Jill Dolan - The Feminist Spectator as Critic

This book is not meant to be a definitive study of feminist performance criticism. Rather, in some ways, it is a historical accounting of the different methodological and ideological pathways this criticism has taken over the last twenty-odd years, illustrated here by critical case studies. I do not mean to neutralize my own critical stance by that caveat; the following pages should be clearly understood as representing my own methodological and ideological position as a materialist feminist critic.

The book is organized as a series of essays that refract around the central topic, which is detailed in . Taken together, the essays should provide a cumulative effect, rather than a necessarily linear one. The last chapter, however, does represent work that I feel is the most stimulating and provocative of contemporary feminist performance criticism.

Writing for people interested in a feminist approach to theatre and performance is a challenging task, since that constituency is large and varied from theoretical, political, and ideological perspectives. Any feminist endeavor in this area confronts the problemand pleasureof diversity among its audience. The Women and Theatre Program of the American Theatre in Higher Education organization, for example, is charged with appealing to academics and practitioners and a range of women who admit to very different stances vis--vis feminism. Women & Performance Journalwith which I was involved as managing editor and cofounder at its inception in the Performance Studies Department at New York Universityworried at the outset about providing a forum for all women interested in performance.

As I hope to clarify in this study, I believe that such a committedly nonpartisan approach inevitably butts against its own limitations. How can an organization or a journal provide a kind of visionary leadership if it does not take a clear ideological and political stand on its own issues? In January 1988, the Women and Theatre Program created formal by-laws that at least set forth the organization's commitment to address and attempt to eradicate sexism, racism, and homophobia as part of its charter. This stated intent cannot help but focus, shape, and lend vitality to the group's future work.

In publication, it seems equally important to take a stand and to state it at the outset of one's writing. If part of the materialist feminist project is to demystify ideological authority in performance and in dramatic literary texts, it is necessary to guard against reinstituting the materialist feminist critic as the absent, naturalized authority. Demystifying the author and particularizinginstead of idealizingthe reader for whom she writes seems imperative as part of the critical process.

I have tried continually to clarify my stance and my ideological, political, and personal investments in the studies that follow. I write from my own perspective as a white, middle-class woman, with every effort to stay aware of and change my own racism and attitudes about class. As a Jew and as a lesbian, I also write from my own awareness of exclusion from dominant ethnic and heterosexual discourse. I hope that readers constituted across a diversity of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference identities will find the ideas in these pages useful.

This text is written for practitioners and critics, historians and theorists, academics and professionals, and myriad other feminist spectators interested in what it means to combine feminism and performance. I see it as an introduction to feminist critical and theoretical ideas relevant to theatre and performance. Still, it straddles a somewhat precarious position in relation to its intended readership.

On one hand, although it is an introduction, it demands at least a cursory familiarity with post-structuralism, deconstruction, and semiotics. I have tried to refrain from needlessly opaque jargon. But formulating new critical theory demands a new critical language, which I do draw on here. On the other hand, in addition to introducing these ideas, I would like this work to challenge and provoke colleagues who are already breaking new ground in the field of feminist theatre criticism. I hope that both sets of readers will find their way here. With an eye toward provoking dialogue and debate, both are envisioned in these pages.