Women’s Writing for Performance Project: ‘Making’ a Feminist Intervention

Abstract

‘To bring women to writing’ was an attractive, if flawed feminist manifesto adopted by Helene Cixous in an earlier phase of feminist thinking and activity in the 1970s.1 In a more contemporary moment, specifically for the years 2003–6,I have been the principal investigator on a Women’s Writing for Performance Project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and based at my home institution, Lancaster University, where my co-investigator is theatre colleague Gerry Harris. Together, we have been focusing on process and practice with the aim of understanding how and in what ways a number of established women artists, many of whom have been foundational to women’s theatre and performance practice and politics in the UK and elsewhere, engage resistantly with gender in their performance work. Seeking to avoid the earlier essentialist pitfalls of an ecriture feminine, the project has refused a monolithic view of ‘women’, ‘writing’ and performance. ‘Women’ was adopted as a ‘to-be-contested’ or contingent category, as Butler and Spivak (among others) advise. ‘Writing’ was argued for in the most expansive and inclusive sense of any means of making creative work to be performed, and the project included a diverse range of performance genres (such as storytelling, radio drama, live art, performance art, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, playwriting and site-specific performance).