Women in Performance

Repurposing Failure

Sarah Gorman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315404882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure charts the renewed popularity of intersectional feminism, gender, race and identity politics in contemporary Western experimental theatre, comedy and performance through the featured artists' ability to strategically repurpose failure.

Failure has provided a popular frame through which to theorise recent avantgarde performance, even though the work rarely acknowledges stakes tend to be higher for women than men. This book analyses the imperative work of a number of female, non-binary and trans* practitioners who resist the postmodern doctrine of 'post-identity' and attempt to foster a sense of agency on stage. By using feminism as a critical lens, Gorman interrogates received ideas about performance failure and negotiates contradictions between contemporary white feminism, intersectional feminism, gender and sexuality.

Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure reveals how performance has the power to both observe and reject contemporary feminist and postmodern theory, rendering this text an invaluable resource for theatre and performance studies students and those grappling with the disciplinary tensions between feminism, gender, queer and trans* studies.

1

Introduction: female agency, essentialism, negativity and the rebirth of identity politics

It is a warm May evening in 2016, I find myself being ushered into a small studio upstairs at Battersea Arts Centre, London. The solo performer greets me at the door; she takes time to make eye contact and smiles warmly at each person as they enter. Seats are arranged in two blocks, each row level with the stage and small floor lights demarcate the performance area. The stage is set with: a heap of compost; a stretch of fake grass; a gold painted vase; a heap of gold fabric; a paper projection screen; a microphone; and brightly coloured potted plants. Rachael Young, the performer who welcomed me into the space, employs direct address to tell the audience of her experience coming to terms with her mother’s death and visiting the grave for the first time in 11 years. She explains that after her loss she felt emotionally adrift and struggled to find a place in the world. The image on the front cover of the book is taken from this piece: I, Myself and Me by Rachael Young. She is shown reading from a list of internalised ‘rules’ she has gleaned from family and local community. At the outset the list appeared diminutive, it fitted neatly into her hand, but a comedic flick of the wrist revealed it to be significantly longer. With a deft sleight of hand Young let the remainder of the paper fall – it reamed from her hands and spooled copiously at her feet. Her list, or the ‘black mantra’ as she has called it, includes the directive to assimilate; to play down references to cultural difference; to ‘settle down’, ‘get married’ and have children. The list of rules includes contradictory information: to assimilate but concurrently become ‘blacker;’ to mimic stereotypes from popular culture: to have ‘hard nipples’ and a ‘big ass’ (Young 2016). I, Myself and Me is revelatory in that it actively critiques the multiple social directives aimed at young Black British women. It illustrates the social forces brought to bear upon a young woman by white supremacist culture and Afro-Caribbean culture. Young is one of a number of contemporary artists borrowing stylistic techniques from what Sara Jane Bailes has called a ‘poetics of failure’. Until recently it was unusual to see these techniques used in an autobiographical context. Young performatively articulates her sense of self in relation to the hegemonic perception of ‘failure’. She is repurposing failure because by performatively naming or ‘calling out’ the varying sources of oppression she garners a sense of agency and self-possession. Rather than experiencing failure as a disoriented, decentred ‘failed’ postmodern subject she recalibrates, or centres herself by ridiculing the manifold strictures she is required to observe.

Young is part of a new wave of female theatre makers and activists taking to the stage and streets to protest the resurgence of racist, misogynistic and homophobic values. A significant number of artists have chosen to return to the topic of ‘identity politics’ despite it having been denounced as anachronistic by postmodern cultural commentators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop (Johnson 2013: 27). Artists such as Split Britches, Rachael Young, Selina Thompson and Bryony Kimmings have returned to the subject of identity in order to protest the rise of intolerant alt-right politics in a number of Western countries. This movement can be attributed in part to the global economic downturn of 2008. Conservative politicians such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have exploited the economic recession, using it as a means to promote a neoliberal capitalist agenda and argue that the increasing scarcity of resources is due to overpopulation and relaxed immigration policies rather than government decisions to scale back funding for public services. Opposition to neoliberalism has galvanised the concentration in feminist activity taking place across the globe. January 2017 saw protests against the inauguration of misogynistic US President Trump across Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK, the USA, China and India. The #MeToo movement met with global appeal with the social media hash tag adopted worldwide. Bloomberg reports that the day after Alyssa Milano asked Twitter followers to share their experiences of sexual harassment the #MeToo hashtag had been used 609,000 times (Griffin, Recht and Green 2018). Since 2012 numerous protests have taken place across India protesting against rape, with nuns recently speaking out against abuse in the Catholic Church. Mass protests have taken place in Poland against legislation to restrict women’s access to abortion. In October 2018 women in Iceland staged a national walkout to protest against disparity in pay. The International Women’s March in 2019 saw 80 events mounted across 31 different cities (Durkin and Busby 2019). In August 2019 in Mexico City women gathered to draw attention to the alleged rape of two teenage girls by police officers. The World Economic Forum reported that the Global Gender Pay Gap would take 202 years to close (Neate 2018).

