the margins, cinder blocks for an uncompleted foundation are strewn everywhere. More than a metaphor for the interrupted marriage of Jason and Medea, Warner’s set invokes the smooth, hard lines of twenty-first-century corporate power – the world of Creon – in all its hostility to the messy spaces of women and children. Yet women and children inhabit this site, like weeds sprouting between paving stones. On each cinder block is a well-used child’s toy, a toy boat floats in the pool. The Chorus of Corinthian women, looking like they’re on a break from Walmart, scurry over the angled clutter, speaking in thick, provincial accents – the working-class locals drawn to the spectacle of misfortune enacted by these newly established elites. Creon’s affect in this production might be described as impatience. He wants to consolidate the marriage between Jason and Creuse, to clinch the deal. Jason approaches Medea not with guilt 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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or remorse, but with anxiety, because she’s holding up the deal – everyone else has moved on, while she, Medea, sits ranting. In the course of the action, Medea mangles the plans of royal succession. Corporate grey, reflected in the central pool, is soon stained bloody red. The murder of the children is, in this production, made to seem inevitable. As Fiona Shaw’s haggard face reveals, if she doesn’t execute them, Creon will. Yet this is a minor modernisation. More significant is the fact that in Warner’s staging the audience is always emotionally wrong-footed. Mayhem erupts not as a conclusion to anger, but rather within the space of instinctive touch, of homely family embrace. As causality thins out, something else emerges flying under the flag of tragic fate, and that is coercion, the imposition of an abstract will, embodied in Creon, which shapes the space, even as the sorceress exacts her revenge. Despite her native powers, Medea is bereft in the Greek world. The filthy toys in the cinder blocks signal the degradation of children and affective life, even for economic elites. Besides Warner’s Medea, imported from Dublin via London, several American productions of Medea sprouted not long after 9/11 – at New York’s Classical Theater of Harlem, Milwaukee’s Chamber Theater, the Pittsburgh Public Theater. Audiences seem drawn to the notion that murderous rage may be a rational response to oppression and cultural isolation. But perhaps there is something deeper at play here: perhaps audiences are seeking to understand the link between violence and domestic intimacy in this newly configured site: the transcultural global home. When we constellate Medea with Parks’ Red Letter Plays, this theme emerges vividly. Parks claims that she was at work on Fucking A when another play leapt out of her chest. It had the same protagonist – a marginalised, poor woman of colour called Hester – and the same outcome – both Hesters are stigmatised and end up killing a beloved son. Hester of In the Blood is called La Negrita and lives in a migratory site, ‘under a bridge’ of a large metropolis, with her five children, each by a different father. In nine scenes interspersed with songs, coercive so-called helpers from the state come and go, craving Hester’s body, giving her nothing she really needs (medical care and employment). Fucking A takes place in an impoverished developing country that looks across an ocean at a Europe of wealth and advanced medical services. As Parks describes it, Fucking A is ‘an otherworldly tale involving a noble Mother, her wayward Son, and others. Their troubled beginning, their difficult end 19 scenes with song’ (Red Letter Plays, p. 113). In other words, Fucking A bears the hallmarks of a contemporary 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation 15

Brechtian fable, and despite, or perhaps because of, this respectable pedigree, Parks experiences that self-described rude interruption by a monstrous Hester, whose queenly name (Hester derives from Esther) riffs on the filthy welfare queen who, at the opening of the play, is smashing aluminium cans for remuneration, unable to read the word ‘slut’ that someone has scrawled on a bridge pylon (In the Blood, in Red Letter Plays, p. 9). Published together, Parks encourages us to read In the Blood and Fucking A as a diptych – or a triptych. Constellated in mimetic and ironic relation to Parks’ plays is another text of sexual coercion, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Parks’ aggressive and creative dialogue with icons of American cultural history is well known, yet the collisions sparked between and among old and new texts are especially illuminating. Reverend Dimmesdale, Hawthorne’s sweet-voiced minister who conceals his paternity of Hester’s child, makes an appearance in In the Blood as the religious huckster Reverend D, the sperm donor of Hester La Negrita’s last child. Reverend D claims he feels like a Pilgrim building his church on Plymouth rock. And Hawthorne’s herbalist necromancer, Dr Chillingworth, Hester Prynne’s first husband, splits into the peripatetic sandwich-board-wearing doctor of In the Blood and the hopelessly 12-stepped Chilli of that play, Hester La Negrita’s first sperm donor. All three Hesters are marked by the letter ‘A’. This is the only letter Hester of In the Blood can write, illiteracy being one of her many social sins. Hawthorne’s Hester is, of course, forced to wear the letter ‘A’ sewn to her breast, a symbolic brand of the adulterer that effectively ostracises her in the Puritan settlement of colonial Boston. In a nice example of what Parks calls ‘rep and rev’ (repetition and revision), the ‘A’ of Fucking A stands for ‘abortionist’, and is branded on Hester Smith’s flesh. Just as Hawthorne’s badge seems to give his Hester a second sight into the sins of her neighbours, the brand on Parks’ Hester stinks and oozes whenever abortion clients come to call, which is every night, and in numbers.14 Most important in this constellation of Hesters is the indication that Hawthorne’s Hester, as Sacvan Berkovich demonstrates, was created as an allegorical emblem of dangerous revolution. The year 1848, when the novel’s frame story opens, has been nominated by historians as the ‘Year of the Red Scare’: Chartist agitation in England and the first Paris commune were accompanied by anti-monarchical revolts in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto reached print in 1848. Polk’s presidency, 1844–8, had epitomised Jacksonian chauvinism – ‘Mexico 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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16 Elin Diamond

had been defeated, the Oregon Territory appropriated (along with Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and parts of Utah), gold discovered in California, and Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin entered the union’.15 But Polk himself was defeated in 1848. New England intellectuals like Hawthorne were worried that 1848 would bring a renewal of Robespierre’s Terror. They were therefore ready to be appalled by what social commentators designated the first major symptom of the ‘red plague of European revolutions … on these shores’ – the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 (Berkovich, ‘Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise’, p. 350). Hester Prynne, estranged … outlawed from society … had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness … . The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers … and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.16 There could be little more socially ‘amiss’ than the convention at Seneca Falls. In The Scarlet Letter sexual transgression expresses and covers over the more shocking social sin of agitating for women’s suffrage. Parks’ Hesters are also social criminals. Hester La Negrita’s crime is ignorance of the system in which she lives, and Parks gives Amiga Gringa a long monologue that both obfuscates and explains the reason she cannot fence the watch Hester has stolen: Do you know what the Dow did today, Hester? The Dow was up 12 points. And that prize fighter, the one with the pretty wife, he rang the opening bell. She wore a dress cut down to here. And the Dow shot up 43 points in the first minutes of trading, Hester. Up like a rocket. And glanced up at the faces of clocks on the walls of their offices and women around the country glanced into the faces of their children and time passed. [And when they get back] to their office where they … work the Dow has plummeted. And there’s a lot of racing around and time is brief. Phone calls are made, marriages dissolve, promises lost in the shuffle. (Parks, In the Blood, p. 26) Amiga Gringa cannot fence Hester’s stolen watch because it is keeping the wrong kind of time. It should be keeping global time – ‘numbers racing on light boards Hester, telling those that are in the know the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation 17

value of who knows what’. Whatever ‘Miga’s grasp of global economics, Parks insists that the everyday/impenetrable flash before our eyes like those figures ‘racing on light boards’ of the world’s stock exchanges. Hester and ‘Miga’s everyday deprivations seem to increase or decrease according to a market that has never factored them in. And Reverend D, for whom suffering is an enormous turn-on, hates Hester, hates her hunger, and looks for a better televisual flock: I dont want local poor. Local poor dont look good. Gimmie foreign poor. Poverty exotica. Gimmie brown and yellow skins against a non-Western landscape, some savanna, some rain forest some rice paddy. Gimmie big sad yes with the berri-berri belly and the outstretched hands struggling to say ‘Thank You’ the only english they know, right into the camera. And put me up there with them holding them, comforting them, telling them everything’s gonna be alright, we gonna raise you up, we gonna get you on the bandwagon of our ways, put a smile in yr heart and a hamburger in yr belly, baby’ [sic]. (Parks, In the Blood, p. 73) Reverend D, like the public relations officers for the IMF, knows that the sight and, more importantly, the gratitude of the ‘foreign poor’ can disguise systemic practices that produce poverty. Indeed, in the logic of globalisation, the US and G8 countries help create the foreign poor both through unfair trade practices (you lower your barriers to trade, but we’ll keep ours up), and through the far more insidious burden of debt. Over 50 countries have debts that will never be repaid, and yet resources are constantly being diverted from health, education and sanitation towards unproductive debt servicing. In other words, debts are paid with people’s lives, the most vulnerable of whom are women and children. In Zambia, every newborn infant owes the nation’s creditors $708, more than twice the average income.17 As Jaggar notes, the ‘feminisation of poverty’, a term coined originally to describe women in the US, is now global: the UN reports that women make up 70 per cent of the world’s 1.3 billion poor (Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women’, p. 198). Indebtedness, of course, has a history. Many developing countries engaged in massive borrowing in the 1970s when interest rates were low, but when rates rose most debtor countries could not pay the interest, and in the early 1980s a world debt crisis resulted, threatening default by large debtors like Mexico and the collapse of US banks. To forestall a global economic 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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18 Elin Diamond

collapse the IMF and World Bank rescheduled these debts. But at the same time, they imposed new loan conditions, mandating policies of ‘structural adjustment’ – policies of economic discipline – which drew the borrowing countries into the global market, forcing them to abandon self-sustaining production, insisting instead on cash-crop agriculture which builds dependency on Northern manufactured machines and fertilisers (Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women’, pp. 201–2). In other words, structural adjustment programmes turn complex local markets into an eight-lane highway for First World manufactured products, technologies and consumer goods, and simultaneously ensure a captive supply of cheap, exploitable labour. And now we’re back to women on the move, whose remittances keep indebted economies afloat, but who enjoy the gender wrath of leaders like President Ramos of the Philippines, who would discipline migrating mothers because they’re destroying family values.18 Says Hester la Negrita, who refuses to sell her children, as Amiga Gringa suggests, to sterile whites: ‘I don’t think the world likes women much’ (Parks, In the Blood, p. 59). Oh, but it does. Hester’s prolific maternity makes her a debtor and society her creditor, keeping her perpetually in their debt. But the crude logic of that relationship is belied by the desire at work in these scenes. Ken Urban notes that in advanced capitalism money as a signifier of value has become increasingly indeterminate and suggests, citing Patrick Brantlinger, that indebtedness is foundational: ‘All modern nation states including Britain have been founded and funded on the economic basis of national debt and public credit.’19 What matters, then, Urban argues, is not debt in its dollar amounts, ‘but the affective experience of being beholden, of binding obligation’. And with this obligation comes a concomitant longing for debt-free autonomy and a deliverance made possible by ‘the gift’.20 The gift, as Jacques Derrida notes, seems like a salvation from debt’s grasp; with a gift lies the possibility of a giving or a receiving outside all cycles of exchange.21 In the violent circuits of migratory female labour, sex is frequently the payment for debts incurred. Even the great Medea has to offer Aegeus sexual service, and the promise of a son, to satisfy her debt to him for rescuing her. But Parks’ Hester confuses the sexual exchange: she simply gives. To the doctor who answers to the ‘higher-ups’, she was ‘phenomenal’; to the African-American welfare provider, whose husband demands a kinky sexual threesome, Hester has her ‘cross the line’ and momentarily abandon the class distinctions between them. In other words, Hester’s sexual pleasure defies the victimhood of her 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation 19

marginal social identity. And for this, Parks punishes her. That is, for her refusal to abide by the debtor’s logic, Hester is given her own version of structural adjustment: she is forcibly sterilised. And the blood on her hands from the murder of her boy mingles with the blood of her own surgical wounds. Why has she killed her eldest son Jabber, one of her ‘treasures’? The answer lies in the troubling oscillation of the everyday/impenetrable. Of all theatrical signifiers, stage blood is the most obtrusively artificial. The red blobs that indicate the fake tearing or puncturing of the body’s surface and signify violent pain, extreme suffering or death are so conventional as to be distracting, even embarrassing. However, in Parks’ Red Letter Plays and Warner’s production of Medea, the punctures to the circulatory system refer not to a unitary body on stage but to the phantasm of a global female body, and so are both materially and abstractly referential. That is, Hester La Negrita’s bloody abdomen, Hester’s Smith’s bloody apron, Medea’s bloody lab coat are points of a constellation that illuminate, however briefly, the circuits of global exchange. They mark the wound that occurs when an impenetrable distant system collides with the domestic experiences of women, even women who are sorceresses. This stage blood is more than a representation of real blood; it is an emblem of the unseen networks of global migratory labour in which women and their offspring are merely functional and conveniently anonymous. When blood is spilled, when the mothers themselves slaughter their children, both the system and the suffering can be glimpsed, and in that glimpse, recognised, and in that recognition, resisted. In its unique ability to provide viscerally powerful constellations for its audiences, feminist theatre can and does perform a demystifying labour – and this despite the inflated rhetoric of transnational global flows, despite the drone of the 24/7 news cycle, despite the fact that three years after the performances I have described in this essay, the carnage of the Iraq war continues apace.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on a Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 255. 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in Peter Demetz, ed., Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 179, 189. 3. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 209, n. 27. 4. Suzan-Lori Parks, ‘Elements of Style’ (excerpt), in The Red Letter Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), pp. 8–10.

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20 Elin Diamond

5. David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalisation and Anti-Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 1; Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women and Neoliberal Globalisation: Debt Burdens Undermine Women’s Health in the Global South’, in Robin N. Fiore and Hilde Lindemann, eds, Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights (Nelson and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 195. 6. Ted C. Lewellen importantly includes ‘regional adaptations and resistances’ to an otherwise similar definition of globalisation in The Anthropology of Globalisation (Westport, CT and London: Bergin & Garvey, 2002), pp. 7–8. 7. See also David Harvey’s more recent elaboration in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 8. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination’, Globalisation: Public Culture, guest ed. Arjun Appadurai, 12.1 (Winter 2000): 1–19, p. 5. 9. Sarah Kane, Blasted, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 3. 10. Saskia Sassen, ‘Global Cities and Survival Circuits’, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds, Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), pp. 254–74, p. 254. 11. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, ‘Introduction’, Global Women, pp. 1–13, p. 2. 12. See Sara Warner’s fine discussion of the Medea myth in ‘Mythic Proportions: The Medea Project Theater for Incarcerated Women and the Art of Creative Survival’ (unpublished dissertation, Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, 2003). 13. Euripides, Medea, in Harriet Kriegal, ed., Women in Drama, trans. Rex Warner (New York: NAL, 1975), p. 9. 14. Consider other ‘rep and rev’ parallels. The welfare lady offers Hester La Negrita sewing work, echoing Hester Prynne’s redemptive vocation as a seamstress. The welfare lady maintains her respectability by othering Hester La Negrita, as do the Puritan women in The Scarlet Letter. Hester La Negrita sees an ‘e-clipse’, an echo of the meteor in Hawthorne’s story. Most striking is the opening of In the Blood where Hester La Negrita walks through a hissing crowd carrying her newborn baby, a direct echo of Hester Prynne’s shaming walk through a gossiping crowd when she emerges from prison holding her infant daughter. Finally, both Hester La Negrita and Hester Prynne (via the novel’s narrator) refer to their children as ‘treasure[s]’, an ironic riff on the contradictory costs of birthing illegitimate children and perhaps on the biblical passage that equates salvation with ‘treasure’ (Matthew 13:44). 15. Sacvan Berkovich, ‘Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise’, in Ross C. Murfin, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, (Boston, MA: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 344–58, p. 348. 16. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Bantam Classics, 1981), p. 180. 17. Jubilee 2000, ‘Who We Are’, http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/jubilee2000/ about.html. Accessed 24 July 2003.

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Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation 21

18. See Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, ‘The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational Families in the New Global Economy’, in Ehrenreich and Russell Hochschild, Global Women, pp. 39–54, p. 40. 19. Brantlinger, quoted in Kenneth Urban, ‘Cruel Britannia: Nihilism, British Theater and the 1990s’ (unpublished dissertation, Rutgers University, 2006), pp. 93–4. 20. See Marcel Mauss, ‘Gift, Gift’, in Alan D. Shrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 28–32. 21. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 34.

