Abstract
Performance artists are often folks for whom ‘the personal is political’ remained a vital challenge, rather than a piece of seventies’ kitsch or an excuse to pass off attending Twelve Steps groups and aerobics classes as contributions towards social change.2
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Notes
Holly Hughes, in Holly Hughes and David Román, eds, O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (New York: Grove Press, 1998), p.8.
Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p.167.
Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, eds, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.23.
Katha Politt and Jennifer Baumgardner, ‘Afterword: A Correspondence between Katha Politt and Jennifer Baumgardner’, in Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, eds, Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Boston, MA: North Eastern University Press, 2003), pp.309–19, pp.317–19.
Imelda Whelehan, Modem Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p.13.
Robin Morgan, cited in Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000), p.19.
See Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, eds, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (London: The Merlin Press, 1979);
Sheila Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (London: Pandora Press, 1989).
Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘The Politics of Transliteration: Lesbian Personal Narratives’, in Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara C. Gap, Susan L. Johnson, Kathleen M. Weston, eds, The Lesbian Issue — Essays from Signs (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1985), pp.251–70, pp.253–4.
I am using these ‘periodic’ designations because they have already become shorthand reference, although I recognize that the concept of ‘waves’ is problematic. See Siegel; Whelehan; and Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, eds, Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).
Irene Gammel, ed., Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).
Sidonie Smith, ‘The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities, Politics’, in Shirley Neuman, ed., Autobiography and Questions of Gender (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp.186–212, p.189.
Sidonie Smith, ‘Autobiographical Manifestos’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp.433–40, p.434.
Originally published in Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), p.43.
Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p.116.
Kenneth Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
Lenora Champagne, ‘Notes on autobiography and performance’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19: 10 (1999): 155–72, p.155.
Elizabeth Bell, ‘Orchids in the Arctic: Women’s Autobiographical Performances as Mentoring’, in Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor and M. Heather Carver, eds, Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp.301–18, p.315.
Jeannie Forte, ‘Women’s performance art: Feminism and postmodernism’, Theatre Journal, 40 (1988): 217–35, p.224.
Faith Wilding, ‘The Feminist Art Programmes at Fresno and Calarts, 1970–75’, in Norma Broude, and Mary D. Garrard, eds, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), pp.32–47, p.34.
See Broude and Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art; Helena Reckett, ed., Art and Feminism (London: Phaidon Press, 2001);
Terry Wolverton, Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002); Jeannie Forte, ‘Women’s Performance Art’;
Moira Roth, ‘Autobiography, Theater, Mysticism and Politics: Women’s Performance Art in Southern California’, in Carl Loeffler, ed., Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art (San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1980), pp.463–89; Judith Barry, ‘Women, Representation, and Performance Art: Northern California’, in Performance Anthology, pp.439–62;
Catherine Elwes, ‘Floating Femininity: A Look at Performance Art by Women’, in Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau, eds, Women’s Images of Men (London: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1985), pp.164–93.
See Joan W. Scott, ‘Experience’, in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds, Feminists Theorize the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp.22–41.
Each of these examples obviously does much more than I give them credit for here. Some anthologies of ‘performance scripts’ have recently been published. See Hughes and Román, eds, O Solo Homo (1998);
Jo Bonney, ed., Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000);
Alina Troyano, I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000);
Mark Russell, ed., Out of Character: Rants, Raves, and Monologues from Today’s Top Performance Artists (London: Bantam Books, 1997);
Miller, Taylor and Carver, Voices Made Flesh; Moira Roth ed., Rachel Rosenthal (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997);
Sydney Mahone, ed., Moon Marked and Touched By Sun: Plays By African American Women (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994);
Lenora Champagne, ed., Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990).
Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p.8.
Jonathan Kalb, Theater, 31: 3 (2000), p.14.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990 (1976)), p.59
Jon Dovey, FREAKSHOW: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p.138.
Rebecca Walker, ed., To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995).
Barbara Findlen, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 2nd edn (Seattle: Seal, 2001), p.xv.
In her project with female students, Self-ish (1997), Elaine Aston uses autobiographical performance-making as part of a feminist pedagogical practice. See Elaine Aston, ‘Staging Our Selves’, in Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey, eds, Representing Lives: Women and Auto/Biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp.119–28.
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Heddon, D. (2006). The Politics of the Personal: Autobiography in Performance. In: Aston, E., Harris, G. (eds) Feminist Futures?. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554948_9
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