Abstract
Moll applies feminist technoscience theories of Karen Barad, Katie King, and Donna Haraway to Duncan Macmillan and Katie Mitchell’s play The Forbidden Zone, revealing how it poses epistemological challenges to how the history and ethics of science are often narrated onstage. The play depicts historical figures Clara Immerwahr and her granddaughter Claire Haber, two women scientists with connections to chemical weapons research, and their respective suicides. The play uses experimental theatrical techniques, including live cinema, to explore the ethical-political ramifications of chemical weapons research and its relationship to sexism and other oppressions. In the play, this weapon development symbolizes and creates a modernity defined by apocalypse, as part of a tradition of critique which spans from Virginia Woolf and Mary Borden to Barad and Haraway.
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- 1.
This analysis will use the Barbican production as well as the unpublished script by Macmillan.
- 2.
Compare either character, for example, to Sophocles’ tragic heroine Antigone, who is often held up (rightly or not) as a symbol of both revolution and women’s power, who chooses death rather than dishonoring the beloved dead, and who claims that the laws of the gods overrule the laws of corrupt men.
- 3.
As King’s essay suggests, Donna Haraway has also put forth arguments about the masculinist, colonial nature of the god’s-eye fantasy of unmediated knowledge.
- 4.
An interesting comparison is to Hannah Höch’s photomontage work, which makes the physical cut of the page visible; according to Maud Lavin’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1994), the visibility of the cut is central to the Höch’s feminist and political statements.
- 5.
Feminist technoscience, Science and Technology Studies, and other scholars have offered numerous critiques of this Enlightenment view of science, which is often considered to still be the basis for predominant understandings of what science is today; examples of such critique may be found in Haraway (1997) and Schiebinger (1993).
- 6.
For a fuller account of Brechtian theory’s relationship to feminist theater, see Diamond’s Unmaking Mimesis (1997).
Works Cited
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Chicago, Judy (1979). The Dinner Party. Installation art. Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Diamond, Elin (1997). Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. London: Routledge.
Dick, Jutta (2009). “Clara Immerwahr.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 Mar. Jewish Women’s Archive. <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/immerwahr-clara>. 20 Mar. 2018.
Haraway, Donna (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 149–181.
——— (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseª: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge.
King, Katie (2004). “Historiography as Reenactment: Metaphors and Literalizations of TV Documentaries.” Criticism 46.3: 459–475.
——— (2011). “Pastpresents: Playing Cat’s Cradle with Donna Haraway.” 14 May. <http://playingcatscradle.blogspot.com>. 10 Mar. 2018.
Lavin, Maud (1994). Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Macmillan, Duncan (2016). The Forbidden Zone. Unpublished Playscript. n.p.
Mitchell, Katie (2016). “In Her Words: Katie Mitchell on the Forbidden Zone.” Interview by David Tushingham. 16 May. <http://blog.barbican.org.uk/2016/05/in-her-words-katie-mitchell-on-the-forbidden-zone/>. 28 Feb. 2018.
Risling Baldy, Cutcha (2014). “Why I Teach The Walking Dead in my Native Studies Classes.” 24 Apr. <https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-i-teach-the-walking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/>. 20 Mar. 2018.
Schiebinger, Londa (1993). Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Stoppard, Tom (1993). Arcadia: A Play. New York: Grove Press.
Acknowledgments
Thank-you to Duncan Macmillan, and Rachel Taylor and Helena Clark at his representation company, for providing access to the playscript for my study of this play.
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Moll, E. (2019). Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone. In: Engelhardt, N., Hoydis, J. (eds) Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_11
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