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22 Elin Diamond

Mind Yourself: On Soundwalking, Race and Gender Karen Shimakawa

Be ready for the unexpected, as you do in the real world1 Soundwalk’s tag-line – ‘Audio tours for people who don’t normally take audio tours’ – sums up their objective neatly: the company aims to offer auditors/walkers the chance – literally – to step outside their normalised bodily experiences of the world. A series of audio files available as compact disks or mp3 downloads, Soundwalk’s tours of neighbourhoods in New York City, Paris and elsewhere have proved immensely popular and profitable for their creators (founders Stephan Crasneanscki and Michel Sitruk and sound designer Dug Winningham). Purchasers of the CD versions receive information on getting to the starting point, as well as on the narrator and sound/music samples; this information is available to downloaders via the website. Although both versions offer a schematic, annotated map of the route, these maps are not referred to in the course of the walks; all the walker/listener needs to do is get to the starting point and press PLAY. Beginning in 2002, Oversampling, Inc. (Soundwalk’s parent company) has released more than 15 walking tours of New York City neighbourhoods, including walks in Times Square, Chinatown and three interest-specific walks in the Bronx (‘Hip-Hop’, ‘Graffiti’ and ‘Yankees’) as well as tours of several Paris neighbourhoods (including St Germain des Prés and Palais Royal). Each audio tour uses binaural recording2 simulating ambient sounds (traffic, pedestrians, music from passing cars, etc.) that correspond to the sites specified in each tour. In contrast to more experimental projects like the conceptual sound artist Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair (a 2005 audio walk through New York’s Central Park sponsored by the Public Art Fund), Soundwalk markets itself (via its own website, Amazon.com, and other travel23

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3

related retail outlets, as well as the Museum of Modern Art gift shop) explicitly appealing to tourists.3 The narrator is typically presented as a neighbourhood ‘insider’ who promises to take the walker/listener on a gritty, hipper, more ‘real’ tour of the neighbourhood, rather than the sanitised versions typically marketed to outsiders. Each lays some ‘authentic’ claim to their neighbourhood: Jazzy Jay (co-founder of Def Jam Records) leads us through the Bronx ‘Hip Hop Walk’, for example, pointing out the sites of his childhood in addition to the culturally significant landmarks (James Monroe High School, alma mater of many early graffiti and rap luminaries); Vinny Vella (Jimmy Petrille on ‘The Sopranos’) takes us to a park in Little Italy where he fed pigeons as a kid; and Johnny Solitto, novelist and former stockbroker, takes us to his old office at Goldman Sachs on the ‘Wall Street’ soundwalk. As these examples suggest, the narrators of the New York soundwalks are almost exclusively male – the two exceptions are Pearl Gluck, the narrator of the ‘Hasidic Williamsburg: Women’ soundwalk (discussed below) and Ivy (no surname provided), the alto-voiced, punky androgyne gallery owner who leads us through the Meatpacking District.4 By and large, the gender/sex of the narrator goes unremarked, and the walker/listener is structured as gender-neutral. The exceptions, however, are striking in their aggressive (if implicit, in the case of the Chinatown soundwalk) attempts to discipline the walker/listener into normatively gendered embodiments. What is the appeal of these tours? Certainly, the authentic/exotic soundtrack flourishes on each tour suggest that a heavy dose of voyeurism and fetishisation is at work here: resonating gongs, plinking pipas and thumping Asian pop music accompany you on the Chinatown walk; police sirens, bass-heavy back-beats and cars backfiring (or are those gun shots?) pepper the Bronx walks; and sitars and street beggars serenade you as you float down the Ganges in Varanasi. However, a summary dismissal of these works on the basis of fetishisation is, I think, too easy (or perhaps just incomplete) in trying to understand how they work, and it belies the more complicated content and conflicted effects of these tours; in this chapter, I shall consider the affective work these tours do in attempting to draw us into these ‘exotic’ sites and somatic spaces via specifically gendered bodily performances. To be clear: I am not suggesting that these tours do not exoticise, fetishise or objectify the (imagined) residents of these neighbourhoods – they clearly do, and are often quite explicit about such voyeuristic aims – but I want also to ask how we might think about 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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24 Karen Shimakawa

their productivity: not only how do they fail to deliver on their promises? but also what might they deliver instead? Brian Massumi’s examination of the biogram5 offers us a way of answering these questions, by refocusing the question of bodily identity in terms of asking how bodies and subjectivities are produced – constantly, dynamically, multiply/contradictorily, in motion and in space. In keeping with his project to revise notions of ‘identity’ previously conceived in terms of (static) positionalities in favour of a more dynamic, processual model, Massumi argues for a version of identity in which ‘positionality is an emergent quality of movement’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 8). This approach poses difficulties, however, since the very recognition of an identity names a seemingly static position that is fictional to the extent it purports to describe a quality or characteristic whose meaning is stable over time: likening consciousness to Zeno’s philosophical arrow, ‘the transition from bow to target is not decomposable into constituent points … . It is only after the arrow hits it[s] mark that its real trajectory may be plotted. The points or positions really appear retrospectively, working backward from the movement’s end … . A thing is when it isn’t doing’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 6; emphasis in the original). The body’s identity is never stable or permanent, he suggests, and to the extent that we link a fixed, historical category of identity to it we engage in an act of retrospection/reconstruction of a moment past. How, then, to account for identities – raced, gendered, sexed, etc. – as produced, experienced and communicated and made functional in the present? Focusing on the sense/act of propioception (a mode of sensing/moving the body self-referentially, that is, by ‘displacements of the parts of the body relative to each other’, p. 179) as a counter or partner to the more familiar mode of cognitive mapping (exo-referential orientation of the body based on the abstract grid of Euclidian space), Massumi posits the biogram as that unit by which we move ourselves, experienced as selves, through space/time.6 Experienced most spectacularly and self-consciously by so-called ‘synesthetes’ (a diagnostic label for individuals who record memories across the conventional boundaries of discrete senses), ‘[t]he biogram is a literal, graphically-diaphanous event-perception’, writes Massumi, one that, he suggests, operates on a less pathologised level for embodied subjects more generally: ‘It is what is portended when you remember seeing space in time’ (p. 188). In other words, the biogram is one of the ways we carry or move through our pasts in/with our bodies, how ‘identity’ is experienced and reproduced temporally and spatially. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Soundwalking, Race and Gender 25

In illustrating his concept, Massumi relates the case of synesthete S., whose biograms ‘came in “walks”’. He would store biograms as ‘objects’ deposited at a particular turn along a meandering walk. There they would remain as mnemonic landmarks that would come into sight as approached. Massumi continues: The walks themselves were biograms of a configurational kind. They were composed of a number of synesthetic objects stored in vicinity to one another. They had to be re-accessed in order, following the proprioceptive twists and turns of the walk … To find a memory, S. would have to enter the right geography and then move ahead proprioceptively. (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 193) Soundwalks operate in much the same way as S’s biograms. Walkers are directed along a specified route, laid out proprioceptively: we are not instructed to follow a paper map (although one is made available to the walker via the CD packaging or as a website download), but rather directed via paratactic directions such as ‘turn right at the next traffic light and walk along the blue wall’, etc. Along the way, we are told what to look at (and how to see it); we are instructed to visit particular stores and restaurants and told what to purchase/eat; and at various sites we are given contextual information (provided by the narrator and community ‘experts’) that imbue these sites with histories and meanings. In other words, having been given the ‘right geography’, walkers are presented with (what is purported to be) the narrator’s prior sense-memories – following these mnemonic landmarks, we are invited to collect and cash in the sensory deposits presumably left there for us by the narrator. Massumi does not address the specificity of the biogram; the body that moves through space in order to enact or inhabit its identity remains, for him, ‘the body’ (or occasionally ‘you’). Presumably this is in keeping with his focus on the body that precedes or evades (if only temporarily) the constraints of static (gendered or raced) identity, his interest in Zeno’s arrow perpetually caught in mid-flight, before its (identity) trajectory can be mapped. But what if the synesthete’s route is plotted along a gendered and/or raced grid? The soundwalks I discuss below proleptically attempt to envisage/produce gendered, raced bodies in motion, bodies that can become gendered and raced through motion. It is an interesting (and, I believe, well-intentioned), if impossible, project: can you learn something of the other’s experience by 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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26 Karen Shimakawa

literally walking a mile in her shoes? In this cartography I would like to examine two sets of soundwalks, both of which take the form of ‘ethnic’ tourism: the Hasidic Williamsburg (male and female) walks and the Chinatown walk. Along with the Little Italy walk and (in different and less explicitly marked ways) the Bronx Hip-Hop and Graffiti walks, these tours make ethnic ventriloquism and/or voyeurism an explicit selling point.7 It seems almost needless to argue that these tours fail to deliver on their promises of full identification/embodiment of the other’s biogram; I want to suggest, however, that by looking more closely at the means by which that promise is made, and the various reasons for their failure, we might begin to see the potential for political work that such failure makes possible.

That’s my name, that’s your name, because today we’re one Perhaps the most explicit and extensive in their insistence on the walker/listener’s adoption of the narrators’ biograms, the Hasidic Williamsburg Soundwalks offer the walker/listener the chance to be (or masquerade as) a Hasidic woman or man for an hour as she/he tours this Brooklyn neighbourhood known as a long-standing ethnic enclave first established by Hasidic Jews fleeing European persecution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Walkers are repeatedly instructed on how to be(have like) a ‘good Jewish girl’ or to ‘blend in, like a real Jew’, and we are given explicit instructions on how we may achieve this transformation.8 Unlike other Soundwalks, the Hasidic Williamsburg walks begin with instructions on what (not) to wear: ‘In order to experience our community there’s a way to dress,’ Joseph Pierkarski (the men’s narrator) begins, ‘and that is modestly.’ Pearl Gluck is more detailed in her sartorial prescriptions for women: ‘So here’s the bad news,’ she warns. ‘It’s also the good news. You’re actually gonna look like a good girl for one day. You gotta wear a long skirt, you gotta keep those elbows covered, and keep those collarbones nice and protected from the eyes of the opposite sex.’ After giving a rationale for these restrictions (‘what [the Hasidic men] should be thinking about when they’re walking their streets is their Torah, the given word of God, not you’) she then orders us to ‘get up, make sure your sleeves are long enough, your skirt is long enough, and your collar’s high enough’ before we leave the (women’s side of the) restaurant where we first ‘met’ Pearl. The biogrammatical function of clothing features prominently throughout both walks: one of the first stops on Joseph’s tour is a dry goods store where male 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Soundwalking, Race and Gender 27

walkers are instructed to purchase a yarmulke, a transaction whose completion prompts Joseph to tell us approvingly, ‘Now you’re going to be a Jew like everybody else.’ Correlatively, Pearl walks us past Tip Top Wigs, but ‘you’re not going in there,’ she tells us, ‘since I’m not married, and you’re me, you don’t need to cover your hair.’ Having adopted the appropriate costume for this biogram, we are thereby better positioned (literally) to perform another biogrammatic task: to move/behave as a Hasidic women or man. ‘You gotta follow my rhythm,’ Pearl tells us. ‘Don’t walk around and be precious, don’t be super-friendly, and don’t walk around and be disrespectful,’ she warns, ‘just be here, in the community, like you belong. Like I belong.’ Joseph is even more detailed: ‘what I want you to do is follow me. And I also want you to listen to my footsteps as I walk. One, two, three, actually, let’s do the Yiddish [counts in Yiddish in rhythm to his footsteps].’ Later, he instructs us, ‘Of course, I don’t want you talking to any women. … Also, when you see two women walking on the street, try not to walk between them.’ Following their directions, the inference goes, will give us some glimpse into the lived, bodily experience of being a Hasidic woman or man as they might move through the streets of Williamsburg. Having (presumably) mastered our narrators’ movements, we are led to various locations in the neighbourhood, through which we are given an illustrated history of Williamsburg and of the Ba’al shem tov movement, delivered by Joseph, Pearl, various rabbis and community members. But even these more educational moments (‘let me tell you about us’) are punctuated with jarringly biogrammatic, identificatory injunctions: as we’re about to enter the first temple on the men’s route, Joseph instructs us, ‘if anybody asks, you’re Jewish. Because I’m sure at one point in someone’s life and history, in your family tree, somebody was Jewish. So, for the sake of this trip right now, you are Jewish. Are you ready?’ We are not told the stakes of failure – is it a requirement that one be Jewish to enter this part of the synagogue? – but we are praised afterwards by a (relieved?) Joseph: ‘You were great. You’ve been initiated.’ Pearl’s route does not enter the ground floor of the synagogue (where women are prohibited) but the subject of sex segregation does prompt a different sort of invitation to experience embodied Hasidic identity. As we pass the synagogue where Joseph’s walker was initiated, she tells us, ‘It’s at this point you’re going to lose your man if you’re with one. It doesn’t matter. I say find a nice Jewish boy. Listen, I’m not one for clichés, but they really please their women. It’s not a cliché – it’s the law. Every month man’s gotta please his wife, no 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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28 Karen Shimakawa

matter what. So I say, let the guy go, and keep looking [laughs].’ In a tour otherwise dominated by descriptions and explanations of Hasidic female sexuality and the centrality of the reproduction of heteronormative familial structures, Pearl invites us (as non-Hasidic women) to imagine we live their sexual lives. Elsewhere Pearl and other commentators explain the conventions of traditional courtship, expectations regarding reproduction and child-rearing, sexual practices and prohibitions; here, though, we are positioned as the partner of a Hasidic Jewish man within that culture.9 For the most part, Joseph’s movement instructions do not emphasise gender/sex differentiation; it is assumed (as is clear in his invitation into the synagogue) that the walker/listener is male and that his blocking applies (only) to men. Pearl’s instructions, as indicated above, are more overtly and explicitly about gender differentiation – and these instructions primarily come in the form of prohibitions. ‘Don’t look directly into the eyes of the men,’ she tells us. ‘Don’t make too much noise. Don’t bother the men,’ she says as we enter a bookshop. Where Joseph invites us to walk fast (having posited a brisk pace as a specifically masculine gesture) and, at one point, ‘listen to this music with me [a sprightly klezmer piece] and dance across the bridge’, Pearl’s companion is repeatedly cautioned to restrain her movements, to stay out of certain buildings (the synagogues) and to refrain from purchasing certain items (men’s clothing). The Williamsburg walks consistently ask the walker to be a Hasidic woman or Hasidic man by accessing Joseph’s and Pearl’s biograms; while there are moments in which our failure to do so is marked and we are addressed as outsiders, these tours seem to emphasise the possibility of success: we are given detailed and direct instructions on how to elicit the biograms, with the promise that the involuntary nature of biogrammatic movement will take things from there – that we will, as Joseph promises, ‘experience what it’s like to be a Hasidic Jew’. My experiences of taking the women’s walk, and listening to the men’s walk, however, were far from the biogrammatically transporting experience the narrators seem to promise: the high collars and long sleeves felt restricting (especially during the walk I took on a humid late July afternoon); the injunction to avoid eye contact made interactions with people on the street feel somewhat uncomfortable (is this person looking at me/wanting to initiate a conversation/glaring at me for transgressing or trespassing?); and the walk past the synagogues (one of which is quite beautiful and well known) made me keenly aware of the fact that the men’s walk did go through these buildings. Male walkers I queried 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Soundwalking, Race and Gender 29

almost universally opted not to dance across the overpass ‘with Joseph’, despite the klezmer soundtrack, and many opted not to purchase or wear a yarmulke (and refrained from entering the synagogues). Both my experience and those of other walkers was generally that of feeling firmly, and in some cases staunchly, outside the Hasidic male or female biogram into which we were so insistently inserted. What then to make of these purposeful refusals/deviations from the prescripted biograms?

This is Chinatown, baby … are you scared yet? The Chinatown soundwalk was one of the first created, the one that garnered widespread media coverage, and continues to be one of their best sellers (now in its fourth revision). Following the standard ‘boilerplate’ liability waiver (read by a female performer in heavily accented English), we are invited to a restaurant at the edge of Chinatown; after a few seconds of ambient restaurant noise, we hear, ‘Hi, is this seat taken?’ and we ‘meet’ our narrator Jami Gong, who begins by assuring us of his qualifications for the job: ‘These are my streets,’ he tells us confidently. ‘These are my people. So listen to me carefully, and I will take care of you.’ As in the Williamsburg walks, there is an invitation to inhabit the narrator’s (imagined) body/identity: ‘Be one with me,’ he instructs us, and later we are told to ‘get ready to see, to smell, to touch, and to be Chinese’, as if offering a mystical transubstantiation into the exotic other’s body. This extended introduction orients the walker/listener in relation to the narrator, and to the space through which she/he is to be moved/moving. There are two appeals being made: on the one hand, the promise that we should ‘get ready to … be Chinese’, an offer of mystical transubstantiation into the exotic other’s body; on the other hand, though, we are informed that this body-snatch will be, as in the best scary movies, dangerously incomplete: ‘I will bring you into places where you are not supposed to go,’ Jami warns us, and so we are dependent on an authentic, native informant who can claim ownership over ‘my streets … my people’ to ‘take care of [us]’. This dynamic tension between being and needing the other is sustained throughout the walk, and contributes to the spectacularity of the ‘failure’ of transubstantiation as well as the opening up of new possibilities. For the most part, the walk follows the second strategy: we are plunged into a strange, dangerous and otherwise impenetrable Otherworld and our only hope of survival is Jami. There are numerous ‘edu10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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30 Karen Shimakawa

cational’ interludes throughout (voiced both by Jami, providing a history of Chinese migration to the United States, for example; as well as by priests, academics and shop proprietors, who provide historical and cultural contexts on some of the sites visited) that resemble the content of more mainstream tours; however, the most written-about (and evidently the most viscerally effective) episodes are less infotaining in the traditional sense: an early version of the tour walked us up to the screen door of a sweatshop to peer in on the women at their sewing machines and cutting tables; Jami tells us that at one time, his mother laboured here.10 Later we are instructed to walk past another building where ‘rumour has it that it was and still is an opium den … don’t even try to get inside … I warn you, they do not appreciate your attention. Remember, this is Chinatown – you don’t mess with this kind of business. Keep on walking.’ We are instructed to enter another building, but discreetly, and to look through the crack in the door of a third floor apartment where, it is promised, ‘there is an old man playing cards’. Jami tells us that ‘This is Mr Lam. He is a big boss … He used to be head of the biggest triad in Chinatown, the Ghost Shadows. Not too long ago, they retired him.’ After informing us that we are spying on a former crime boss, Jami abandons us for our descent back to the street where he tells us he’ll be waiting (‘be careful on your way back,’ he warns us), and suddenly we are left ‘alone’ to make our way back into the daylight. In these seemingly perilous encounters11 (and the peril is enhanced greatly through SFX – gunshots, women moaning in pain and/or ecstasy, hawkers aggressively selling phone cards) we are presented with a textbook stereotype of Chinatown: at turns threatening and alluring in its otherness, (over-)sexed and gendered as, if not overtly female, then penetrable (albeit at some risk). ‘This is not New York,’ a Chinese woman coos seductively in our ear, ‘This is not even America. This is Chinatown, baby … are you scared yet?’ The use of a woman’s voice, as counterpoint to Jami’s, is a tactic employed throughout the walk. Whereas Jami (speaking with the mildly inflected accent of a second-generation Chinese American) stakes an ownership claim to Chinatown, the woman whose voice we hear in the disclaimer seems to occupy a very different relationship to us, and even to Chinatown itself. Her voice surfaces periodically among the ambient sounds behind Jami: the ecstatic moans in Mr Lam’s stairwell; fragments of a Chinese folksong in the background; fevered, shallow breaths as we traverse a dark and ‘scary’ underpass. Jami may own Chinatown; this woman evidently embodies it – and that embodiment is emphatically exterior, if not altogether exotic: we are 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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32 Karen Shimakawa

