Raining Cats and Dogma

Although only 13 of my students this semester chose my course on performing identity as their first preference, I was happy that that many were interested in the topic. Still, one of my goals in designing "The Pleasures and Politics of Food Writing" was to broaden the appeal. Registration opened last night at 8pm, the server went down for about an hour immediately after, and by 10, both sections of the class were full!

Since that time, several students (many of whom seem genuinely interested in the class topic) have asked to oversubscribe, a request I sadly cannot honor in order to protect the precious class size.

Still, I am so excited about such an enthusiastic bunch. Now to design the best restaurant review assignment ever!

Posted by at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Repeat. This is just a draft.

Such a challenge to reigning notions of the author would be true, however, of any staged life-writing, regardless of gender—the theatre of Spalding Gray and Moisés Kauffman’s Tectonic Theatre Company require the same complex understanding of the relationship of the material body of the speaker, the voice of the author, and the physical presence of the performer as do performances by Hughes or Smith. But while the challenges are the same, the political implications are different, and these implications for the very exigence for a feminist study of staged lives. This is precisely because while Barthes “Death of The Author” generally supposes to elide the specific historical identity of the auteur, only to replace it with the anonymous scriptor, the language worker, that worker’s maleness is never up for debate. When Barthes writes, “Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humors, feelings, impressions” (225), he first of all acknowledges the gender of the scriptor as male (indeed the French offers him no other choices).

Furthermore, Barthes’ disdain for authorial passions suggest that he might as well be Carolee Schneeman’s structuralist filmmaker, discounting the performer for
the personal clutter
the persistence of feelings
the hand-touch sensibility
the diaristic indulgence
the painterly mess
the dense gestalt
the primitive techniques . . . (qtd in Forte 225-226)
Instead, Barthes seeks to accord the scriptor the same status as he sees accorded to the reader “without history, biography, psychology” (225).

The problem is that when we view Barthes’ theoretical desire to elide the author within the field of staged feminist life-writing, we find that women become the collateral damage of Barthes’ de(con)structive impulses. When the theorist attempts to take away Holly Hughes’ “history, biography, psychology” he seeks to elide precisely what has been denied her as a woman throughout time. While Barthes’ desire to kill off the author does nothing to disrupt the status of men’s contributions to history, women’s contributions to history are by no means well established in the popular imaginations, and much of what is established comes through what we know from women writers and their texts. To elide the historical body of the author; which in this case is the speaking body of the woman who experiences the very narrative that she sets down to write, is to prevent women from writing themselves back into history.

Ultimately, then, the dialectic created by staged feminist life writing serves as a means to asserting the relevance of the material historical body to the body of the performer. In doing so, we must acknowledge both the relationship of the historical woman’s body to the image we see on stage, thereby reasserting her place in history and revalidating her experience, which the notion of the dead author and the author-function invalidates as merely so much textuality.

In the case of Holly Hughes’ Preaching to the Perverted, acknowledging such a dialectic permits us to understand Hughes narrative through the authority of her experience. This understanding therefore encourages the audience to join Hughes in her critique of the Supreme Court and its institutionalized white male anxiety, and to understand the urgency of this critique by acknowledging its grounding in the real, a grounding that the elision of the author does not permit. It is Hughes’ performing body—the same body that was made into spectacle by the NEA Four controversy, that verifies the experience of her performed narrative, and therefore underwrites the authority of her life performance.

In the case of biography plays, such a congruent connection between the historical subject, the playwright, and the performer is not necessary to establish the political connection, say, between the Restoration actresses of Playhouse Creatures and the contemporary actresses who play them, although to understand what is being reclaimed in this play, we must first understand how those disparate bodies function dialectically across history. And in plays like Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies, being able to read the objectifying gaze of the biographer/ playwright through the body of the desiring character of Severine forces us to understand the dialectic as one the exceeds simply the historical body and the performing body to include the author in its representational function.

And in the case of staged oral history, to understand this relationship and to acknowledge the identity of the author is to interrogate the relationship of Eve Ensler’s white middle class body to the diverse bodies of her interview subjects. If we heed Barthes, we ignore the disempowerment of those voices that Ensler’s process of writing and performing the play necessarily involves, and we similarly ignore the large degree to which Anna Deavere Smith attempts to invest those diverse voices with the empowerment she identifies as missing from the violent events that prompt her performances.

This study, in seeking to put forward the feminist theatrical practice of playing at lives through autobiographical performance, biography plays and staged oral histories, also puts forward a few more mundane methodological assertions: that narrative study, despite the disciplinary turf battles that it inevitably invokes, can be usefully applied alongside performance theory in illuminating theatrical, literary and real-life performances of gender; that life-writing and life-performances be read and viewed through lenses that consider both their fictional aspects alongside the truth-value that they assert; that the dialectic between the historical body the authorial body and the performing body be scrupulously interrogated as a means of understanding how authorship functions, how women construct and assert their identities and political power, how transgressive performances can be reclaimed and disseminated, and how community can be propagated through single or multiple performing bodies.

