Embodying imperfect unity: womanhood and synchronicity in anti-war protest

Abstract

In March 2003, a contemporary version of the Greek play Lysistrata was performed on over 1000 stages across the globe to protest the war in Iraq. This article analyzes the synchronized performances of Lysistrata in order to question the role of the lived body in social activism. The lived body, as conceptualized by Young (2005), considers the power and constraint we experience as the material facts of our bodies – skeleton and organs, ligaments and tendons, muscles and fat – move and exist in a particular time in history, a particular geographic space, surrounded by particular other people who are co-constructing ways of being in the world together. In the past several decades, numerous public examples have emerged of women in particular creatively constructing themselves in relation to their given socio-historical conditions. This article engages in a two-part analysis, of a ‘productive misreading’ of Aristophanes' Lysistrata and of the synchronized performance-protests orchestrated by the Lysistrata Project, in order to better understand the ways in which gendered bodies are enabled and constrained by their physical and social environments in performing dissent.