Chinatown – a world within a world within a world [repeat/fade] And yet … when I take this or other soundwalks, a curious thing happens: I go slightly numb. That is not quite it: my senses are hijacked. Everything draws in a bit: touch (the jostling of other pedestrians, ambient temperature, etc.), sight, even smell and taste – all are subordinated to what Jami (in the Chinatown example) tells me to feel, hear, smell and taste.12 The woman’s voice is – for lack of a better term – disorienting: isolated and sited (for the most part) very locally (often behind and to the side of the listener), her voice frequently startled me, as I repeatedly mistook it on the recording for an external, ‘real’ voice intruding on my tour. Other walkers report similar experiences: when I assigned these walks to my class, several students reported turning to look for someone over their shoulder, experiencing sudden or fleeting geographic vertigo – becoming aware, suddenly, that they did not know where they were (in the cartographic sense), even in neighbourhoods with which they were otherwise very familiar; several others reported nearly being struck by cars, having fallen out of sync with the beautiful, organically choreographed dance between pedestrians and cars that characterises New York City traffic. It is a process not unrelated, I think, to those Department of Transportation statistics linking cell phone usage with increased incidences of car accidents, but I would argue that it is different too: the voice of the narrator in your ear is in some sense with you in the space your body occupies – you actually need that voice to move you through that space safely, and to tell you how to occupy and apprehend that space. It is obvious, perhaps: you do what the recording tells you to do – you have, after all, purchased it for that very purpose. Yet what is most palpable for me as I take this tour, as with the Hasidic Williamsburg walk, is the way the tour fails to interpellate the walker/listener fully into that exotic/erotic sound – and landscape. If part of the promise is to enable us to ‘be Chinese’ (or, I would argue, to be a Chinese-American man as Jami is), and to attempt to put us somatically into that body/identity, the dangerous thrill of submission to Jami’s instructions (which are frequently cast as vaguely risky) puts us more firmly in our own bodies, even as it places that body’s 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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invited, under Jami’s supervision, to consume it/her. It is in part through this stark aural/aesthetic/spatial juxtaposition, in fact, that we are invited to identify bodily with Jami in terms of race and gender.

safety in the authentic native’s care. What I am suggesting is that by trying to promise both simultaneously, the soundwalk succeeds at doing neither, and instead puts the walker/listener somewhere else: we are not Jami, but nor are we allowed to be comfortably in our own skins, either. The normal/normative way in which we typically move through the world as unselfconscious agents is temporarily disrupted; that we fail to assume (what we imagine to be) Jami’s biogram seamlessly or comfortably only heightens our awareness that we are no longer seamlessly or comfortably located in our own biograms. Is there something productive to be made of this failed attempt? Judith Halberstam has argued for a consideration of failure as an ‘alternative to the violent triumphalism that victory implies … . Failure, as a practice, recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed, failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.’13 What might be made of the indeterminacy of this somewhere else body produced in/through the soundwalk? Following the neurological literature on this phenomenon, Massumi notes that ‘biograms are described as having an odd status: they are “involuntary and elicited”’ (Parables for the Virtual, p. 189; emphasis in original, footnote omitted). One chooses to move one’s body and attention in a particular direction proprioceptively; what follows, however, in terms of sense experience of that movement, is ‘peri-personal [and] autonom[ous]’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 189). One interesting consequence of this incongruity is that it leaves open the possibility for ‘mistakes’ – an error or mis-step in the act of elicitation (failing or refusing to take up the mnemonic clue, for example, means the sense-memory will not be accessed); conversely, even an accidental or unscripted encounter with the object of elicitation can evoke the sense-memory unintentionally. In other words, biograms are, on the one hand, one of the ways our bodies become sites of embedded identities and histories; and, on the other, there is some play in the joints between bodies, their emplacements, history and identity. ‘In the circus of synesthesia’, writes Massumi, ‘you never really know what act will follow. The rabbit might turn into a dove and fly away’ (Parables for the Virtual, p. 191). That this ‘be[ing] Chinese’, which Jami promises never occurs, does not entirely negate its effectiveness in presenting the walker with a new/altered biogram: discomfort (or even fear) may signal another kind of newness, an out-of-body-ness that is neither wholly me nor wholly Jami. The synthesis of Chineseness, hetero-masculinity and ownership/self-sovereignty is, in dominant 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Soundwalking, Race and Gender 33

culture, a novel premise. And while it may not be fully realised in the course of the walk, perhaps the discomfort of having consciously to negotiate gendered, raced embodiment in the face of that failure is productive: the work of social identity-formation laid bare as differential, relational and as work. Perhaps we might see this as a potentially profound (if subtle) exercise in re-subjectification: the walker willingly commits herself to another subject’s biogram – a (failed) act of faith and fictionalisation that she nonetheless performs with/in her body. It is this submission to bodily vulnerability, I would argue, that distinguishes the ‘failures’ of the Chinatown walk from those of the Williamsburg walks and opens the walker (willingly or otherwise) to new possibilities, rather than to the biogrammatic re-trenching that results when we simply balk at Joseph’s and Pearl’s exhortations to be their narrators. ‘Reaccessing the biogram’, suggests Massumi, ‘and pulling a determinate strand of organized experience, is to reapproach the point where the materiality of the body minds itself’ (Parables for the Virtual, p. 190). To the extent that we are engaged in the project of analysing or critiquing regimes of hierarchy and oppression based on (perceived) identifications, then, perhaps a conscious engagement with our and others’ biograms holds the possibility of eliciting or (re-) producing specific pasts by their emplacements of the body. What if the Chinatown soundwalk actually (if unintentionally) pulls new or different strands of experience? What, then, might the body mind[ing] itself be, or be becoming?

Notes 1. ‘Disclaimer’, http://www.soundwalk.com/disc.php (excerpt). Accessed 12 October 2006. The full text of the disclaimer is also included as the first track of all Soundwalk audio tours. 2. Binaural recording utilises a particular arrangement of microphones in the recording process resulting in audio recordings that, when played back on stereo headphones, simulate 360-degree sound spatialisation. 3. In addition to the neighbourhood walks, Soundwalk is in partnership with various corporate sponsors to produce specialised products, such as their collaboration with Puma (‘Train Away’ running guides to New York, London, Berlin and Paris), a mobile phone download project with France Télécom, and an audio tour of the Louvre coordinated with the content (and release date) of the film version of The Da Vinci Code. The centrepieces of the company upon which these corporate projects build, however, are the neighbourhood walking tours. Rave reviews in Wired (1 September 2002), New York Times (1 September 2003) and elsewhere have fuelled this

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34 Karen Shimakawa

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

success and the company continues to produce new walks at a rate of several a year, while releasing updated versions of current walks. The four Paris walks, in contrast, are narrated (in sultry, dulcet tones) by four young (judging by their photographs), beautiful and very femme European actresses; and while each professes an affection for/familiarity with her respective neighbourhood, their qualifications appears to lie elsewhere: perhaps in keeping with the (stereotypical) Parisian theme, their walks are moody and reflective, laced with tales of love and (hetero-)sex, heartbreak and betrayal. Another notable exception is the ‘Varanasi: City of Light’ soundwalk, which is narrated by Robert Svoboda, US-based author and ‘expert’ on Ayurvedic medicine. Packaged as a glossy, art photographfilled hardcover book and CD, this soundwalk appears to be aimed at the armchair traveller, which might explain the choice of a similarly situated ‘outsider’ as narrator. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Massumi’s construction of the biogram is intended as a neologism deriving from the term ‘diagram’ as it is deployed in recent architectural theory: ‘Synesthetic forms … are lived diagrams based on already lived experience, revived to orient further experience. Lived and relived: biograms might be a better word for them than “diagrams”’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 186–7). Massumi does not appear to be referencing the term as it has been used in earlier evolutionary psychology and anthropology or, more recently, molecular biodynamics. The Varanasi, India soundwalk is similarly explicit in its appeal to racial/ethnic exoticism; that walk, however, was conceived as primarily targeting an ‘armchair’ audience rather than contemplating its use by actual travellers and as such, its invocation of an ‘other’ biogram is arguably different. In addition, the narrator for this walk, unlike those of most of the others, is already an (albeit very knowledgeable) ‘outsider’: Dr Robert Svoboda, an American expert on Ayurvedic medicine. As discussed in more detail below, the implied addressee is presumably nonHasidic, and arguably non-Jewish. To be fair, there are many other instances in each of these tours – perhaps the majority – in which the walker is not expected or imagined to attain full identification with the narrator. Some of the most interesting moments occur when the walker cannot, or will not, take up the biogrammatic deposit left for her/him. Both Pearl and Joseph address the walker in Yiddish, but Pearl soon remembers: ‘Oh wait. You don’t speak Yiddish.’ Later she tries to teach us a phrase, but gives up in exasperation: ‘Nah, not like that. You know what, scratch that.’ Similarly, Joseph gives us an extended description of the walking habits of Hasidic men and women respectively: ‘Look at the men … they’re always walking so fast, like they’re always running somewhere … But check out the women: the women, on the other hand, are a lot slower.’ It’s clear in his anthropological stance that we are being positioned as outsider-observers; in these instances he does not invite us to move like our Hasidic counterparts, only to study them from a distance. This stop was eliminated from the tour after the first edition.

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11. Although I am arguing that this ‘scary’ appeal predominates throughout the tour, it is not the only characterisation of Chinatown in it: other stops on the tour include a community senior centre, a bustling, 100-year-old tea house, a Buddhist temple, a herbalist, etc. 12. Most of the soundwalks, including the Williamsburg and Chinatown walks, include stops at restaurants or delicatessens, where the narrator usually tells us what to order. 13. Judith Halberstam, ‘Notes on Failure’, unpublished manuscript.

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36 Karen Shimakawa

Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms: Pollesch@Prater Katrin Sieg

The work of the playwright and director René Pollesch (*1962) brings into view the changes in the gender order that have attended the complex process we call globalisation, and adds a distinctly European perspective to our understanding of it. In the late 1990s, European feminist scholars began to examine the combined effects of immigration and the dismantling of socialist and Western welfare states on the gender order of European societies shifting from industrial to postindustrial economies. The status of the state in countries on that continent, and in particular its function of regulating the economy, differs considerably from that in so-called free market economies. The state’s economic policies have played a key role in crafting socialist-egalitarian and capitalist-patriarchal gender and family relations (with many variations in between across the region). In addition, the state (in Western Europe) has also long subsidised public spaces for the production and dissemination of academic knowledge as well as art, in order to facilitate a self-correcting, democratic public discourse protected from commercial or political pressures. Concomitant with the adoption of neoliberal policies by the European Union, which aim to liberate the economy from state control at the national and supranational level, the relations between men and women, and between natives and immigrants, are undergoing dramatic changes, at the same time that the possibility to reflect collectively on these changes and publicly debate them in academic, journalistic and artistic venues is also radically curtailed through the privatisation of the public sphere. Pollesch’s plays address these changes in a theatrical idiom marked by the convergence of theoretical, artistic and activist languages, while also showing how the (counter-) public sphere is increasingly caught up in the economic processes it wishes to critique. 37

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Pollesch is a noteworthy young playwright-director whose plays have been produced by the most critically acclaimed theatres in Germanspeaking countries, including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, the Schauspielhaus, Zurich, and the Salzburger Festspiele. He studied with Heiner Müller and John Jesurun, and later apprenticed with Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill. He enjoys a great deal of artistic control, as he directs almost all of his plays. One of the two large public television stations produced one of his teleplays, and most of his plays have been published.1 He has received many coveted awards.2 While he is open about his homosexuality, Pollesch does not participate in gay identity politics; nonetheless, his plays have become part of a broader dialogue about globalisation, labour, the arts and gender among leftist, feminist and queer intellectuals in Germany.3 Since 2001 he has run the Prater, the small, experimental stage of the Volksbühne theatre. The Volksbühne and the Prater straddle the districts of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, formerly part of East Berlin. Since unification with West Germany in 1990 these districts have undergone a drastic transformation. In many ways, the changes in this circumscribed locale are exemplary of the massive upheaval that citizens in post-socialist societies faced in the 1990s, although the dismantling of Western European welfare states towards the end of the decade entailed similar restructurings and social upheaval. As dilapidated apartment blocks were turned into American-style ‘lofts’, luxury condominiums and hotels, and twenty-something dot.commers on aluminium scooters replaced long-term residents and shopkeepers who could no longer afford soaring rents, the Prater theatre not only bore witness to the transformations in its vicinity, but became an active participant in the dialogue about globalisation. Pollesch’s plays parade and parody the homo œconomicus at the centre of neoliberal economic theories, the subject driven purely by self-interest, whose enterprise is thought collectively to balance out in a free market for the good of all. His work investigates the paradigm shift from historic welfare-state liberalism – which rested on the division of market and domestic sphere, or the realms of ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ labour, as Marxist-feminist economists named them in the 1960s – to neoliberalism, which eliminates that division by wrapping all areas of life into the market logic that historically developed from the organisation and imperatives of industrial production. In Wohnfront [Domestic Front] (2001–2), Neustadt [New City] (2002–3) and Zeltsaga [Tent Saga] (2003–4), Pollesch asks what happens when all social relations and cultural activities – family, love, emotions, sex, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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38 Katrin Sieg

play and artistic creativity – are measured in terms of efficiency, speed, productivity and profit. My discussion here will focus on Domestic Front, which investigates the extensive reconstruction of the urban landscape and attendant class and gender relations in the centre of the German capital. The performance is situated within a larger activistacademic milieu responding to these changes. Domestic Front offers an interesting case study of theoretical circuits not only within Europe, whose outlines and internal demographics were dramatically changing in the period preceding (and following) the European Union’s eastern expansion, but also within transnational feminist theory, and finally, between page and stage. Domestic Front reveals how German feminists, including Pollesch, began to think through the transformation of social relations under neoliberalism, but also exposes the blindspots and dead-ends of their critique. Pollesch’s more recent plays have addressed many of these shortfalls by including issues of race, postcolonialism and migration in their dramatisation of neoliberal gender regimes. Yet I find the earlier plays noteworthy precisely for the way in which they resonate with a certain German feminist mainstream whose neglect of class and ethnic differences between women risks being unable to intervene in the current construction and cementing of ethnic and gendered hierarchies in Europe.4

Sexual economies During the first season at the Prater, Pollesch created a series of plays assembled under the title Wohnfront (Domestic Front), including Sex after Mae West and Insourcing des Zuhause: Menschen in Scheisshotels [Insourcing of the Home: People in Shit Hotels, hereafter: Shit Hotels]. They cite the work of women writers (Mae West and Vicki Baum) of the early twentieth century, who successfully articulated a feminist sexual politics in a popular idiom (Sex ran on Broadway, and Grand Hotel was an international bestseller and later box-office hit).5 Through these intertexts, Pollesch links himself to a feminist tradition of dramatising and problematising sex in the city, even as he highlights the transformation of sex and desire into prime engines of capitalist interpellation, and notes the disappearance of a liberationist identity politics championed by feminist movements. In addition, the ‘domestic front’ was inhabited by fluctuating groups of local intellectuals and artists that were not part of the theatrical ensemble. This diverse array of performances took place on the multipurpose set of the designer Bert 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms 39

