From Playing at Lives. Draft conclusion . . . Comments warmly accepted. This is really early draft material . . .

At its heart, this study examines the relationship between the performing female body, the historical female body, and the narrative ties that bind them together. Along its course, however, it must contend with notions of subjectivity, agency, objectification, historical truth, narrative voice, community, authorship, and power. Yet lest we forget that central dialectic—performing body and historical body—let us consider an example from each of the three genres of this study to fully flesh out (no pun intended) the richness of the field of life writing in feminist performance, and its potential as a site for powerful political engagement.

As an example of autobiographical performance, Holly Hughes’ Preaching to the Perverted relies on an essential correlation between the body of experience, the authorial voice, and the performing self. The embodied experience that she narrates explicitly involves her body, and the degree to which her sexed and sexualized female body was made a public spectacle. Because the narrative relies upon the speaking I, the autodiegetic turn of her performance is crucial in supplying subjectivity as a response to the objectification, the feeling of being watched, that the NEA Four controversy generated. Ultimately, by performing her own narrative, by verifying her experience through the presence of the same sexed and sexualized body that had been held up for vilification, Hughes reclaims her body and her experience from the discourse that sought to marginalize it. The performance could not have been effective had someone else performed it, in part because the narrating I relied on an audience expectation of truth that ultimately offered Hughes the political power to speak. In this case, subject, author, and performer are collapsed, because the truth-value of the narrative depends upon the truth-value of the narrative voice as its verifying lynchpin.

While Preaching to the Perverted requires a congruence between historical body, narrating voice, and performing body, April DeAngelis’ Playhouse Creatures has no such option, since the subject of the biographical inquiry, Nell Gwyn, is long since irretrievable. Her historical body is literally dead, her authorial voice is silenced, and her performing body a footnote in history. And yet DeAngelis’ narrative carries with a similar political weight, since even as she describes the working conditions of the first professional actresses on the English stage, she implicates the working conditions of the very actresses who perform the play. In this case, the image of Nell Gwyn is radically dialectical, evoking at once Gwyn’s experience, DeAngelis’ voice, and the actress’ body. This is drama’s narrative third person, a representation of an other through the lens of performance. As such, the expectations of historical value are diminished, and what DeAngelis’ voice reclaims is less the specific experiences of Nell Gwyn than the radical nature of the performances with which Gwyn stylized her own body in history. As such, a contemporary actress can stylize her own body through the image of Gwyn, thus interrogating both history and the present through the very conflicts that such a dialectical image on stage presents. What is reclaimed is not the historical body, but the disembodied performances that can be taken off and put on--such a thrid-person performance as staged feminist biography enacts makes this process obvious.

While autobiographical performance demands that experience, voice and performance all coincide in one body, and biography plays virtually presuppose that each player in the representation of history is different, each of these genres generally features a one-to-one correspondence between the historical body and the performing body. Staged oral history makes no such claims. In some ways, the form suggests the radical identity slippage that autobiographical performers often aspire to. Here, emphasis on what Anna Deavere Smith calls the travel from the self to the other” (Fires in the Mirror, xxvi, emphasis original), the shifting of the performing body from one narrative voice to another, provides precisely the sort of empathetic, communal, and democratic approach to representing a broad array of experiences. And yet at the same time, it can provide the façade for what can be a virtually invisible exercise of power over the voices that are represented.

Take the case of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. On its surface, it seems to be precisely the utopian chorus (cf. Dolan on Utopiann Performatives) that the form seems to offer, in this case, a chorus of women’s voices against domestic violence. However, close examination of the text and its construction reveals a fairly uniform presentation of a white, middle-class woman’s values and perspectives masked by the illusion of diversity. While Smith works hard to mimic the vocal intonations of her interview subjects, Ensler’s solo performances collapse her hundreds of interviews into her own voice (indeed, the interviews themselves are often merely inspiration for the monologues that Ensler writes). Here the singularity of the performing body (many diverse bodies collapsed into a white middle-class body) and the performing voice (many diverse voices collapsed into a white middle-class voice) undermines the multiplicity of experiences she draws upon. But this effect is lessened when, every February 14th, hundreds of college-age women across America perform Ensler’s play, since the performing I that hides behind these monologues is replaced by a similarly diverse chorus of voices and bodies, thus representing the sort of choral effect that the play itself purports to represent. So while autobiographical performance demands that experience, voice and performing body coincide, the progressive efficacy of The Vagina Monologues depends on as little coincidence as possible, since it through the consolidation of narrative power in Ensler’s solo performances that the most radical politics of her play is thwarted.

These three contrasting examples tell us much about the breadth of theoretical configuration that field of staged feminist life writing can represent. Let me close this study, then, with a brief consideration of the challenges that these examples pose to notions that apply not only to feminist performances, but to much larger concepts of narrative voice, authorship, and political presence.