The rise of social media has helped galvanise mass protest, with activists mobilising around issues such as Female Genital Mutilation, femicide, taxation on sanitary products and abortion legislation. Activist groups include One Billion Rising, Femen, Slutwalks, Daughters of Eve, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May our Daughters Return Home), Las Hijas de Violencia, West African Women’s Rights Coalition, Project Alert on Violence Against Women, Pussy Riot, #BringBackOurGirls and many more. Although not all women feel included by the ideology of Western feminism, it is clear that women are mobilising to protest against growing levels of inequality.¹ The global economic downturn is customarily dated from 2008 and it is no coincidence that minoritarian groups began to convene around specific examples of social injustice around that time. Performances about subaltern categories relating to class, race, gender, disability and sexuality began to enjoy increased visibility on the UK stage from 2009 onwards. According to Stephen Farrier the postmodern turn towards queerness resulted in a ‘tacit declaration of the death of identity politics’ (Farrier 2013: 49). In spite of this artists increasingly marginalised by the economic downturn began to mobilise and create work around specific identity categories. Amelia Jones gave voice to the groundswell, announcing ‘we are not “post” identity’ (Jones 2012: xix). Whereas ‘feminism’ was regarded as anachronistic in the mid 1990s and early 2000s by 2010 it was enjoying a renewed sense of vigour (Hardy et al. 2014). Harry Potter star Emma Watson became UN Women’s Goodwill Ambassador with Paper Magazine publishing her conversation with renowned feminist writer bell hooks as part of its ‘Girl Crush’ series (hooks and Watson 2016). Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (2014), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (2014) and Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman (2012) all became best sellers. Promotional copy for the 2019 Calm Down Dear Festival at Camden People’s Theatre posed the question,

[w]ho would have thought that when we took a punt in 2013 on programming our first ever festival of far-out feminist theatre – this was back when there was still some timidity around the word – that ‘Calm Down, Dear’ would one day be an unmissable feature of CPT’s annual programme?²

I am aware that not all theatre makers have responded to the global economic downturn in the same way, but activists have felt the need to protest against the legislation of more conservative governments as they have been elected in countries such as Italy, Finland, Latvia, Sweden, Romania, Australia and the US. Sarah French has observed,

[t]he growth in feminist independent performance during [2005–2015] can be viewed as a response to the increased presence of sexism in Australian society, in which feminist theatre-makers sought to critique public debates about gender roles and offer a counter-narrative to dominant discourses.

(French 2017: 5)

After what Elaine Aston has described as ‘feminism fatigue’ in the 1990s and early 2000s, the late 2000s to 2010s has seen a wide range of artists mounting critically lauded productions exploring interlocking oppressions of gender, race, class, disability and sexuality (Aston 2013: 24).