Neumann, which stayed in place during the entire season. The stage consisted of rows of shallow rooms, including a kitchen and a bathroom, arranged in horseshoe format around an elongated area in the middle, where spectators sat on office swivel chairs. The actors lived on this set for much of the rehearsal period and throughout the season. Shit Hotels addresses a novel and popular type of upmarket residence for modern executives in the new, chic centre of Berlin, known as Mitte. The play grapples with the puzzling fact that, on the one hand, the incorporation of the domestic sphere into a free market logic appears to cancel the heterosexual contract, and, on the other, the heterosexual contract appears to have expanded to govern relations among women. The play explores the emotional labour performed in the new living arrangements catering to the highly mobile transnational class. Its title cites an eponymous article by two feminist sociologists, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, in the socialist journal Widerspüche (2000), in which the authors examine the concept of the so-called Boardinghaus, a composite of apartment and hotel, which specialises in offering full-service, short-term homes.6 Its subtitle alludes to Vicki Baum’s popular novel Menschen im Hotel, which was made into the Oscar-winning film Grand Hotel. Kuster and Lorenz’s analysis of modern Boardinghaus living explores, in the form of a small-scale case study, changes in the spatial organisation of work, home and leisure. Their article, I argue, illustrates a particular moment in German feminist theorising, when women sought to assess the implications of the gender trouble wrought by these changes, without yet being able to judge in what ways a local phenomenon was indicative of, or deviated from, larger European or global trends. In their article Kuster and Lorenz seek to clarify whether the decline of the separation of home and work heralds a ‘dissolution of gender difference and heterosexual norms’ that feminists and queers could welcome (‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, p. 15). After all, feminists have long dreamt of an equitable division of housework and protested at essentialist ascriptions of nurturing femininity that serve to hold women responsible for the care of children, the elderly and the sick, not to mention husbands and fathers, while men are exempt. Lesbians constructed an entire politics around women’s primary investment of emotional and sexual labour in other women. Kuster and Lorenz focus on the female boarding house guest, the ‘executive, highly paid and extremely busy, who wheels her “home” in her carry-on bag’ (‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, p. 20). Her entitlement to the same pampering by attractive young women as the male guest who is still the ideal 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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and statistical norm has moved the guest to the other side of the heterosexual contract and in a sense trans-gendered her. While her highly feminised appearance, to judge by her depiction in glossy magazines, does not suggest that conventional notions of gender have become obsolete, the scholars propose reading corporate hyper-femininity as a masquerade (recalling the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s diagnosis in the 1920s, when modern career women first appropriated the father’s penis by arrogating professional authority).7 Several of these Boardinghäuser have opened in Mitte. They house politicians, diplomats and business executives who value the proximity to embassies, ministries and other government buildings, as well as the urban ambience of the bustling, gentrified quarter around Hackescher Markt. The size, furnishings and equipment of the suites aim to accommodate single tenants who wish to work at home as well as occasionally socialise with colleagues. The synchronisation of the home, traditionally constructed as a refuge from waged labour, with corporate requirements, practices and rhythms, prompts Kuster and Lorenz to coin the phrase ‘insourcing of the home’. Crucial to the promise of making guests feel at home are the female employees, who are trained to model their job performance on that of a caring wife. The authors’ interviews with employees and managers reveal that the Boardinghaus management constantly monitors the degree to which personnel create cordial relations with guests and learn their personal preferences, manufacturing the illusion of committed care as part of their paid work (‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, p. 20). The workers’ subservience, attention and interest in the guests’ well-being (regardless of their gender), so Kuster and Lorenz maintain, cement the heterosexual matrix, while making previously male prerogatives available to female guests.8 Their focus on the insourced ‘sexual labour’, however, effaces the service worker, to whom the less appealing parts of dirty and monotonous domestic labor are outsourced – the figure whose subaltern class perspective had framed Baum’s novel. Recent feminist scholarship, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Global Woman, has brought into focus the ethnic and class divisions underlying the sexual division of labour among women – introducing analytical dimensions that are absent from Kuster and Lorenz’s study.9 The nannies, maids and sex-workers discussed by Ehrenreich and Hochschild often travel enormous distances to compensate for the ‘care deficit’ that has emerged in the affluent countries of the North. ‘Today, while still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labour, the wealthy 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms 41

countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look like love,’ they write (Global Woman, p. 4). Sabine Hess and Ramona Lenz show that this is true for the European Union as well, and point to an internal differentiation within the EU (‘Das Comeback’, pp. 128–65). In Germany, for instance, women from Poland and Eastern Europe perform much of the domestic and care labour, often as commuters (Hess and Lenz, Geschlecht, p. 129). These scholars’ insights confirm and contextualise Kuster and Lorenz’s findings by demonstrating that the production of heterosexual relations is both regionally specific and of global scope.10 At the same time, that transnational feminist work throws into relief the impasse in Kuster and Lorenz’s neighbourhood study, for whom the corporate couple of masquerading servant-wives and transgendered executive guests proves that femininity operates entirely as simulacrum, from which all material traces of social inequality are evacuated. The very small scope of Kuster and Lorenz’s ethnography (they interviewed just two female employees of unspecified national origin) is most likely responsible for their omission of the dimensions of race and migration. Pollesch’s dramatisation of the ideas presented in Kuster and Lorenz’s article amplifies their analysis into a dystopic vision, while the reference to Baum’s novel is confined to the play’s subtitle. The scatological prefix ‘Scheiss’ to ‘hotels’ signals the degradation of life in the global city, defined as the loss of emotional authenticity, mutual responsibility and humanity. The three actresses in Shit Hotels discuss the predicament of having feelings of home, family and love produced by a complex service environment in order to enhance the creative productivity of the hotel guest, while domestic labour is outsourced to employees trained to simulate idealised family relationships. The play thus portrays the ‘insourcing of the home’ as the nightmarish totalisation of the corporate logic of maximised productivity, resulting in absolute alienation, the lack of any alternative life options and the elimination of behaviours defined as non-productive. The service workers employed in the gross hotel are called ‘cyborgs’ and ‘replicants’, whose emotional and sexual output is monitored by a supervisor called ‘blade runner’ – alluding to the famous science fiction film based on a Philip K. Dick novel.11 In turn, guests are dehumanised by being relieved of emotional responsiveness to domestic workers: their responsibility for them is a purely monetary one. Unfortunately, Pollesch’s adaptation of the article also amplifies its weaknesses. Where Kuster and Lorenz speak of the Boardinghaus’s 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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42 Katrin Sieg

tempting identificatory offers, Pollesch blows this up into the interpellative power of the neoliberal economy, as if the economy’s hailing of the subject as executive was both irresistible and not predicated on ethno-national privilege. Resistance or alternatives to such a totalising economy can only be represented as literally a crappy choice: ‘I simply don’t get any offers of living shittily’, complains C. ‘But that’s what I want. I WANT TO LIVE THIS SHIT!’ (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 80). The class contradictions structuring relations between workers and guests are all the more shitty because their camouflage as ‘love’ cloaks them from the guests’ experience. The women portrayed in Vicki Baum’s novel, whose struggle for economic independence necessitates the kind of emotional and sexual labour performed by Pollesch’s cyborgs, would be unfamiliar with the predicament C describes. The three women on stage describe their sense of dehumanisation, but they are not portrayed as cyborgs; rather, much of their frustration results from their inability to distinguish between the performance of caring and its simulation by the service-worker replicant, and ‘real love’ from its simulation. The sci-fi terminology obscures the fact that this is not a novel predicament, but – as Baum demonstrates – one that has been typically experienced by men. Nor is it the main problem. Rather, the often illegalised conditions under which all too real emotional and sexual labour is performed render workers open to abuse and exploitation, as well as making their work invisible. Pollesch draws attention to the emotional toll that the international division of labour takes on those who profit from it economically, yet his preoccupation with the predicament of the ‘blade runner’ rather than that of the ‘cyborgs’ reveals a distinct class bias and blindness to workers’ issues that is disappointing in a (post-) socialist, feminist theatre. While Pollesch’s work is important in illuminating the affective consequences of reconstructing the ‘private’ for upwardly mobile women, and points to a new, emotionally devastating kind of homelessness that greets those who are succeeding in the globalised world, the often literal displacement from home, the emotional labour and old-fashioned exploitation of the service worker fade from view. Nor does the play recognise that not all women experience this traditionally male predicament; it is as stalled by the focus on heterosexuality as the only social matrix structuring the relations between client and worker as the article on which it draws. For this reason, it describes customer–personnel relations in terms of a paradox or contradiction: ‘there is a same-sex relation between you and the concierge, but working relations remain HETEROSEXUAL!’ (Pollesch, Domestic 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Front, p. 78). The work of Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Hess and Lenz, as well as Wichterich, Lenz/Nickel/Riegraf, Klingebiel/Randeria, and Mies demonstrates the challenges of a multi-scaled approach to the globalisation of the heterosexual matrix and the urgency of taking into account race, class and migration.12 Rather than despair over the elimination of genuine feelings, the interpellation into executive roles, the futility of resistance and the dark prospect of forgoing ‘home’ altogether (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 80), one might consider how to tackle the conditions and institutions that systematically organise the international division of emotional and sexual labour. A feminist critique and political practice would have to operate simultaneously at different scales: macro-politically, it must intervene in international financial policy, structural adjustment programmes and debt management, which have all aggravated economic differences between developed and developing nations, and contributed to the massive increase of migration, with an increasing proportion of women. Moreover, it must transform immigration law, which has contributed to the illegalisation and exploitation of domestic workers in particular. At the national scale, feminists ought to hold the state responsible for making the care for children, the elderly and the handicapped available and affordable, as well as regulate domestic employment. Finally, at the micro-political scale of gender role behaviour, a feminist politics would question the tendency to teach boys – and increasingly girls – that they are exempt from domestic labour, as well as from emotional and sexual responsibility for others more generally. In its splicing of a myopically local study with a global mass cultural text, Shit Hotels makes very large claims about the alienation experienced by those whom neoliberalism positions as a transnational elite. If feminism aims to articulate shared interests between the winners and losers of globalisation, the neglect of the corresponding alienation of the ‘cyborgs’ to whom dirty and monotonous labour is outsourced undermines that objective. Moreover, the antagonism of human guests and cyborg service workers masks the fact that for many women today being ‘modern’ entails straddling the two. That omission in Shit Hotels, I suggest, correlates with a certain myopia in some mainstream German feminism, which unquestioningly adopts the neoliberal discourse of flexibility, mobility and creativity – now revalued as an advantage women derive from their historic training in bearing the ‘double burden’ – in order to position women competitively as the model subjects of the neoliberal economy.13 It is no coincidence that this research has emerged in relation to postsocialist 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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gender systems, as Central and Eastern European women are much less likely and able to outsource domestic labour; instead, they compensate for failing state support with their own unpaid domestic labour. Postsocialist women’s orientation towards combining work and motherhood, and the flexibility they have learned to realise that goal, are now seen to enhance their competitiveness in a globalised economy.14 While a number of scholars concur that many post-socialist women have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of social mobility, many are also critical of the fact that modernisation comes at the price of imposing a heavy and unjust toll on women.15

Knowledge economies Watching a Pollesch production is a little like witnessing a theory seminar whose participants are on ‘speed’. Pollesch splices political theory and mass culture into dialogues without action. Nothing much happens on stage, although the atmosphere is hectic. Monologues and dialogues circle around theoretical concepts and terminology shared not just by the young, largely student audiences flocking to the Prater, but also by the activist groups that inhabited the Domestic Front along with Pollesch’s theatrical ensemble, as ‘roommates’ of sorts. In contrast to the reading and discussion groups consorting with the actors, however, the plays do not clarify or explore the meaning of the theoretical texts, nor are they parodied. Pollesch mines laboriously constructed arguments (such as Kuster and Lorenz’s article) for quotable slogans and catchphrases, which are repeated and varied rather than developed into theses. The fast pace with which actors deliver their lines impedes comprehension; at best spectators remember some of the key terms. When characters realise that the meta-characterological statements they speak concern them, they demonstrate the process of absorbing and applying theory; in Sex after Mae West, for instance, Inga says: ‘Some desire bolsters my exploitation and I’m just lucky that it’s no heterosexual desire. Wait a sec. OH GOD! But it is, I’m a fucking HETEROSEXUAL!’ (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 131). As knowledge and self-knowledge are placed in the same economy that is thematised, the individual must continually rearticulate her position vis-à-vis the discourse that speaks it; the capitalised words and phrases do not just signal abrupt increases in volume – which might signal the strain of that cognitive labour and the agony of realising one’s interpellation – but also slight decreases in tempo, faintly echoing the stillness of reflection. Hence Pollesch’s style operates as a metaphor for the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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accelerating and expanding regime of neoliberal efficiency that enfolds not only the ‘private’ realm, but also the public, autonomous realms of art and knowledge. The piercing screams punctuating the delivery – not all of which are scripted – signal the agony of not being able to stop to think. The relative immobility of bodies on stage, which are inundated with mass cultural signs at high volume, evoke the stillness of the reader, on which the interruption of busy ideological reproduction is predicated. On his stage, theory is denied the critical distance and elevated status of meta-discourse, but neither does Pollesch seem to share the optimism of Naomi Klein, who notes that contemporary artists’ embeddedness in corporate environments has merely heightened their ability to block any discourse. At irregular intervals, the dialogue is interrupted by so-called ‘clips’. During these moments, actors jump up, walk around or talk to each other while very loud music blares out from speakers. These ‘clips’ provide performers with opportunities to stretch, drink water, wipe off their sweat or do a quick workout to make their bodies fit for the next segment. During these moments the strain of acting becomes visible, thereby linking the actors to the service workers referenced in the dialogue, who tap parts of their subjectivity to add value to the emotional experiences they provide. By foregrounding acting as work, the theatre also throws into relief the spectators’ release from social responsibility, which in turn increases their own efficiency. This defamiliarisation technique foregrounds the heterosexual matrix structuring relations between the female worker and mixed consumer-audience in the interest of increased productivity; the wheeled office chairs on which spectators are seated in Domestic Front underscore that the consumption of emotion and release from the labour of thinking make them fit for another day at the office. The interruptions in the dramatic flow highlight acting as labour and flag the convergence of art and the market, which liberalism postulated as distinct. Pollesch’s theatre thus exhibits and reflects on its own conditions of production as part of the social changes it seeks to analyse. As art is folded into the market logic, working conditions prevailing mainly in the cultural sector spread throughout the economy, while public spaces shielded against commercial and political pressures vanish. Whereas political consultants in Britain, the US and Germany applaud the growing complexity, meaningfulness and flexibility of work in post-industrial ‘creative economies’,16 the work of cultural scholars points to overwork, low pay, self-exploitation, lack of security and benefits, the accelerating pace of production, the shift from 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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cooperation to competition and the ubiquitous erosion of security or solidarity as the hallmarks of the increasingly deregulated, informal sector in which designers, musicians, graphic artists, architects, journalists, researchers and many others work, conditions that are effaced by the enthusiastic vision of ubiquitous ‘creativity’.17 What kind of art and knowledge can be produced under these conditions, and what are the political consequences of the attendant transformation of civil society? In the Enlightenment, the theatre and the university were given the task of producing critical citizens able to emancipate themselves from the yokes of superstition and authoritarian rule, shielded against commercial and political pressures. Certainly, these institutions did not live up to the ideal of the public sphere as Jürgen Habermas theorised it; both the exclusion of certain matters as ‘private’, and of certain identities from civic debate, have been rigorously criticised.18 Yet I would link Pollesch’s facilitation of a collective space for reflection and debate at the Prater to those who seek to modify the concept of the democratic public sphere, rather than discard it altogether. By turning itself into a hub in networks of activists, theorists and artists, the Prater models the very public sphere whose vanishing is the subject of Domestic Front. Notwithstanding the critical pessimism that marks the plays, I want to note the optimism of democratic will and method that drives the social and work relations in that space. The working group that constituted itself as one of the ‘roommates’ of Pollesch’s ensemble inhabiting the Domestic Front called itself NewCenterAddition.19 Its The Wrong Life Show20 consisted of a series of discussions that aimed to connect the personal, the professional and the political; a reading group working through Hardt and Negri’s Empire; and video nights, slide shows and karaoke shows.21 NewCenterAddition had grown out of a supra-regional network of urban activists, which in 1997–8 organised actions protesting at the transformation of public, urban space into privatised, increasingly policed consumption and service zones, from which unwanted populations and individuals are systematically excluded.22 The Wrong Life Show sought to come to terms with the shifting role of artists and other hip urbanites from social outsiders to model citizens of the neoliberal ‘creative economy’, and the cooption of self-determined, alternative and politically critical practices located in the social margins. Reflecting on the show, participants noted that it reproduced the very conditions the actors had thematised and criticised: the blurring of work and life, the pleasure and satisfaction derived from it, and 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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minimal pay. NewCenterAddition used the stage as a forum where the pressing of culture into social service, the ‘culturalisation’ of social conflicts that are no longer solved politically, could be discussed. ‘But perhaps performative repetitions such as this will bring about change,’ they concluded (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 128). In conclusion, Pollesch’s work stakes out a critical space at the margins of the cultural sector, which is currently undergoing far-reaching transformations. Domestic Front brings into view changes resulting from the folding of the domestic sphere into corporate rhythms and objectives. These changes are examined from the point of view of European women who gain economically but experience unsettling, alienating consequences from their integration into the global economy. By illuminating the sexual and emotional life of the homo œconomicus at the centre of the neoliberal worldview, Pollesch’s plays make an original contribution to feminist theatre’s engagement with globalisation. Read alongside feminist theorising in Europe and North America, however, they also reveal very particular blind-spots in German feminism, which until recently neglected the widening class differences between women, and the ethnicisation of the European workforce as a consequence of migration. The plays’ thematic focus on the consequences of the ‘insourcing of the home’ is amplified by the dramatic form, which highlights what could be called the ‘insourcing’ of the creative and critical imagination. Pollesch’s signature style signals the painful synchronisation of playing and thinking with the demands of the post-industrial economy, in which the arts model the ascendant notion of eminently innovative, flexible, deregulated, self-exploitive labour. Yet the project of making emotions, eroticism, contemplation and critical reflection more ‘efficient’ constitutes a severe and dangerous refashioning of civil society and the public sphere, which Habermas and others postulated as key to self-correcting, participatory, democratic politics. Pollesch’s thematic focus on the very private matters that Habermas excluded from consideration emphasises the need to rethink the philosopher’s notion of the ‘public’ in order to retain its critical purchase in the face of neoliberal restructuring. Aside from the thematic and formal dimensions I have outlined, Pollesch’s democratising impulse also informs his theatre’s institutional structure, which actively resists the social relations marked by isolation and competition that prevail in the gradually de-subsidised, privatised, creative economy. By sheltering a whole array of activist, academic and artistic interlocutors, and fostering the very argumentative, collaborative discourse that the plays show to be 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms 49

Notes 1. René Pollesch, Wohnfront 200/2001 (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2002). wwwslums (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003), Zeltsaga: René Pollesch’s Theater 2003/2004 (Berlin: Synwolt, 2004). 2. In 2001 he was awarded the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis for www-slums, and in 2002 was named Best Dramatist by the magazine Theater heute. In 2006 he received both the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis for Capucetto Rosso and the Audience Award at the Mühlheim Festival. Domestic Front was selected to participate in the Theatertreffen 2002, an annual theatre festival to which the ten best productions of the season are invited. 3. For instance, several scenes of www-slums were excerpted and anthologised in Forge Reproductive Accounts: Heterosexuality, Work & Home by a feminist collective of critical urbanists/social geographers; the written analyses of that collective were in turn incorporated in Pollesch’s play Gross Hotel in Berlin later that year. 4. Sabine Hess and Ramona Lenz, ‘Das Comeback der Dienstmädchen: Zwei ethnographische Fallstudien in Deutschland und Zypern über die neuen Arbeitgeberinnen im Privathaushalt’, in S. Hess and R. Lenz, eds, Geschlecht und Globalisierung: Ein kulturwissenschaftlicher Streifzug durch transnationale Räume, (Königstein: Ulrike Helmer, 2001), p. 137. 5. Mae West, Three Plays by Mae West, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: Routledge, 1997); Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (Berlin: Ullstein, 1929), translated as Grand Hotel (New York: Doubleday, 1931). 6. Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, ‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, Widersprüche 20:78 (2000): 13–26. 7. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 10 (1929): 303–13. 8. While the authors profess to dislike the ‘international colonial style’ in which these Boardinghäuser are furnished, they are attracted to the possibility of escaping the constant, draining negotiations around housework, professional pressures, needs and duties that characterise the daily life of many heterosexual feminists living with male partners. 9. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). 10. This allows the ‘First World to take on a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the family – pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks, while constructing the migrant, who now shoulders the labour of love, not as wife but as secret mistress, whose work remains invisible and unacknowledged (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, pp. 11–12). 11. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Del Rey, [1968], 1996).