With so much going on with what may initially may seem to be a tiny field, it is difficult not to return to the narrative that began the study, in which we looked at a boom in staged life writing in a fairly random location at a moment in history when feminism was being asked to reconsider its continued relevance. That staged feminist life writing finds itself so central to theatrical practice in a city in which power is wielded unapologetically suggests that its political intent and impact go beyond the discreet audiences who filter into the theatre night after night, and that instead, extends across communities, across pages, and across history.

Posted by at 4:30 PM | Permalink

I have suggested that the relationship between the real self and the performative self of autobiographical performance implicates notions of authorship in ways that existing theories don’t fully account for. Certainly a simplistic understanding of the death of the author is undermined by a reliance on the physical presentness of the author’s body (as opposed to another speaker’s) in autobiographical performance--anyone else, even Karen Finley, performing Preaching to the Perverted would fall flat. And Foucault’s author-function only partially explains the imbricated nature of these multiple conflated identities. While none of these genres suggests a return to a simple one-to-one-to-one understanding of the relationship of the body that experiences, the body that writes, and the body that performs, theories that deny that the identities of the body of experience and the writing body are important are confounded by these genres.

Of course, since biographical drama ultimately posits that transgressive performances (often transgressive performances of writing itself) can and must be recovered without the historical body that first performed them, we can neither harbor the old humanist notion that the author and the performing voice are precisely the same--Carmelita Tropicana's multiple identities show us this fact just as clearly. We must then account for authorship in a way that neither completely discounts the life experience of the historical body, nor works too hard to conflate it with the laterary or dramatic performance with which we might otherwise associate it.

Oral history performances are again revealing in the challenge they pose to this theoretical question. Critics are often hard-pressed to call Anna Deavere Smith a playwright (although most ultimately agree that she is). This is true because the bodies who experience the narratives she retells are also the ones who authored the text she performs. Yet her performance, and the political efficacy of that performance, proves that even narratives that are praised for their truth-value can be enhanced by the very performativity of that life-writing: it is precisely Smith's ability to "be" all of her interview subjects, and to do so "truthfully" that garners her acclaim and allows audiences to read themselves into the communal subjectivity she conjures.

But to suggest that the identity, the experience of those orginal speakers is worthless to us as readers is to fall into the same potentially hegemonic ethical traps that Ensler falls into: the obfuscation of the power of the performing "I." The material bodies and identities of the interview subjects of Twilight come to bear in crucial ways on how we read the power structures of that play, even as we acknowledge that it's political effectiveness relies on the fact that Smith as performer stands in for those absent bodies. While death of the author theories ultimately seem to want to read the written text as a discreet entity separate from an orginary writing body as a means of avoiding the intentional fallacy, Smith's performances provide an example in which Derrida's "father of logos"--the origin of the spoken word--is no longer inherently privileged over the reproduced graphein, the written, or at least reproduced linguistic sign, but that the material body of the original speaker remains crucial to an understanding of the context of that speech and its relationship to power.

More to come on why it's important that this conclusion comes about in a study of feminist drama.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by at 10:21 PM | Permalink

There are now six days and about 11 hours to go before parenthood. I'd like to say we're excited, and we are. We are also:

Scared.

Bored.

Tired of waiting.

Now lest you all out there in blog-world (what all three, four of you?) think me whiney, let me tell you that we are trying to make the best of it. Ann and I have embarked on a killer Scrabble(tm)-fest, wherein I have bested my benchmark of 300 points more often than not, although I've only broken 400 once. That was not the game in which I got the eight-letter "jettison" on a triple word score on my first turn. Ask me how badly the rest of that game went. If you do, I will tell you all of the words you can make with three A"s, two I's, an O and a blank tile (as far as I can tell, "aioli" is the best of them).

Also, we have been trying to eat out more often. On Sunday we realized we may not get to go to Addie's, our favorite slightly overprised restaurant in the area--so we went and had yummy yummy yummy food. Tonight, we opted for the Cheesecake Factory when our Thai options seemed too far away from our current shopping locale.

While Chez Claycomb often has some exciting options, we're expecting to dine there a lot in the next several months, so we're stepping out while it's just our four feet and not four feet and a double stroller.

Posted by at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

OK. So I have mentioned elsewhen that I love my brilliant students, my brilliant students whom I have told that if they have more to say than the max recommended pages that I would keep reading.

