Performance studies as women's work: Historical sights/sites/citations from the margin

Abstract

Constructing a consciousness of the presence and absence of sexual difference in performance studies mandates a new story of performance as women's work. This construction moves women from the periphery of performance history to the center, problematizes the presence and performances of women in the past, and interrogates the politics of oral interpretation textbooks' gender neutrality. The sight of the first actress/readers on the American platform, the site of speech education in private academies in turn‐of‐the‐century America, and oral interpretation's citations, metaphorical attempts at “writing the body,” are cultural, historical, and linguistic textual spaces of representation and identity. These neutered, condemned, and policed spaces of display for women are routes to the margin of the communication discipline.