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increasingly impossible, Pollesch turns the Prater into an arena for staging the current, acute contradiction between capitalism and democracy, without ceding the latter as a lost cause.

12. Christa Wichterich, The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality, trans. Patrick Camiller (London, New York: Zed Books, 2000); Ilse Lenz, Hildegard Maria Nickel and Birgit Riegraf, eds, Geschlecht, Arbeit, Zukunft (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2000); Ruth Klingebiel and Shalini Randeria, eds, Globalisierung aus Frauensicht: Bilanzen und Visionen (Bonn: Dietz, 1998); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 13. I call this work ‘mainstream’, since it aligns itself with the dominant position articulated by the ‘transitology paradigm’ in the social sciences, which teleologically posits liberal democracy as the outcome of socio-political developments following authoritarian forms of rule. (The term was originally applied to Latin American and Southern European states in the 1970s and 1980s.) Transitologists thus assume (rather than argue) that ‘market capitalism and democratic rights have been expanded for all postsocialist societies’, Jacqui True, ‘Gendering Post-Socialist Transitions’, in Marchand and Runyan, eds, Gender and Global Restructuring, Sightings, Sites and Resistances (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 74–93, p. 77. 14. See Hildegard Maria Nickel and Eva Kolinsky, eds, Reinventing Gender: Women in East Germany since Unification (New York: Frank Cass, 2003); Susan Gal, ‘Feminism and Civil Society’, in J. W. Scott, C. Kaplan and D. Keates, eds, Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997). 15. Nickel’s work must be seen in the context of the many feminist studies of post-socialist women in the early 1990s that portrayed them as victims of transformation processes. Against that tendency, scholars like Julie Beck and Jacqui True insist on a differentiating view of processes that have engendered ‘both new forms of exploitation and empowerment to women in Central and Eastern Europe’ (True, ‘Gendering Post-Socialist Transitions’, p. 76). Even among the most avid post-socialist proponents of the free market system in Eastern Europe, there is a greater sense of alarm over ‘signs that capitalism is having a negative effect on the employment opportunities of many women at the lower end of the skill and education ladder’, widening income gaps between men and women, and the ‘growth of prostitution and sex tourism since the Velvet Revolution’ (Julie Beck, ‘(Re)negotiating Selfhood and Citizenship in the Post-communist Czech Republic: Five Women Activists Speak about Transition and Feminism’, in Marchand and Runyan, Gender and Global Restructuring, pp. 176–93, p. 189). 16. Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore, eds, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999); Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People make Money From Ideas (London: Allen Lane, 2001); Adrienne Goehler, Verflüssigungen: Wege und Umwege vom Sozialstaat zur Kulturgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006). 17. Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds, Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002); Angela McRobbie, ‘From Holloway to

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural Economy’, in du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds, Cultural Economy, pp. 97–114. Georg Yudice, ‘The Privatization of Culture’, Social Text 59:2 (2000): 17–34. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1972] 1989). For newer critical approaches to Habermas, see especially Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Neue Mitte [New Centre] was a catchphrase often used by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for the reorientation of social democratic parties away from their historical commitment to the interests of labour. Schröder invoked an entrepreneurial subject required by the neoliberal economy in order to legitimate the dismantling of the welfare state as collective safetynet and mechanism of secondary distribution. The term also refers to the redeveloped district Mitte. The group explains its name as follows: ‘Utterly enmeshed in these [neoliberal] practices, we cannot discern an outside. That’s why we’re choosing to add on: tacking tawdry sheds onto the interior walls of cool lofts. Air out Beautiful Homes by drilling holes in their walls’ (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 107). The show’s title alludes to Adorno’s aphorism that a ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (New York: NLB, 1974) p. 19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See the special issue on Fragmente städtischen Alltags of the journal Widersprüche 78 (December 2000), the study Stadt als Beute by the collective SpaceLab (Klaus Ronneberger, Stephan Lanz and Walther Jahn), which Pollesch adapted for the stage; and Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, eds, Reproduktionskonten fälschen! Heterosexualität Arbeit & Zuause (Berlin: b books, 1999).

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Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms 51

5 Sue-Ellen Case

The concept of globalisation is most often understood as a genderless, sexless phenomenon, signifying the processes of nation-states and transnational flows of capital as if they were purely self-referential dynamics. In spite of interventions into the critique by feminists and queers to personalise differences among those most affected by globalisation, the major discourses continue to inscribe the global and even the local as if abstracted, universalised categories. In fact, these authors take great pains not to ‘descend’ to particulars, even when they insist that they are interested only in the materialist effects. Take Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential work Empire, for example.1 They write of ‘populations’, ‘subjectivities’ and ‘ethnic groups’, in their socalled ‘Biopolitics’ (Empire, pp. 31–7). Significantly, though, they treat ‘capital’ as if it were an active subject, as in ‘capital does relate to and rely on its noncapitalist environment, but it does not necessarily internalize that environment’ (Empire, p. 225). It is difficult, at least for this author, to imagine how capital could internalise anything. Nonetheless, economic processes, unmarked by gender and sexuality, are the dominant subject posed within their critique. Other familiar ‘big names’ in the field, such as Fredric Jameson, move considerations of identity and difference into the misty regions of heady abstractions that operate as subjects: ‘As you begin to watch Identity turn into Difference and Difference back into Identity, you grasp both as an inseparable Opposition. … At that point, you have approached the identity of non-identity.’2 Surely, the scene Jameson paints of a clash of philosophical Titans melting into one another registers some anxiety of specificity, but, beyond that, it is difficult to parse just what happened to differences in this collapse. More, David Harvey offers a seemingly activist role for ‘-isms’ in his notion of ‘militant particularisms’.3 As for 52

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The Queer Globe Itself

the local, it too appears as an active abstract term. The influential author Arif Dirlik defines it in this way: ‘The local as I use it here has meaning only inasmuch as it is a product of the conjuncture of structures located in the same temporality but with different spatialities.’4 We might hope that in one of those spatialities we would find something like a lesbian bar, but it is unclear whether or not the local actually signifies any populus. From a feminist perspective, Carla Freeman argues that in these discourses the global operates as a masculinised concept. 5 Even though these authors seem to write critiques of the global, the agency and power they lend to it masculinise its role, if not their very discourse. Moreover, Freeman insists, since these accounts do not consider the role of gender in the global sphere, their seeming nongendered space is, as usual, a masculinist space; for the unmarked has traditionally been construed as masculinist (‘Local:Global’, p. 1010). Freeman locates accounts of gendering processes within ethnographies, rather than within critiques of globalisation. Ethnographic accounts have recorded and understood gendered hierarchies as part of a specifically local scene (‘Local:Global’, p. 1011). This practice of situating gender within the local, argues Freeman, reinscribes the equivalencies among global/ masculine and local/feminine (p. 1012). Finally, Freeman observes that in the macro-scenarios of global and local, the local is often construed as a rape victim of global capitalist domination. She argues that a feminist reconception of the global would understand local practices not merely as the effects of the global, or as a contradiction to it, but as constitutive of it (p. 1013). This means that gender would be a constituent of the global, rather than one part of its ‘other’. The feminist shift to the discourse would install people as subjects, marked by differences of gender and class in contrast to the active ‘-isms’ and economic processes of global critiques. Apart from ethnographies, sexual practices and gender codes have been constituted as autonomous, discrete objects of study, carefully sorted out from global discourses and belonging only to critiques dedicated solely to them; thus queer and feminist writings are perceived to deal exclusively with sexuality and gender, respectively. In Queer Globalizations, Miranda Joseph notes how kinship and community have been constructed as part of the so-called ‘natural’ and thus ‘extraeconomic’ realm.6 If capital is perceived as an active agent of power that refers only to its own economic processes, sexual practices must belong to an order that is entirely self-reflexive. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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As my students in feminist classes often ask, ‘How did this happen?’ By way of an answer, Joseph offers a cursory consideration of the division of the economic from the embodied in the work of Karl Marx as a kind of ‘origin’ of influence for Leftist critiques. Joseph turns to Marx’s use of the term ‘value’ (as in ‘use value’ and ‘surplus value’) as establishing referents of economic value that are abstracted from embodied practices. These so-called ‘values’, which actually define conditions of labour and consumption, serve only to refer to economic conditions, extracted from the values associated with embodied practices such as gender or heteronormativity (Joseph, ‘Discourse of Global/Localization’, p. 86). Moreover, she argues, Marx’s notion of capital, like that of ‘value’, ‘depends on an abstract equivalence across cultures’. She concludes that ‘this abstraction is what makes capitalism seem mobile and dynamic’ (pp. 86–7). Ironically, Leftist abstractions of monetary operations and their values as culture/gender/body-free collude with those very operations and assumptions of global capital. Here is the actual battle of the Titans: one form of economics wrestles with another, abstracted from embodied processes. So where, one might ask, does Marx situate the embodied practices of the subject? Unfortunately, for those outside the heteronormative order, he relegates all personal/social/kinship values to the family unit, for better or for worse. The family unit bears the weight of embodied production and kinship hierarchy. As Joseph notes, the family unit also serves as a compensatory site. It constitutes the private, personal realm imagined as supplemental to capitalist and market exploitation (‘Discourse of Global/Localization’, p. 88). The family is installed as the great keeper of the gender divide and hierarchy, the exclusive propertyowner of the bedroom, and the single refuge from the arena of state and global economics. Here, Left and the Right also seem to agree. The title of the volume in which Joseph’s article appears, Queer Globalizations, reveals that any study that imagines large economic and state processes that would be marked by the social and particularly a social outside of the heteronormative zone must constitute a separate, autonomous critique of the local. So first, what queer studies can bring to studies of globalisation is an understanding of the direct relation between economic forces and the social. Sexual practices and preferences can be seen to co-constitute not only local, but also global transactions. In other words, like feminist critiques, queer interventions can help to dissolve the autonomous sense of capital and economics upon which both critiques of the global and globalisation depend, infusing embodied practices in the root of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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these operations. Second, and most important, queer subjects can displace the self-referential discourse of the economic with an agent who is neither necessarily a resident of the local nor a normative citizen. Queer discourses can insist that there is a labouring/consuming subject within the global arena that is not defined by the family or kinship hierarchies. And the queer subject can be treated as a denizen of both the local and global arenas. In this way, queer studies of globalisation can alter the paradigm of the critique at its base.

The voyage out A vast liner labours its way into the harbour. In many ports of the world this is a familiar sight. While the ship contaminates international waters with its waste, it also brings welcome tourist dollars to port regions. Street performers rush to the dockside, along with those who bring ‘local’ foods and crafts in the hope of earning tourist dollars. When the passengers begin to disembark for their short visit to a ‘foreign land’, the locals are shocked to see homosexual couples coming down the gangplank: men are holding hands with other men; women have their arms around each other. Performers who practise sexualised versions of local traditions on the docks, such as the hula, stop in their tracks, afraid that the gay men will respond to the male dancers and the lesbians to the female. Food vendors flee from imagined contamination. This scene could have happened anytime from the early 1990s to today, in many ports, but let’s set it in the Cayman Islands, a British territory, where the islanders were, in fact, so offended by displays of same-sex affection that in December 1998 the local authorities denied docking privileges to an American gay cruise ship insisting that ‘gay vacationers could not be counted on to “uphold standards of appropriate behaviour”’.7 The public and national space, it seems, are imagined as heteronormative. Gay and lesbian tourism creates a ‘visible and mobile homosexuality’ in the world, challenging local behaviours (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 102). Some queer theorists argue that creating a queer space is always a form of tourism, particularly in fleeing repressive societies at ‘home’. From their perspective, the search for a safe habitat in which to express affection and desire in public, combined with a disposable income, launched a ‘golden age’ of queer tourism in the 1990s. Today, ‘an estimated 5–25 million gays and lesbians … spend more than $10–17 billion on travel products each year’ (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 105). The visibility of these tourists definitely challenges local prohibitions and seduces local 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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market economies. A myriad of gay and lesbian travel organisations and publications now flourish, publishing descriptions of welcoming sites as well as homophobic ones for queer tourists. It is important to note that only certain queers are part of this venture, however. A marketing survey published in 2001 claims that 88 per cent of gay travellers are college-educated, most are white and many live in urban centres. Moreover, 94 per cent of gay and lesbian travellers are, in fact, gay; only 6 per cent are lesbians (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 114). However, critiques of queer travel perceive it as launching a form of globalism that reconstructs the imperial sense of travel, with its nostalgia for illicit, exotic encounters. In this way, queer travellers practise ‘the use of the exotic to transgress’ (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 104). Joseph Boone, in ‘The Homoerotics of Orientalism’, traces this practice in the biographies and literatures of noted gay authors from André Gide to Roland Barthes.8 The sex trade for boys in the Mediterranean and in Asian countries such as Thailand has financed new clubs and scenes, bringing a relaxation of local laws. Bangkok now houses numerous clubs, many featuring transgender or drag acts as entertainment, featuring katoeys, or ladyboys. Beach towns such a Phuket host many gay guesthouses and clubs. The majority of those who perform in these clubs and serve as sex-workers are young boys from poor homes, who have found economic success in plying their trade with gay tourists. The critique within feminism of the sex trade and the sexual use of poor women in the Third and Fourth Worlds has apparently not permeated the consciousness of these gay male travellers. So while queer tourists may bring a new, global visibility to alternative sexualities, they also exploit local conditions for a booming Orientalist sex trade that preys on poverty. Queer women tourists have also financed numerous forays into the global. Their preferred method of travel, however, is less the occupation of cities and resorts than lesbian cruises. The earliest and most successful of these grew out of the feminist recording label Olivia Records, now known as Olivia Cruises. These are the lesbian specials, although not necessarily marketed that way by the cruises themselves. One needn’t read the secret codes of the subculture to discover these are primarily lesbian cruises. Lesbian travel agencies advertise them as such. One lesbian travel agency, Flamingo Travel, notes: Olivia, serving the lesbian community since 1973, has worked to empower women through travel. It’s different to say the list as lesbian cruise travelers really feel free every minute of every day 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Resources travel agency posts that ‘Olivia Gay Travel is up and coming and is one of the hottest gay and lesbian travel agencies in the world. Catering to the lesbian community, most if not all of Olivia’s staff and customers are gay and lesbian’.10 These cruise ships feature musicians of feminist/lesbian note, travelling to Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Netherlands, the Greek islands, etc. The Netherlands may seem to stand out here as a different sort of port-of-call, but Amsterdam has long been recognised as a lesbian-friendly city, with several ‘hot spots’ to enjoy. Along with Amsterdam, the cruises advertise ‘the buzzing social scene’ of Key West, Florida – another known queer resort – as part of the ‘Caribbean Escape with Melissa Etheridge’.11 Etheridge, long a favourite in certain lesbian circles, provides what some describe as a ‘dreamy cruise’, as she croons across the Caribbean. As this suggests, these cruises are more about romance on the far seas than sex in the port cities, while still offering short visits to various bars in the ‘buzzing social scene’. Prices for these cruises range from US$1,400 to $6,000. The Etheridge tour for 2006 sold out. This success indicates a flourishing class of lesbians who can afford such travel and leisure. To be fair, not all of these cruises are focused on romance: at least two evince an interest in ‘nature’, one sailing to the Galapagos Islands, the other to Antarctica. While these cruises indicate a different sort of traveller and a different interest in the global, they also chart frightening incursions into fragile ecologies. By the way, should heterosexual feminists feel left out of the portrait of global travellers, Ms. Magazine will be hosting its third all-women feminist cruise in 2007. On this cruise, speakers such as the activist Dolores Huerta, the actress Tyne Dailey and the president of the National Association for Women will (presumably) deliver feminist politics, while cruising the seas. In fact, our Women Studies programme at UCLA sent out e-flyers for this cruise. While the ship cuts through the Caribbean, stopping at familiar ports, it also hosts such events as a ‘meeting with Mexican feminists’ and, more difficult to comprehend, a ‘feminist land excursion to the Guatemalan Mayan Ruins’. While at sea, feminists can enjoy feminist gambling at the ship’s casino and feminist facials at the spa. And all this for as little as 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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from the outside world. Olivia, like many other gay travel cruise companies, charters entire ships and resorts and they continually craft new vacation packages and unique experiences for the gay travel industry.9

