Constructing Experience: Theorizing a Feminist Theatre History

Abstract

Women and theatre history have always had an uneasy relationship. Women's theatre experiences, until recently, have rarely appeared in theatre histories, and each generation of women in theatre has had to invent itself anew. Women, particularly feminists, are understandably suspicious of the operations of a hegemonic theatre history tradition. As feminist theatre historians have problematized the writing of theatre history, they have been confronted with this act both as feminists and as theatre historians. As theatre historians they work within the discourse of historiography, a discourse that feminists, at best, distrust and, at worst, reject outright. As feminists, they must discover a historical method that will allow them to tell stories of women in theatre without effecting their assimilation into the dominant discourse or so greatly distorting the theatre work that its oppositional potential is negated, so allowing the works' appropriation by patriarchal interests. Consequently, the act of theorizing a feminist theatre history is caught between several sets of conflicts and contradictions: between a distrust of the patriarchal biases and assumptions of theatre historiography and the need to theorize and implement a feminist theatre historiography, between the imperative to recuperate women's theatre work erased by history and the responsibility to critique that work, between the historical moment under examination and the current moment in history, and between the feminist investment in essentialism and the feminist use of poststructuralist theory. The possible intersections are multiple, complex, and difficult. However, any attempt to construct a feminist theatre history attentive both to the demands of a grassroots feminism and to the concerns and dictates of poststructuralist theory has to negotiate these conflicts. Each project necessitates different parameters and involves a series of complex maneuvers. One such notion is the lived experience of women and feminists' commitment to that notion as a primary site for feminist thought and action.