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Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Charlotte Canning
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin

Extract

Given performance history's disciplinary complexity, not to mention the complications of a “we” comprised by so many different scholars, Theatre Survey's question is, in one sense, unanswerable. In another sense, if I translate the question to what I can do (staying fully aware that others will propose answers different from mine), however, I can offer an answer from my position as a feminist performance historian and historiographer. My response to it is twofold. The argument I make here is for performance that foregrounds historiographical operations, making physical, gestural, emotional, and agonistic the processes that construct history out of the past. Concomitantly, I am arguing for history that overtly acknowledges the ways in which it is a performance of the past, but not the past itself. This dual approach is especially important in feminist accounts of the past because performance has historically been a crucial constituent of feminist theories and practices.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Charlotte Canning is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as Graduate Advisor (Director of Graduate Studies). She is the author of Feminist Theatres in the USA: Staging Women's Experience (1996) and the forthcoming The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance. Currently she is serving as the President of ASTR.