Performing Bulimia, engendering dis‐ease in the South African body politic: Janine Denison's all the rage

Abstract

This essay examines power politics, performative and subversive strategies, and networks of social control in South African culture, and in contemporary culture more generally, by focusing on Janine Denison's all the Rage (1992): a play which ‘performs dis‐ease’ in contemporary South African society. This postmodern play interrogates the myth of the ‘perfect woman’ at the nexus of the discourses of race, class, gender, the family, the Church, and the Law. It entertains and unsettles through an exploration of bulimia as: an eating disorder, a ‘disease’, a symptom of woman's struggle to fit into a dominant ideal of female beauty, and also as a political subversive strategy: a form of voicing, or protest. Denison's play subverts the position of the female in South African culture, firstly by putting a female protagonist centre stage, and then by surrounding her with voices and figures which haunt her and test her; which weigh her down with the heavy burden of society's ‘dis‐eased’ expectations for women. Blumberg analyses the power dynamics which affect women in South African theatre, and in contemporary culture, investigating bulimia as a social reality and a metaphor for women's rejection of patriarchal ideas of what they should be, look like, think of themselves. What is gained through this analysis is a sense of the many ways in which protest has long been ‘staged’ by women, albeit often at the expense of self, and an insight into the relationship between self‐representation and theatrical performance, when we see the bulimic, and differently the anorexic, as calling attention to themselves by conforming to the feminine stereotype to a potentially deadly extent, we may see these eating disorders as subversive strategies for gaining control, rejecting existing power structures, undermining the dominant cultural stereotype of feminine beauty and demanding a re‐examination, so that (personal) political change may, slowly, occur. In this and the next essay by Miki Flockemann, we move from work which contextualizes the work of South African women through theoretical and historical accounts, to theory tempered with personal/political analyses of gender oppression, as written and performed (and critiqued) by South African women.