Body Trouble: Corporeal "Presence" and Performative Identity in Cixous's and Mnouchkine's "L'Indiade ou l'Inde de leurs reves"

Abstract

Performance, performativity--one hears these words a lot today. The first has filled the need for an inclusive term that brings together different types of public, private, artistic, and commercial spectacles under a single rubric as the object of a newly instituted field of study. The second, particularly since the 1990 publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,' has been urgently buzzing in the mouths and from the pens of those who would challenge normative assumptions of identity grounded in ontological or purportedly natural categories of the subject. Performance artists and proponents of a performative identity often share a common target in these categories, and the overlapping terminology appears to betray deeper affinities. Yet, performativity and performance are not always compatible. Live performance clearly does not imply a subversive performativity; much theatre, mimetic theatre in particular, even that which didactically criticizes accepted notions of identity, often first exacts the spectator's recognition and implicit validation of a character's verisimilitude based on an undisturbed idea of the familiar