$1,849 or as much as $5,800. The class of these feminists is fairly easy to deduce from these prices.12 However, the sight of independent women together, descending the gangplank, may have a liberating effect on those who find themselves in constrained social circumstances. At the same time, that capitalist independence might also produce a kind of cookie-cutter globalism in its image of feminist and queer women. One could imagine, too, that the sight of these upper-middle-class women on vacation might not inspire the working women in the ports, with their few vegetables and fruits. Money does speak, in all these ways, with the growth of queer travel. Eng-Beng Lim, in his article ‘Glocalqueering in New Asia’, describes the effect of ‘pink dollar politics’ in Singapore – a nation-state long known for the persecution of homosexuals.13 Recognising the economic benefits of luring queer tourists, Singapore reversed its policies to host ‘Asia’s [queer] Mardi Gras’ in 2003. A form of the Pride Parade, the event attracted tourists from many countries, including Germany, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong and the US, along with more than 4,500 local participants. This enormous ‘coming-out party’ eased restrictions on public displays of queer affections, including dancing. ‘Pink dollar tourism’, then, motivated the nation-state to lift its prohibitions. Beyond state-instituted changes in legislation of non-normative sexual behaviour, the global visibility of queers has inspired the formation of more indigenous political organisations such as the Asian Lesbian Network, organised by the Thai group Anjaree in 1990; the first Indonesian Lesbian and Gay Congress in 1993; the Progressive Organisation of Gays in the Philippines in 1992, and the group Occur in Japan.14

Dubbing the queer voice Adopting the globalised queer voice has become a strategy of resistance. In several countries, people have found it useful to ‘dub’ the queer voice in order to mimic its association with transgender identification and same-sex desire. Some have found that mimicking these non-normative practices can offer protection within oppressive normative hierarchies; others have found a way to articulate their own set of identifications through this globalised paradigm. For example, Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, who suffer not only indentured servitude but also sexual exploitation, adopt a sexual identity called ‘tomboyism’ to discourage the men for whom they work from making sexual advances 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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and compromising their integrity (Freeman, Local:Global, p. 1016). They find that convincing these men that they are, in fact, masculinised women, interested only in other women, can successfully prevent their sexualisation. They appear less seductive and less available in their ‘tomboy’ role. Some queer theorists posit this kind of strategy as a glocalised use of ‘lesbian’ in contrast to a ‘global lesbian’. In other words, local women appropriate the global signifier ‘lesbian’ as a standpoint from which to resist oppressive practices: less a site of identification than a foil to traditional assumptions governing women’s sexuality.15 These ‘glocal’ adoptions of queer identities contrast sharply with the manner in which more official, seemingly feminist organisations in the international realm have eschewed any nominative association with lesbians. One need only recall what transpired at the UNsponsored Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. As Katie King documents, a coalition of women’s organisations from South Africa, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the US and Mexico drafted a document on sexual orientation and women’s rights.16 At the eleventh hour of drafting the Platform for Action of the World Conference, the term ‘sexual orientation’ and its attendant issues were struck from the document (King, ‘There Are No Lesbians Here’, p. 34). King points out how this process is tied to the human rights project of creating a ‘new global citizen’, or, more specifically, the new global woman as citizen who signifies stable, normative identifications and social realities across cultural and national differences (p. 37). In so far as sexual orientation issues threaten the success of women’s application for global citizenship, they are often considered dispensable. I have been asked by feminist representatives of three countries where I have delivered public addresses not to mention the term ‘lesbian’, lest it impede the success of their feminist agenda there. So, ironically, while lesbian issues have been silenced in international feminist platforms, the voice or identity has been ‘dubbed’ by other, local women as a strategy of resistance. I have borrowed the term ‘dubbing’ from Tom Boellstorff’s notion of ‘dubbing culture’.17 Boellstorff coined the term to describe several local practices he discovered in his research on gay Indonesians. For example, he relates the case of ‘Darta’, a Muslim man living in East Java, who adopted two English words to describe his sexual identity, first, ‘lesbi’ and then ‘gay’ as in dapat gay juga (‘I Knew it Was Me’, pp. 21–2). These words had travelled via gay literature and gay tourist contacts to his country and helped him to articulate his own practices and desires which had no name in his Javanese Muslim culture. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Boellstorff records that 95 per cent of his informants from Java, Bali and Sulawesi cite the mass media as a source for understanding themselves as lesbi or gay (p. 33). Boellstorff also notes the widespread use of the term ‘tomboi’ in Indonesia as signifying various forms of transgender identification (p. 31). Surprisingly, the term ‘tomboy’ has been adopted across cultures as a strategy of resistance and self-definition. Not only have Hong Kong domestic workers and Javanese Muslim men ‘dubbed’ the term, but Taiwanese butch lesbians have adopted it to signify their social identity. Apparently, in the 1960s, gay men in Taipei began referring to women who wore ties and trousers and sported short haircuts as T boys. By the 1980s, the women themselves were using the term, hanging out in what came to be known as ‘T bars’. Antonia Chao reports that more than 30 such bars have opened in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsung since the 1980s.18 These are globalised environments, specialising in karaoke and global music videos, so the identity of ‘T’ could be perceived as a purely global phenomenon. Yet, notes Chao, while these women seem to participate fully in a global commodity culture, their T identification plays on traditional Confucian gender codes of the masculine, including Chinese beliefs in sexual potency, etc. So, while their nomenclature and social space are globalised, their codes of transgender identification are derived from the local Chinese traditions. The process of ‘dubbing culture’ describes how globalised queer identities can be used to ‘animate a sexual self felt to be fully modern and authentic, yet a disjuncture from the local’ (Boellstorff, ‘I Knew it Was Me’, p. 22). As a dubbed soundtrack is shaped by images originating elsewhere, so a ‘dubbed’ identity is something one cannot originate, but only receive. The ‘dubbed’ identity mimics the original in order to disrupt the naturalised cultural referents that are determined by the traditional. Thus, the term is neither strictly globalised, nor strictly localised, but oscillates between the two, in offering, through the global, a local identity. Boellstorf argues that beyond this dubbing, queer identities are positioned in a similarly oscillating manner within global critiques. They are perceived as either autochthonous bearers of ‘traditional identities masked by Westerns terms, or as traitors to tradition, partaking in global gay imperialism’ (‘I Knew it Was Me’, p. 27). ‘Dubbing’ negotiates between the practice of globalised assimilation and local tradition. What Boellstorff has termed ‘dubbing’ others have called ‘glocalisation’: or ‘the localization and indigenization of globally mobile understandings of sexuality’ (Berry, Martin and Yue, Mobile 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Electrifying global sex In their introduction to Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue periodise the global transmission of queer sexualities, citing Time magazine’s assertion in 2001 that ‘the Internet had done to Asia’s gay and lesbian communities what Stonewall enabled in the West …’ (p. 2). The new millennium, it seems, ushered in an electronic network of sexual and political contacts for queers. High-speed technology and the ‘ephemerality of the commodity’ for a network of what these authors perceive as ‘mobile and transient cultures’ (p. 2). As the Web provided online possibilities for assignations and even actual sex around the globe, it also created opportunities to share strategies for political organisation. Websites and chatrooms enabled a new meshing of the public and private – the twilight zone where queer identities and practices form. At the same time, new forms of surveillance have been put in place to monitor and punish these contacts. As usual, sexual practices prompt censorship and moral outrage. Globalising sex also globalises morality. The case of Josephine Chuen-juei Ho, a prominent academician in Taiwan, chair of the English Department at the National Central University and president of the Cultural Studies Association, illustrates how both radical intervention and surveillance can meet on the Web. In June 2003, 14 Taiwanese conservative NGOs filed charges against Ho for two bestiality hyperlinks located on the zoophilia webpage in her Sexuality Studies databank. Ho has been researching sexuality and supporting freedom for marginalised sexual minorities for ten years. She has published 17 books in the area of sexuality studies and feminism. These groups, which had been hounding her for the duration, used the website as an issue to insist that Ho be dismissed from her teaching post. The conservative coalition included a censorship group, Christian groups and a parents’ group. Ho described the hyperlinks in this way: In my case, the hyperlink in question is situated at the bottom of our ‘animal love’ webpage, one among more than 50 webpages on sexuality studies that we are building, preceded by a collection of essays on zoophilia, literary pieces on zoophilia, topical news about cases of bestiality. The hyperlink, when clicked, would reveal 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Cultures, p. 7). Thus, the queer subject is both local and global, assimilated and resistant.

a warning message that says, ‘The following are photos of alternative bestiality sexual acts. Those who may feel offended should refrain from entering.’ The hyperlink itself leads to a string of a dozen or so zoophilia photos that I found on one of the bestiality sites in the US. This collection was chosen mainly because it illustrates not only the various types of animals involved but also the cliché scenarios portrayed. BTW, I have never used the databank in my teaching; it was merely a research reserve for like-minded researchers.19 The study and representation of queer sexual practices, it seems, must be omitted in favour of the normative. Even research implies unhealthy participation, and the global sharing of research pollutes the new, emerging global citizenry. Ho’s response to the censoring of her website clearly articulates the issues: Imposing a law on cyberspace that decrees that ‘the mere provision of hyperlinks’ to the so-called obscenity sites is criminal is simply absurd. For hyperlinks are not direct avenues to fantasyland, but moments of choice-making. A person has to initiate the click to effect his decision to enter. That is something totally different from the passive situation in which you are handed a flyer of obscene images on the street corner. [3] If providing a hyperlink to difficult knowledge is a crime, then search engines from Yahoo to Google would all have to be shut down for they all can lead us to numerous unspeakable terrains. (‘The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript’) The charge inspired a response by local scholars and activists and a transnational internet petition of over 1,000 signatures from 35 countries and areas, including formal letters from the AAUP, the Hong Kong Association of Sex Education and others. Ultimately, two investigative hearings were held concerning the structure and content of Ho’s sexuality databank. Apparently, the Taiwanese legal system considers all explicit sex-related information to be obscenities and not scholarly. In the trial, the prosecution could not distinguish between a hyperlink and a holding in a databank, claiming that Ho had violated the criminal code in making graphic and obscene materials easily available. The court proceedings became a site for activist education – a 50 footlong petition with signatures was unfurled outside the courtroom, the building and plaza were jammed with protestors, etc. Ho was found not guilty, but the case focuses internet issues around the internet 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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representation of alternative sexualities, rights and processes of access, new definitions of the public space, and local, juridical holds on global databanks. Ho’s case challenges the location of the moral choice. She argues that morality is not located in the databank of knowledge, but in the decision of the user. Moreover, she illustrates how search engines of online materials are successfully opening doors to knowledge and contacts across cultures and national laws in a way that is impossible to censor. Sexual practices reveal how the global space is one of extreme anxiety in terms of censorship or security. As the private becomes the public in sexual politics and liaisons, codes of the normative seem even more difficult to presume and enforce. In response to such acts of surveillance and censure, the Taiwanese filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang produced a digital sci-fi porn film, I.K.U.: A Japanese Cyber-porn Adventure, to provide what she deemed a feminist intervention into the mainstream production and reception of digital images considered to constitute a moral outrage. Her film satirises corporate-linked digital-cyber-porn, with porn stars portrayed as mobile flows of the transnational corporation Genom.20 The fictional corporation sends collected sexual pleasure signals directly to the brain of consumers, without any ‘physical friction’. I.K.U. orgasm decoder chips, in different colours for different sexualities, provide access to the Genom server. Thus, Cheang’s film sidesteps all issues of identity and even sexual practice, as the process uploads entirely into the digital realm. Katrien Jacobs claims a ‘queerscape’ for Cheang’s work, which projects a mythologised site, animated in many cases, and projected into the future.21 The digital realm, then, challenges the notion of the sexual as embodied. The global sexual subject may be formed in the future as a collection of digital effects. The few strategies offered above may begin to suggest ways in which queer studies can intervene in normative global critiques and discourses. They prompt the visibility of untested normative assumptions that are built into the global and local, suggesting ways to imagine a more nuanced and varied global subject. Queers studies can intervene in the bipolar opposition of the global and the local, offering an oscillating position from which to perceive economic and social effects.

Notes 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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2. Fredric Jameson, ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 54–77, p. 76. 3. Quoted in Matthew Hyland, ‘In Place of a Conclusion’, in Jameson and Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization, pp. 378–9. 4. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Global in the Local’, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds, Global/Local (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 21–45, p. 39. 5. Carla Freeman, ‘Is Local:Global as Feminine:Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization’, Signs, 26:4 (Summer, 2001): 1007–37. 6. Miranda Joseph, ‘The Discourse of Global/Localization’, in Arnaldo CruzMalavé and Martin F. Manalansan, eds, Queer Globalizations (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 71–99. 7. Jasbir Kaur Puar, ‘Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism. Travel, and Globalization’, GLQ, 8:1–2 (2002): 101–37, p. 101. 8. Joseph Boone, ‘Vacations Cruises; or The Homoerotics of Oprientalism’, PMLA, 110, (1995): 89–110. 9. Flamingo Travel Group, http://www.flamingo-travel.com, accessed 29 September 2006. 10. Gay Resources Online, http://www.gay-resources-online.com. Accessed 29 September 2006. 11. Olivia Cruises, http://www.olivia.com/cruises. Accessed 29 September 2006. 12. Ms. Magazine Cruise, http://www.msmagazinecruise.com. Accessed 29 September 2006. 13. Eng-Beng Lim, ‘Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore’, Theatre Journal, 57:3 (2005): 383–405. 14. See Dennis Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities’, Social Text, 14:3 (Fall 1996): 77–94, p. 79. 15. See Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue, eds, ‘Introduction’, Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 1–18, p. 8. 16. Katie King, ‘“There Are No Lesbians Here”: Lesbianisms, Feminisms, and Global Gay Formation’, in Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan, eds, Queer Globalizations, pp. 33–45. 17. Tom Boellstorff, ‘I Knew it Was Me: Mass Media, “Globalization”, and Lesbian and Gay Indonesians’, in Berry, Martin and Yue, eds, Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, pp. 21–51. 18. Antonia Chao, ‘Drink, Stories, Penis and Breasts: Lesbian Tomboys in Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990’, Journal of Homosexuality, 40:3/4 (2001): 185–209, p. 186. 19. The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript, http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/ 2003/10/controversial. 20. I.K.U.-com, http://www.i-k-u.com. 21. Katrien Jacobs, ‘Queer Voyeurism and the Pussy-Matrix in Shu Lean Cheang’s Japanese Pornography’, in Berry, Martin and Yue, eds, Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, pp. 202–1, p. 211.

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64 Sue-Ellen Case

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Part II

Interventions

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Actress Stories: Binodini and Amal Allana Bishnupriya Dutt

In Calcutta, the actress made her entrance on the stage 50 years before she did in any other presidency in colonial India. For the last 30 years, a by-product of the colonialist imagination has been the popular performance genre the ‘actress story’, performed in numerous versions in Calcutta and in the jatra (repertory theatre), which tours the surrounding countryside of Bengal. The ‘actress stories’ present a moralistic and didactic treatment of the actresses who appeared on the Calcutta stage in the nineteenth century. The performances actually serve to sanctify both the moral role of the actress and that of the nineteenth-century colonial theatre model which grew up under the aegis of an intelligentsia trained in the English colonial system. The genre, which once performed the roles of several actresses, finally came to focus on the central actress figure of the nineteenth century: Binodini Dasi (1863–1941). Though not the first actress on the colonial stage, she belonged to the first generation of actresses1 and in that sense became the first female star and a cult figure in Indian theatre. Binodini Dasi joined the public theatre in 1873 when she was eleven years old, one year after they started recruiting actresses. She was very soon recognised as one of its most accomplished performers. She became a sensation in the title roles in a run of plays written and produced by Girish Chandra Ghosh (1844–1913). Ghosh, dramatist, director, actor and manager, was one of the most influential theatre figures of his time, almost single-handedly setting up the Calcutta Public Theatre.2 In Binodini’s ‘story’ he plays a patriarchal role: as a benefactor and father figure at the centre of her life in the theatre. Despite her success, at the height of her fame, Binodini quit the stage in 1887. Like many of her female colleagues, for most of her life she depended on patrons or protectors alongside her profession as an 67

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actress. In 1883, a young Marwari businessman, smitten by Binodini, offered to build a theatre for the company if she became his mistress. Binodini agreed, partly in response to the pressure of her colleagues and partly because of her commitment to a theatre of her own. In recognition of her decision, the new theatre was to be called ‘B’. However, when the time came her colleagues registered it as the ‘Star Theatre’ since it was felt that naming a theatre after a ‘fallen woman’ would not be good for business. Binodini’s writings were published from 1885 onwards and continued to be published until 1925.3 Her ‘story’ as it is played on the stage, however, while it has appeared in many different versions – including the jatra performance Nati Binodini, which, first performed in 1973, has more than 5,000 performances to its credit – is reduced to one kind of overarching narrative of ‘saintly sinner’. Despite claiming to speak in Binodini’s own voice and to use her autobiographical writings as their main point of reference, her ‘actress story’ is presented as her rejection of the theatre on moral grounds. This is not the story of a consummate actress, but of a woman who is a martyr to the stage. If she assumes a ‘genteel’ or ‘lady-like’ persona, it is not because of her skill and exceptional acting talent, but because of her apologetic and confessional voice and her final penance and atonement, which lead to spiritual redemption. The moral message for the actress is to leave her acting career and do penance for her life in the theatre. The ‘story’ thus constructs a pattern between the admonitory and the exemplary: Bindoini remains at the centre of the discourse as an idealised model, at the same time as she displaces other actress stories. Actual acting achievements by Bindoini, or by any of her contemporaries, are deliberately erased or trivialised.