This project is the culmination of research undertaken, over the last ten years, into the recalibration of identity politics, feminism and gender studies in Western performance. It responds to a perceived tension between the now established discourses of performing failure, postmodern and intersectional feminism. The praxis of performing failure has come to exemplify postmodern and postdramatic performance and as a result can be seen to replicate postmodern theories of human subjectivity and agency. Postmodern gender theorists, most notably Judith Butler, reject essentialising subject categories, such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and champion incomplete, queer subjectivities that remain fluid and indeterminate. In contrast, many contemporary identity theorists such as Kay Inckle and Rebecca Reilly-Cooper writing in the area of feminism, trans* and disabled subjectivities find they are loath to renounced fixed identities and subject positions because, for better or worse, they inform the material experience of their day-to-day lives and provide a crucial concept around which to forge activist communities. The book is entitled Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure because it takes as its object of study the work of a number of female, trans* and non-binary artists who borrow techniques from the praxis of performing failure and adapt them to foster a sense of agency on stage. The idea of a subject with agency is at odds with the ‘post-humanist wave’ that Rosi Braidotti suggests ‘radicalises the premises of postmodernist feminism’ (Braidotti 2010: 178). My chosen artists are trans*, non-binary or women in the inclusive sense and are repurposing failure because they borrow recognised stylistic techniques from postmodern practice whilst strategically occupying a clearly defined subject position. Featured artists include Rachael Young (see cover photograph); Young Jean Lee; Lauren Barri Holstein; GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN; Selina Thompson; Bryony Kimmings; Project O; Lucy McCormick; Lucy Hutson; Kate Bornstein; Lois Weaver; Hester Chillingworth; Curious; Haranczak/Navarre; Bridget Christie; Lolly Adefope; Shazia Mirza; and Hannah Gadsby. Throughout the book I analyse challenging examples of work encouraging audiences to revisit hegemonic assumptions about identity and performance. Many of the performances, in so far as they push against notions of cultural propriety and behavioural constraint, may be regarded as controversial. Several examples are explicit and feature nudity, sex acts and swearing. If you are of a delicate disposition and likely to be offended by profanity and nudity then it may be a good idea to return this book to the shelf. The performances include moments of comedy and conversely critique and celebrate elements of Western popular culture. Some performances took place more recently than others and all provide the opportunity to engage imaginatively with gender politics and contemplate the tensions between those who theorise gender and those who interrogate it through performance. There have been crucial challenges to white feminism over the past 20 years and this project has given me the opportunity to consider how more recent strains of feminism have taken on board theories relating to race, queerness, intersectionality and trans* theory.³ The book draws from a wide range of disciplines: postmodernism; poststructuralism; intersectional feminism, white feminism, performance studies, Black feminism; scenography; queer studies; trans* studies; sociology; disability studies; and comedy studies. My aim has been to gather examples of performance demonstrating a preoccupation with gendered, racial, class and ethnic identity, although I recognise there are a great many artists whose work I have not been able to include and many subject positions unaddressed. The majority of artists identify as feminist, although some, such as Rachael Young, explicitly state that they choose not to because they consider feminism to refer to an exclusionary white feminism. Some of the artists, such as GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN and Selina Thompson, distance themselves from conventional models of feminism whilst acknowledging that it remains important and relevant. I perform discrete readings of the performances, but within each chapter I also work to identify overlapping themes and ideas. For example, in one chapter I analyse how three different artists transform theatre spaces into club-like environments; in another I analyse the different relationships four comedians have to anger and comedy personae. Many of the performances work to challenge a white supremacist, patriarchal hegemony and although many artists identify as subaltern or minoritarian, they often resist processes associated with labelling and objectification. The featured artists detail the manifold ways in which they are shaped by oppressive discourses and push back against racist, sexist, colour and gender blind practice.

For the last 25 years my research interests have been situated in the field of gender studies, feminism, feminist performance, postmodern performance and a poetics of failure. A tension exists between subjects and I have become increasingly fascinated by the contradictions implied by mapping identity politics on to the recently established discourse of performing failure. As intimated above, mapping identity on to postmodern theory and performance is problematic because the discourse of feminism relies on the sovereign concept of ‘woman’, considered by some problematically reductive, essentialist and fixed. Sara Ahmed has observed, ‘the model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate … feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as self-identity’ (Ahmed 1996: 71). Andy Lavender has written of his sense that contemporary artists demonstrate ‘a new fascination with authenticity’, suggesting a move ‘beyond’ postmodernism into post-postmodernism (Lavender 2016: 23). In relation to centred or sovereign subjects he writes:

After decentring, we found ourselves diversely centred. To address a tense present: we are amid interdisciplinary cultural formations, interested in meaning, representation, utterance and content, but also mindful of display, surfaces, presentation. […] After the clarion calls of modernism, and the absences and ironies of postmodernism, come the nuanced and differential negotiations, participations and interventions of an age of engagement.

(21)

Working along similar lines to Lavender and Ahmed, I aim to interrogate the work of artists who engage with humanist notions of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: female agency, essentialism, negativity and the rebirth of identity politics
• 2. Taking back control: invective, irony and inscrutability
• 3. Self-care and radical softness: refusing neoliberal resilience
• 4. Nightclubbing: queer heterotopia and club culture
• 5. Taking pleasure: binary ambivalence and transgression
• 6. Tempering anger: asserting the right to define as a comic without further caveat
• 7. Afterword
• Index