In Defense of the Discourse: Materialist Feminism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism... And Theory

Abstract

Ten years ago feminist theatre and performance criticism was something of an oxymoron. Like most avowedly political criticism, feminist work in the late I970s and early '8os seemed caught in conflicting demands of aesthetics and ideology. Feminist critics of feminist work teetered uneasily among the desires to support women's production efforts, to investigate the ramifications of an unprecedented switch in gender perspective, and to compare women's theatre and performance with an aesthetic standard that had not yet been formulated. Critics writing for feminist presses usually chose to validate what they saw; those writing in academic venues generally took a sociological approach to theatre's reflection of women's social roles. The bulk of the critical effort was aimed toward redressing the historical invisibility of women in the field.1 When French theory began to find its way across the Atlantic it changed the contours of feminist criticism in the academy. Isabelle de Courtivron and Elaine Marks published their landmark anthology New French Feminisms in I98I, and suddenly gave American feminist criticism a whole new vocabulary and new territories to cover. Hel6ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, among others, seemed powerful and poetic in their descriptions of female sexuality as a subversive, antipatriarchal textuality. If women could write with their bodies, as l'criture feminine's florid manifestos proposed, could the body also be a site of a new theatre practice and textual analysis? Could the French feminist pantheon's borrowings from Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan give feminist theatre and performance critics new tools for describing the field? American feminist criticism in the '8os has also been shaped by the field of cultural studies. The influx of British materialism, with its focus on ideology formation in representation, has allowed critics to dig deeper, farther, and wider in the investigation of representation as an ideological apparatus with an active role in preserving social arrangements. The materialist approach has moved academic feminist criticism away from sociological analysis based on assumptions that theatre serves a mimetic