‘How [not] to act’ What were Binodini’s achievements on the stage which are trivialised and generalised through the ‘proxy’ actress who performs her story? Binodini Dasi was the first actress who could command a pivotal role in the middle-class colonial theatre. Generally, actresses were taken on without having any influence over the theatres in which they played. By contrast, Binodini emerged as a powerful woman determined to negotiate her own professional identity. She began a long and protracted struggle for space and identity – socially, culturally and professionally. Her audience appeal empowered her to insist on top billing and she fought for the right to a theatre in her own name. She could 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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even prompt and persuade Ghosh to write roles and scripts especially for her. Finally, as an actress, she had sufficient social standing to be able to write and publish her autobiography and to acquire a literary identity within the colonial system – an outstanding achievement, given that theatre was considered inferior to literature in middle-class intellectual circles. However, the ‘actress story’ distorts all of this as it ‘casts’ her in the fallen/redemptive model, a narrative of salvation identified with a popular religious movement known as bhakti.4 Fictionalised accounts of Bondini’s life become entangled within the contradiction of both adopting a ‘colonial’ theatrical model as Indian and constructing an indigenous religious sect to aid in forming a nationalist identity. The dominant cultural model of colonial theatre was so restricted in its scope that its Victorian grandeur inevitably degenerated into mere excess. The local, city-based theatre in Calcutta never had enough theatre houses, large enough audiences or indeed sufficient performances to be able to replicate the model of the ‘popular’ English theatre. In such a reduced context, the only commercial vitality of the colonial stage came from its exploitation of actresses. Alluring female performers were crucial to the success of the theatre. The role of the actress consisted of an ambiguous construction of her sexuality. Constant shifts around and the departure from the autobiographical texts have created serious problems in the readings of the materials and jatra on Binodini. Her voice as an actress has been drowned out in favour of a constructed literary voice. Thomas Postlewait states in ‘Autobiography and Theatre History’ that the ‘problem of presenting oneself in a narrative is also complicated by literary techniques of characterization’.5 The other roles – or, as Postlewait terms it, the ‘personae’ – that subdue the author’s own voice are that of the character and the narrator. When, in her autobiography, Binodini calls herself ‘wretched from birth’ or refers to herself as ‘lacking the identity of the patriarch that society recognized as the only identity’, or that ‘residential locality and single status were reason enough for the actress concerned to be identified as a prostitute’ (My Story and My Life as an Actress, p. 12), she is undoubtedly describing her entire generation of actresses. She merely uses the ‘wretched birth’ story as an entry point to contrast her achievements and success in the role traditionally assigned to her. She shapes her own story in the way that Postlewait describes as the familiar autobiographical trajectory: a ‘pattern of narrative development from childhood though journey to crisis, conversion and confession’ (‘Autobiography and Theatre History’, p. 257). Yet the theatrical texts 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Binodini and Amal Allana 69

created from her autobiography deliberately distort her success story in an attempt to make her role perform a public apology. By prolonging her ‘miserable’ retirement and creating a redemption and salvation process out of her autobiographical materials, they destroy her main contribution to the role of the nineteenth-century actress. The voice of Binodini in these performances is actually the moralistic, didactic, hegemonic voice of the patriarch who would admonish her on ‘how [not] to act’.

Amal Allana and a contemporary Binodini story In spite of a long tradition of replicating the iconic image of Binodini as a repentant figure, a new version of her story has now been taken up by one of the leading woman directors of India, who works exclusively in Delhi and in Hindi. Amal Allana is perhaps the most influential and most popular woman director working outside of commercial theatre in India today. Though Allana does not make any claim to feminism, she is an important figure in feminist research, and her plays offer strong, albeit apolitical representations of cross-dressing and body politics. Like Binodini before her, Allana lays claim to an important and powerful role in the theatre: she is, for instance, the chair of the National School of Drama, a highly influential institutional training and theatre centre which has significantly retained its name as the National School of Drama. Among Allana’s recent successes is a stage version of Gabriel Garcia Marques’s Erendira and her Grandmother, performed not only in Delhi, but in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Allana’s decision to work on the Binodini text represents a radical break with the ‘actress story’ as performed in urban Calcutta and rural Bengal. Allana frees the ‘story’ from this legacy and the overemphasis and over-dependence on historicisation and the literary-textual. Instead, she is looking to leave this colonial burden behind and move the story into a new, alternative performance. Allana’s treatment of Binodini is a lengthy, painstaking and time-consuming workshop process, which engaged the director for over a year and a half (she started work in 2004 and the final performance was staged in November 2006). Allana made a conscious choice about starting her ‘actress project’ with an intense period of critical, historical and sociological research, involving actresses, translators and visiting scholars. Significant in this workshop process is the way that Allana deals only with writing by Binodini. Working from a recent English translation of the text, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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however, Allana has had to deal with the literary emphasis in the translated text and its non-engagement with the theatre. After the first read-through, the actresses she was working with came up with the crucial questions and episodes which they wanted to workshop. The actresses also began translating parts of the text for themselves to work on and to discuss. Stylistically, Allana aims to break with the illusion of realism by using a grotesque carnivalism and combining both folk and urban styles. Departing in content and style then from the colonial legacy of the ‘story’ as played in the Calcutta and Bengal traditions is a radical break with tradition, though may bring its problems. To be able to communicate the storyline to a Delhi audience, for example, who may not be familiar with the Calcutta actress, Allana may need to oversimplify the ‘story’ in a way that risks some of the more radical critical treatment for which she strives. That said, dramaturgically Allana has split the actress persona into three voices: the literary, the narrative and the voice of the actress. The canonical male voice is silenced, left out. The contemporary actresses are given the task (power) of creating a new Binodini performance text. The autobiographical text is read aloud in Hindi, English and Bengali. With five actresses playing Binodini (ranging in age from 18 to 60), the apologetic, confessional voice which supposedly dominates the

Figure 1: Binodinis young (Swarpa Ghosh) and old (Selima Raza) encountering their past. Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana.

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Binodini and Amal Allana 71

autobiographical text is diffused through the collective performance process of the actresses. Theirs are multiple voices seeking identities – identities where sexuality and sensuality are not constrained. This is no longer a male-authored, melodramatic text aimed at commercial success. The actresses that ‘make up’ Binodini are unrepentant and openly sexual, on their own terms. The central theme of this new performance of Binodini is the underlying violence and abuse the actress suffered in a colonial and maledominated society. The benefactor baboos,6 whom Binodini is meant to regard with awe and even a glimmer of respect and affection, are now revealed as possessive, ruthless and sexually exploitative. The lifestyle of the colonial middle classes is exposed as lascivious, decadent, greedy and self-indulgent. Suffering from a loss of identity in an oppressive colonial society, the men in Binodini’s life are portrayed as using her as an outlet for their own pent-up anger and violence. One actor plays all the baboos and businessmen who keep Binodini as their mistress and exploit her in one way or another. In one scene, when Binodini is in pain and seeking solace from her artistic benefactor, Girish Chandra Ghosh, Allana portrays Ghosh as a sexual aggressor instead of a kindly benefactor or father figure. This new interpretation, coupled with Ghosh’s refusal to name the theatre after Binodini when she had given her talent (and ‘body’) to build it, positions the actress as a pawn in a patriarchal game of power politics. Binodini’s acting method was the result of two kinds of style and/or influence: the training she had with her mentor Ghosh, and the influences of the ‘great’ European actresses, such as Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt. This mix of the local and the European was typical of colonialist theatre and acting. Images of English actresses were everywhere in the local penny press, and while alien to Indian culture in their representation of the body as petite and sexualised, this was nevertheless imported on to the colonial stage and into ‘idealised’ notions of the image of the actress. In her workshops, Allana goes back time and again to Binodini’s concentration on her acting method and her determination to succeed as the greatest actress of her age. She focuses on three acting styles: Ghosh’s training, the English system and Binodini’s own method of working on character. With Ghosh, Allana illustrates how Binodini was taught the nuances of Victorian melodramatic styles through gestures, postures and attitudes. He teaches her the importance of realism in acting and characterisation. He also tells her about important English actresses and anecdotes from their lives. He tells her how an English 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Figure 2: The baboo’s intrusion as patron and exploiter on a young Binodini (Natasha Rastogi). Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana.

actress would attempt to imitate the nightingale’s voice. Yet Allana introduces a critical slant by having two of her young actresses skirt the stage imitating a nightingale, hands wide open like a bird, parodying the system, while a third runs up to Ghosh with the text of Hamlet in her hand, asking about Ellen Terry’s portrayal of Ophelia, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Binodini and Amal Allana 73

her basic techniques of playing madness on stage and her own memories of her mother going mad at her brother’s untimely death. While seeming to accept Ghosh’s method as the best of the age, when left to her own devices Binodini works out her own style and method. In her autobiography she explains how she would memorise her lines, characterise her role and work out various alternatives for herself. She uses the mirror extensively to find the new self, innovate and control the overemphasis of the prevalent acting style on gesture, posture and attitude (Binodini, Amar Katha, p. 30). Allana’s actresses improvise movements before a wall-to-wall mirror, a method of selfreflection that enables Binodini to decide for herself what acting advice to accept or reject. In what is staged in Allana’s performance as the final confrontation between the actress and her mentor, it is the patriarch who has to placate the actress by offering her the role of the godlike Chaitanya. Chaitanya was a cult figure from the medieval period, who became a revered figure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial Bengal. The religio-ideological discourse of Bhakti which grew up around Chaitanya was connected to new issues of nationalism and national identity through the political project of Vivekananda and Ramkrishna. It was a new nationalist discourse for the Bengali middle class which grew up around Ramkrishna’s power to evoke the free cultural space of the Middle Ages and a pre-colonial tradition. Traditionally, this role is seen as Bindonini’s final realisation of her sins, followed by her penance and exit from the theatre. To Allana the new ideals of self-realisation were to be embodied through the body of the actress as a public act of her final success and not her repentance. Fusing the man-boy and the feminine, the Chaitanya/Ramkrishna icon stood for a new nationalist self-belief, in opposition to a ‘macho’ colonialist discourse. Allana’s Ghosh looks to Binodini in the role of Chaitanya, not as cathartic penitent, but as a skilled performer: one capable of bringing together the masculine and the feminine. The radicalism of this moment is marked by the way in which this represents a break from the tradition in which the female goddesses of mythology were and are still acted out by male actors. Yet when the mythological culture reaches its height of nationalist identification the protagonist had to be replaced by the ‘actress’. *** To conclude: Allana’s new version of the Binodini story questions the theatrical legacy of the ‘actress story’. Her version, through its years of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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process and its final production (November 2006), is multifaceted, dealing with theatrical, feminist, colonialist and nationalist issues. It is the first time that Binodini’s story may really be heard and it has the capacity to challenge the colonial tradition of theatre; to interrogate this from within a strong feminist, post-colonial theoretical framework.

Notes 1. The first recorded public performance in ‘modern theatre history’ is of a Bengali play held at a private residence on 7 December 1872. On 16 August 1873, in a performance of Michael Modhusudan Dutt’s Shermistha (1859), women first played the female parts. 2. Son of a bank clerk, Girish was regarded as a misfit in the colonial system, particularly its formal educational structure. His major contribution to the Bengali theatre repertoire deals with his philosophical exploration of the Bhakti performance texts, the philosophical monotheistic religion of Ramkrishna and his outright historical-nationalistic plays. 3. Binodini wrote two autobiographical texts: My Story and My Life as an Actress (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998) and Amar Katha [My Words] (Kolkata: Subarna Rekha, 2004). 4. Bhakti are popular religious traditions outside the canonical religion and were important for mobilising the Bengali middle classes into an integrated nationalist consciousness and commitment to a nationalist cause in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 5. Thomas Postlewait, ‘Autobiography and Theatre History’, in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie, eds, Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), p. 255. 6. Baboo is a derogatory term used for the colonial middle-class gentleman. It connotes the feminine and suggests compliance with the colonial government.

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Stockholm Interventions: Feminist Activist Performance Tiina Rosenberg

Sweden has experienced a veritable explosion of feminist performances in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although feminist actions, theatre, shows and performance have an established tradition, the current decade has seen an upsurge of feminist events that adopt a performance approach. Feminist cultural festivals are regular and frequent; feminist performance, dance and theatre manage to attract audiences beyond their immediate feminist constituencies. This popularisation of feminist performing arts is, I argue, related to the lively feminist activism in Sweden. Here, I aim to present some examples of different kinds of contemporary feminist performance work by artists and activists who were born in the 1970s, and some later still, in the 1980s. In other words, they were not involved in the feminist activism and debates of the 1970s and 1980s. I limit my examples to the capital, Stockholm, but wish to stress that feminist activism, performance and events are occurring elsewhere in Sweden. In terms of thematics and activism, feminist theatre and performance in Sweden have lines of continuity: direct action, mixing styles and genres in performance-inspired events, but also utilising the more text-based traditions of theatre as and when required. What is unequivocal, however, is that it is performance that drives the contemporary feminist arts scene as events mix a feminist message with spoken word poetry, queer theatre, music, dance, circus and elements of popular culture, with impromptu pranks and tricks thrown in. When I talk of performance, I mean that hard-to-define live act that is a form of performing art but not necessarily linked to the skills or traditions of the stage. In this sense, performance is effective for fast, improvised and spectacular appearances, and is rooted in the early modernist events – the 1960s happenings and other multidisciplinary 76

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art-forms. Performance, then, is a ‘tumbling place’ for encounters between political activism, autobiography, mass culture, ritual body art and the commonplace. Particular characteristics are the use of multiple voices and the lack of hierarchical components. Performance aims at simultaneity; a concurrent effect that the audience is free to structure and evaluate for itself.

Group interventions Feminists in Sweden and internationally have used spectacular and dramatic means to demonstrate how women are objectified by dominant cultural and social representational systems. The early street demonstrations and direct actions triggered the body-centred critique of gender and sexual representations that came to dominate feminist theatre, theory and practice in the 1980s.1 For example, feminist action groups organised counter-performances in connection with the Miss World contest and other beauty pageants. The ‘No More Miss America’ demonstration in August 1968 heralded the popular image of feminists as bra-burners. Recently in Sweden there has been a return to this kind of feminist demonstration, as illustrated by the activities of the Swedish feminist activist group, Unfucked Pussy. Unfucked Pussy are Joanna Rytel and Fia-Stina Sandlund whose Gubbslem (‘Slimey Old Men’) action protested against the Miss Sweden contest in 2001. When Unfucked Pussy attacked the Miss Sweden pageant with their ‘Slimy Old Men’ banner, they did it with humour and fun to challenge the acceptability of women’s objectification and in an interventionist, spectacular way that made it far more effective than any kind of television debate. The tactic of combating repression with pranks and wry humour has a strong feminist tradition. The Guerrilla Girls, who are veterans of feminist cultural resistance on the contemporary art scene, for example, still describe themselves as ‘fighting discrimination with facts, humour and fake fur’, while the activist group Absurd Response to an Absurd War proclaims that the way to maintain today’s anti-war message is through ‘humour, theatre, music, flamboyance, irony, FUN’. Unfucked Pussy work very much in this tradition of fun and feminist intervention.

The feminist solo artist: Miss Universum One prominent Swedish feminist performance artist is Catti Brandelius, alias Miss Universum. She has developed her own performance style 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Feminist Activist Performance 77

Figure 3: Catti Brandelius as Miss Universum. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler.

incorporating songs with Swedish lyrics conveying urgent political messages against sexism and capitalism. Her alias, Miss Universum, is the ironic title of a feminist version of a beauty queen who has set herself above the beauty pageant and conferred the title on herself. She does as she pleases: sings and dances, writes poetry and delivers speeches. Miss Universum lives by her own rules, and she is angry. Miss Universum also makes music videos set in her apartment, in the supermarket, at a party or with her pram strolling among the concrete apartment blocks. When Miss Universum speaks out, the working-class suburb is the centre of the world, the centre of her universe. Her style is based on the provocatively commonplace. She carries bags of baby’s nappies, grocery bags full of cheap food, as she wanders around the neighbourhood singing ‘This was not what Ellen Key had in mind’. (Ellen Key is one of Sweden’s most famous feminists from the early 1900s, best known for her ideas on the social mother, an essentialist view of femininity and motherhood.) Miss Universum confronts the feminist utopias with crass, everyday realities, which primarily comprise a lack of sleep, money, sex and intellectual stimulation. Despite her criticism, Miss Universum is neither cynical nor pessimistic. Things will improve for women, her message proclaims, if only they have the strength to keep on fighting. Therefore, Catti Brandelius occa10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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78 Tiina Rosenberg

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Feminist Activist Performance 79

Figure 4: Catti Brandelius as Professoran. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler.

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sionally exchanges Miss Universum for Professoran (The Professoress), her most recent alter-ego, a character who holds lectures on women’s history and tours all over Sweden. Professoran is a modern-day popular educationalist, brandishing the motto: ‘No one can understand everything, but everyone can understand something’. Catti Brandelius guides the audience to her female role models, women who had to fight for their rights and were forced to develop their own survival strategies. In the role of Professoran, Catti Brandelius advises her audience: ‘Find role models!’ By appearing as Miss Universum and Professoran, Catti Brandelius wants to instil hope and a fighting spirit in her audience. And her audience responds by cheering and giving her standing ovations.