After my second straight 13-page rhetorical analysis paper (many of which are, as you may guess, quite brilliant), all I have to say is:

"C'mon!"

I'm trying to get these things back to you before the babies come! Is it too much to ask for a slight break on the brainiac treatment so I can finish up a couple of these puppies?

OK. Now that that's done, back to grading.

Also. Have I mentioned lately that we're ready for the babies to get here? Collin, Paige, if you're reading this, come on out already. You're fat enough in there.

Yes. I am cranky from dental pain.

Posted by at 8:56 PM | Permalink

While I don't harbor the stereotypical fear/dread/ire for dentists that we seem to have in the cultural imagination, I have found myself in a situation that was at different times a combination of bad insurance, a previous huckster dental practice and sheer laziness, been to the dentist about three times in the last, oh, say, eleven years.

I should not have been surprised, therefore, to find out that I have four cavities. I further should not have been surprised that getting four cavities filled in one evening would, well, hurt. Like so much hades.

Yes, I got novocaine shots, and I suspect part of the lingering pain in my gums is actually from the injections. But the rest of it comes from the sheer jarring effect of having someone drill out pieces of my teeth.

Now, I'd like to give a shout-out to the Drs. McCarl, a nifty little small-town style family practice in old Greenbelt that Dave and Natalie recommend highly. They run a very friendly practice, and I have not once been offered a fairly expensive tooth whitening process. Instead I've been told a lot about floss, a product for which I expect the dentitsts get very little kickback.

Still. My mouth hurts.

Posted by at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since Dave hasn't yet posted his ruminations on the REM concert (In Spain, they pronounce it as one syllable--Rem__slight roll of the R). I'll just go ahead and do that.

Dave insists that U2 is the greatest band, but I'd just like to make the case for my old friends from Athens. ( I know this isn't fair to Dave, who may be an even bigger REM fan than me).

Yeah, their relevance has slipped a bit (but their last real single, "Imitation of Life" went to number 1 in Japan), and yeah, their accessibility isn't always--well--existent.

But what can you say about a band who writes song about The Cuyahoga River, Andy Kaufman, summer skinny-dipping and the Bush administration (take your pick), and still has the cojones to illuminate their stage with a giant red L-U-V.

C'mon!

Anyway, the set was great. First off, no stinkers. No "Shiny Happy People," "Stand" (although I have a soft spot for that one), or "Everybody Hurts."

Second of all, since it was a best-of tour, we didn't have an overload of new material. Three songs, two of which seemed to me distinct improvements on the last album, was all.

Third, lots of D.C.-appropraite material. Dave speculated that the band probably doesn't play "Exhuming McCarthy" at every stop. Plus "World Leader Pretend" is one of my favorites.

Four, Michael Stipe has totally embraced his inner silliness. He's generally abandoned the recalcitrance that marked the murmur period, but he's also backed off some from the Bono-esque glam ethos that started with Monster. The entire band was relaxed, Stipe was conversational, and the dancing. Nothing beats the guy's dancing, skinny arms flailing and all.

There was a bunch of material from my favorite of their albums (I won't go so far as to say their best--this is a largely subjective distinction with a catalogue as varied and extensive as REM's). Four tracks off of Automatic for the People, four from Document, several from Life's Rich Pageant. I was disappointed that nothing was played from New Adventures in Hi-Fi, but the selections from the last two albums were among the best material from those offerings.

The real highlights: Mills at the piano, low lighting, and "Nightswimming"; a remarkably good jam session at the end of Reveal's "She Just Wants To Be"; "Fall on Me"; and of course, the concert closing, shirtless rendition of "It's the End of the World as We Know it," performed with just enough sense of its cheesiness, that we could all feel perfectly fine screaming, in capital letters: LEONARD BERNSTEIN. All he needed was a skateboard to try some unsuccessful hand plants.

excellent, excellent concert.

Posted by at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After our week 35 appointment today, we got the (semi) official word. It looks like Collin is still butt-down. Therfore, we're going ahead and scheduling a C-section for October 30.

I had been vocally holding out for October 31st, but when given the choice between the 30th and the 31st, I fugured that not making our children suffer all of the "devil-children" jokes they'd get would probably be ok.

Their birthdays are, however, close enough to Halloween that we can guarantee that they can trick-or-treat AND still have a kick-ass costume party every year on their birthdays.

What? NO! I'm not trying to relive my unpopular adolescence by thinking about throwing high school bashes for our children in fifteen years! I'd never try to displace my own anxieties onto their lives! I'd never try to impress their friends with creative costumes as a way of making up for the fact that I couldn't impress my own high school friends with such coolness!

Oh God. I'm gonna need therapy for the rest of my life.

Posted by at 6:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)