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All about Eve: Apple Island and the Fictions of Lesbian Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Stacy Wolf
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Abstract

We continue our occasional series on the actuality and the ideology of lesbian performance with a study of Apple Island, a performance space in Madison, Wisconsin. Many of the productions of this ‘women's cultural and art space’ could, suggests Stacy Wolf, be categorized as performance art: she looks at these in the context of other modes and definitions of cultural production, and at the ‘complex interplay of identity and knowledge’ which constructs Apple Island's potential spectators. Looking at both positive negative critiques of its work, she concludes that the activity through which its refusal of political and performative divisions is best exemplified is the weekly class-cumperformance of country western line dancing, and suggests through folkloric analogy how this helps to define or redefine the meaning of cultural feminism. Stacy Wolf is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Drama and a lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has also published articles in Theatre Studies, Women and Performance, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 37 , February 1994 , pp. 28 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

Notes and References

1. Abbeele, Georges Van Den, ‘Introduction’, in Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. ix.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. ix.

3. Roof, Judith, The Lure of Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 120.Google Scholar

4. See Young, Iris Marion, ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Nicholson, Linda J. (New York; London: Routledge, 1990), p. 300–23.Google Scholar

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6. Butler, Judith, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Fuss, Diana (New York; London: Routledge, 1991), p.13–31.Google Scholar

7. Quoted in Van Den Abbeele, op. cit., p. xv.

8. See Bakhtin, M. M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).Google Scholar

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