The pink rebellion: moderation sucks! The cocky attitude and the pink are typical of Grynet (a Swedish appellation similar to Tiny). Like Miss Universum she wears a tiara, as do W and Courtney Love, and has a predilection for pink chainsaws. Grynet, alias Elin Ek, is a loud-mouthed, over-the-top character, who encourages rebellion. Her main target is adult men in positions of power. With her tiara, her glittery girl’s clothes and big, black-framed glasses Grynet addresses young girls with a broad, clear and direct feminist message: ‘Hey, you are the way you are, so don’t take any shit!’ Grynet is a power princess, a contemporary Pippi Longstocking, who gets her strength from feminism. In the 1970s the women’s movement tried to redefine the Witch. She symbolised women’s right to speak, make a noise, demand attention and challenge conventionality, while being good ‘inside’. This amalgamation of witch and power princess is represented by characters such as Grynet, a plucky little thing in her pink skirt. Princess Don’t-Take-Any-Shit is not trying to be cute, and even less to be a darling or a sweetheart. She conquers her tiara and sings ‘I don’t give a shit’ (about school or parents). Another pink intervention was the Queer Cab project in the summer of 2005. A pink car with plastic flower garlands and blue fairy lights round the rear window took customers anywhere in Stockholm free of charge, on one condition: that they revealed all their prejudices about lesbians and gays. The idea was humorous – a glamorously decorated, Barbie-pink limo toured various music festivals in Sweden throughout the summer, offering a free ride to young people. All they had to do in return was to have their ideas about queers tested during the ride, through a range of activities including hetero bingo and a game of prejudice trivial pursuit. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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80 Tiina Rosenberg

In terms of concept and execution the Queer Cab project is again a lot of fun, but it also has a very serious purpose. Queer Cab was part of the REFLEX project launched by the Living History Forum, whose intention was to raise awareness among young people about their values. The Living History Forum is an organisation for knowledge and culture based in Stockholm, commissioned by the government to promote democracy, tolerance and human rights, with the Holocaust as a starting-point. The idea of a specially equipped taxi was borrowed from New York, where a half-crazy lay preacher offered visitors to Manhattan free rides in his Jesus Cab, on the condition that they listened to his sermons. In the Swedish version, customers were taken care of by the performance artists Lina Kurttila and Jens Jonsson, wearing nifty caps and checked braces. The purpose was not to deliver ready-made truths, but to take preconceived notions and turn them upside-down. The ultimate goal was that passengers, when they got out of the cab, would be more aware of their own attitudes. Only then is it possible to influence these attitudes. There was also a hope that those who had been for a ride in the Queer Cab would have the courage to protest the next time they heard someone shout ‘fucking faggot’. Apart from combating homophobia, the cab ride also challenged the heterosexual norm.

KUNQ and the Lion Kings Queer Cab is an exponent of a genre of popular education activism that uses performance to fight discrimination. In a similar fashion KUNQ, a performance project, seeks to inspire queer youth to dare to demand attention, to feel valuable and to show others that they have something important to say. In this way, they hope to counter exclusion and homophobia. The KUNQ project was launched in 2001, as a youth programme against racism, xenophobia, homophobia and discrimination. KUNQ performs, for instance, at the annual Stockholm Pride Festival. Its summer 2005 production, An Army of Lovers, was a dramatisation of Queer Nation’s famous queer manifesto of 1990. Young people, who were infants when Queer Nation distributed its now legendary flyers with the slogan ‘queers bash back’, dramatised the manifesto which is still highly relevant today. The manifesto is a long homily in defence of the right to be queer, teeming with anger and disappointment over the American authorities’ unwillingness to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic and hate crime against queers. But the text is also full of hope and admonitions to stick together. The young lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals who make up KUNQ were 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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raised in the queer feminist tradition. In addition to their politicosexual activism, they emphasise gender-related activism for the greater acceptance of gender variations and against homo-/bi-/trans-phobic violence. The performance artist Lina Kurttila, who sat in the Queer Cab and performed the prejudice tests, is also a member of the drag king group Lion Kings, based in Stockholm. The Lion Kings examine gender roles and their boundaries with shows and excursions into reality. The drag king culture is popular in Stockholm. Its feminist status has been the subject of a theoretical and political debate that largely resembles the international discussions of drag. The question has been about whether drag in general, and drag kings in particular, can be regarded as subversive and feminist. Certain forms of drag challenge the connection between masculinity and maleness, while others – for instance, those engaging in male mimicry, as the gender theorist Judith Halberstam argues – maintain that there is a natural link between the two.2 This term, according to Halberstam, denotes drag kings who articulate and reproduce male masculinity, without questioning the connection between men and masculinity. She describes drag kings as women who perform in men’s clothing and parody masculinity to reveal its theatrical nature (Female Masculinity, p. 266). The Lion Kings have existed in various constellations since 2002. The group focuses on a critique of heteronormative gender prejudice and explorations of masculinity in general and female masculinity in particular. The Lion Kings are also active when it comes to organising workshops and their activities are based on a conscious strategy. They do not engage in male mimicry but in sabotaging the gender orders. In the Lion Kings’ shows the masks of masculinity and femininity are enhanced.

The autobiographical body performance The strong autobiographical element, and the way in which it relates to the body, links the younger Swedish feminists to the preceding feminist tradition. One of the most successful performances in the autobiographical genre has been Lo Kauppi’s Bergsprängardottern som exploderade [The Rock-Blaster’s Daughter who Exploded] (2004), in which she delivers a raw, powerful and candid account of her life and class origins, giving her audience both a social reportage and the energy to keep going. Her life-story was not just a private anecdote but also a fierce political critique against cutbacks and poor health services. She 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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was fuelled by her own fury and her perpetual questions. Lo Kauppi points out that nobody at drama school understood what she meant by political theatre. ‘I felt so lost – what if I had chosen the wrong profession. And now it has all fallen into place. I was able to do political theatre after all,’ she says.3 In the programme Lo Kauppi sums up how much she has cost society: two million Swedish kronor. And how much less she would have cost, one seventh of this, if she had been given the appropriate treatment when she started having problems around the age of 14. Lo Kauppi tried to resolve her inner chaos in her teens by dieting. Her eating disorder took place in a working-class environment in a family of addicts, where, she says, they used to fight about who was the sickest. This was followed by years of drug abuse and other social problems. ‘I’m incredibly grateful that I grew up in Olof Palme’s Sweden. It doesn’t matter what the Conservatives say, I would never have survived in a more competitive society,’ she says, thanking Sweden’s social democratic society for her life.4 Another example of autobiographical body performance is the actress Lotti Törnros’s work Mitt liv som tjock [My Life as a Fatty] (2005). Her performance is about obesity and is a tribute to the body of size. In the small basement premises of Teater Scenario, Stockholm the audience was brought into close contact with the small, overweight child, all of the bullying and the loneliness, while Törnros also managed to convey what it was like to have a rotund body that many find attractive, despite the prevailing social norms. Acting out scenes from her life, she took the risk of appearing naked in front of the audience, with protruding belly and wobbly thighs. In an interview, Törnros says that she no longer dreams of being someone she isn’t, namely, another, slimmer woman, or that her 100 kg are a temporary mistake. ‘Every puffed-up fat cell of my body is a protest movement!’ she proclaims.5 By the entrance to her performance, Törnros placed a large set of scales and the audience was requested to weigh in and note down their weight in a book before the show started. Many people refused, at least when it came to recording their weight. Others, whose body weight was ‘normal’, explained in a note that at least 2 kg were attributable to their clothing. ‘If women had devoted as much energy to women’s lib as we do to dieting or dressing, we would have been in power by now,’ says the pioneer of Swedish feminist theatre, Suzanne Osten.6 The classical empowerment genre is still vibrant in contemporary feminist performing arts, and it goes hand-in-hand with the autobiographical theme, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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giving the audience both enlightenment and reassurance. Since the early 1990s, however, there has been a strong ‘feel-bad trend’ in young Swedish feminist art, literature, drama and performance, focusing largely on eating disorders, self-mutilation and mental illness. The feeling of being inadequate is familiar to many women, and Mitt liv som tjock was specifically about this painful sense of insufficiency and exclusion. The physical exposure to the audience is a feminist strategy to challenge the onlooker’s gaze at the female body and to make an audience aware of how their own gaze may be implicit in ‘ideal’ body image-making.

Still angry after all these years Performance has been, and remains, a means of politicising and portraying the anger and frustration felt by many feminists. Feminist and queer insights are based on the awareness that something is wrong in the world. Feminist cultural theorist Sara Ahmed demonstrates how the emotional road to feminism goes via range of feelings such as pain and anger, where anger is a reaction to the fact that pain is wrong. Ahmed analyses the anger that feeds the feminist and queer activist, while the angry person needs to move on and present this anger to the world. Thus, these feelings do not stop at being angry and in pain, but are transformed into new feminist and queer power. The fuzzy boundaries between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings in turn lead to new cultural formations, including feminist and queer perspectives, without the participants in these cultures perceiving themselves to be victims. On the contrary, anger and pain are politicised and transformed into decisive action.7 The truly innovative aspect of feminist performance has been, and still is, the position of subject from which a feminist is able to speak and make statements. There is no uniform way of creating feminist actions, interventions or performances. Every expression must be seen as part of a greater cultural and political context where the terrain is constantly changing. There is a fundamental solidarity among young feminist practitioners with the feminist generation that went before them, at the same time as realising that it is necessary for each generation to find new artistic roads. As long as the basic problems of sexual equality and equality in general remain, feminists will continue to help themselves to all and any means possible to protest and fight back. Performance is one exciting and multifaceted way in which feminist artists and activists in Sweden are demanding a more equal future. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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1. Elaine Aston, Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5. 2. Male mimicry is a term coined by Judith Halberstam to denote when drag kings articulate and reproduce male masculinity without questioning the link between men and masculinity. Diane Torr’s Drag King Workshop, where women can experience being a man for a day, is one example. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 250–3. 3. Betty Skawonius, ‘Pa[o] korsta[o]g mot den sjuka va[o]rden: Lo Kauppis självbiografiska succépjäs ga[o]r ut pa[o] turné’, Dagens Nyheter, 18 August 2004. 4. Ibid. 5. Karin Thunberg, ‘Tjockisen som fick nog’, Sunday interview, Svenska Dagbladet, 23 January 2005. 6. Quoted in Tiina Rosenberg, Besvärliga människor: Teatersamtal med Suzanne Osten (Stockholm: Atlas, 2004), p. 263. 7. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 174; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 15–48.

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Notes

Women’s Writing for Performance Project: ‘Making’ a Feminist Intervention Elaine Aston

‘To bring women to writing’ was an attractive, if flawed feminist manifesto adopted by Hélène Cixous in an earlier phase of feminist thinking and activity in the 1970s.1 In a more contemporary moment, specifically for the years 2003–6, I have been the principal investigator on a Women’s Writing for Performance Project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and based at my home institution, Lancaster University, where my co-investigator is theatre colleague Gerry Harris. Together, we have been focusing on process and practice with the aim of understanding how and in what ways a number of established women artists, many of whom have been foundational to women’s theatre and performance practice and politics in the UK and elsewhere, engage resistantly with gender in their performance work. Seeking to avoid the earlier essentialist pitfalls of an écriture féminine, the project has refused a monolithic view of ‘women’, ‘writing’ and performance. ‘Women’ was adopted as a ‘to-be-contested’ or contingent category, as Butler and Spivak (among others) advise. ‘Writing’ was argued for in the most expansive and inclusive sense of any means of making creative work to be performed, and the project included a diverse range of performance genres (such as storytelling, radio drama, live art, performance art, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, playwriting and site-specific performance). Research into women’s practice was carried out through a regularly convened programme of theatre- and performance-based events with artists – workshops, demonstrations, performances, talks and symposia. Artists taking part in the project included Gilly Adams, Geddy Aniksdal, Bobby Baker, Marissa Carnesky, Sarah Daniels, Jenny Eclair, Anna Furse, Leslie Hill, Jackie Kay, Vayu Naidu, Helen Paris, Rebecca Prichard, SuAndi, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver.2 All of these practitioners engage 86

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in different kinds of gender-related interventions, though in radically different ways. It would be fair, however, to summarise that what these artists have in common is the way in which their personal, political and performance lives motivate them to make work in the interests of imagining the world differently: artists whose theatre and performance practices open up critical and dialectical relations on and with those social and cultural systems that constitute and constrain ‘norms’ of gender, race, class and sexuality. To quote Weaver: ‘If you can imagine it, you can make it. If you can make it, then you can change it.’3 While other contributions in Part II, ‘Interventions’, have tended to focus on the work of an individual artist or a particular production, this chapter reflects on the activities of this project, the networking, workshops and interventionist ‘writing’ strategies, and the ways in which these might be instructive for thinking and performing feminism internationally. One of feminism’s serious losses in the UK has been the breakdown of the networks that evolved out of the second-wave feminist movement and the connections that feminism made across different disciplines within the academy. As Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg observe in the Global Feminist Politics anthology, ‘feminism lost addresses right and left’.4 In respect of feminists working on and performing in theatre, the ‘addresses’ that were known to be womenfriendly, whether theatre, community or campus ‘homes’, were ‘lost’ to the ‘centralisation of feminism’ which, while positive in some ways, ‘has been at the expense of what bell hooks (1984) identified as sites of radical possibility’.5 In the study and practice of theatre, those ‘sites of radical possibility’ were realised through the energies and endeavours of feminist individuals who introduced women’s theatre and performance courses into to the main(stream) theatre syllabus; organised and hosted workshops, residences, conferences and performances that enabled women from academic theatre and performance cultures to meet. Conversations between those engaged in professional practice and those in the business of researching theatre were crucial to women connecting up in the ‘margins’ and coming to feminist understandings of the marginality of women in theatres past and present.6 The backlash disconnections to feminism, felt also, for example, in the way that young women are no longer attracted to studying theatre courses that focus on women’s performance work in the way that they were in the 1980s or even early 1990s, indeed are reluctant to identify with feminism at all,7 coupled with the squeeze on institutional funding (meaning reduced access to funds to pay artists for workshops, residences or performances in the academy), has left feminist interests 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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in theatre and performance dis-located and isolated. If feminism has been making connections in recent years, it has largely been through theory rather than practice. The ‘traffic in theory’, while important and essential to philosophical and critical feminist thinking of ‘gender matters’, as this collection illustrates, has nevertheless tended to ‘globalise’ practice: has translated the critical ‘doing’ of theatre back into philosophical writings. Just as British feminism has tended to maintain some kind of presence in the academy rather than in activism, so in the context of women’s theatre and performance in the UK, the emphasis has been on the philosophical, or the theoretical, rather than the practical encounters. When we bid for the Women’s Writing for Performance Project we had all of these concerns in mind and part of our desire was to make some reconnections to women’s practice and to feminism: to put women engaged in professional practice and in the academy back in touch with one another. We wanted the project to be a ‘site of radical possibility’; a means of enabling women to be in touch with each other creatively and politically, generating activities that might link up with other ‘sites’ or might, quite simply, enable women to find others, even just one other, with whom to dialogue, discuss and create. We were not thinking about some kind of ‘old girls’ feminist ‘reunion’ but were more concerned with the possibilities of cross-generational connections to artists and scholars that might be especially helpful to those emergent as practitioners or scholars. To be clear, however, we were not presenting, arguing or headlining the project in terms of feminism. Each artist came to share strategies for ‘writing’ resistantly based on her own work, rather than, say, working on a particular feminist issue.8 In brief, there was no invitation to identify with one feminism that the project was seeking to promote, or with the very different feminisms of the artists, but rather, through process and practice, to identify (with) the practicalities and political possibilities of resistant ‘making’. As the researchers on the project, Gerry Harris and I engaged primarily with the strategies for ‘making’ and reflected on processes in a way that prioritised practice over theory. To be more specific, it shifted our reflections away from the dominant paradigm of encountering practice through theory and towards an idea of what we came to term for ourselves as ‘embodied knowledge’: ways of thinking, of reflecting, that came out of our being in the moment of process and practice. To be in the ‘emotional juice’, the ‘human core’ of the meaning-making creative process (to borrow from Naidu’s diasporic storytelling practice), is to be in something that is associative, lateral rather than linear; 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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surprising, shocking – a whole lot ‘messier’ than a ‘theoretical core’ of meaning. This is not to discount or to do away with the latter, but rather to sense the possibilities that might arise or follow from the experiences of resistant, creative doing which might enable us to come to know what we know differently.9 While enabling women to ‘make’ connections with each other was fundamental to the project, it also answered a very basic need: the ‘space’ for creativity. This we realised early on: both generally through the way in which at project events we never had enough places for all the women who wanted to come (or to come back), and further and more specifically at the Performing Words workshop. Performing Words, which Aniksdal and Adams have jointly delivered in the UK and internationally, in the Philippines, Singapore and Australia, is designed to make a space for women’s creativity; to answer a need for women to step out of other lives, work or performance commitments to explore creativity collaboratively and collectively. The hunger for ‘space’ in which to make work is arguably fundamental to all practitioners, whatever their interests, whatever their practice. However, making a space for women’s creativity comes back to the idea of ‘space’ as a ‘site of radical possibility’: that making space for women’s work and women to work creatively together is an opportunity that in the current moment of ‘centralised’ feminism, is hard to find. Overall, the most important ‘space’ that the project was able to offer was the workshop. Workshops were organised over a period of up to five days and were free to participants (which made a financial difference to women as to whether they might be able to attend or not). The workshops functioned as a shared doing and learning environment. The emphasis was on engaging directly and experientially with the practice, rather than attempting to theorise and to intellectualise in ways that would interfere with the ‘doing’. Moreover, the workshops did not function as ‘master’ classes for an artist to demonstrate her ‘writing’ accomplishments to those less skilled or experienced than herself. Rather the artists, or artists in partnerships (Hill and Paris as Curious; Shaw and Weaver from Split Britches; Sarah Daniels and Sally Avens who work together in radio as writer and producer), shared the processes of her/their own work with the aim of facilitating the creativity of all others. Most remarkable in some instances were those like Daniels, Baker and Carnesky who were more than willing to admit to their ‘failures’ in making work, so that others might learn from this. It has become widely accepted in the ‘doing’ of women’s theatre and performance that the classical and canonical ‘writing’ practices of the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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stage a