SUSAN BENNETT
In this last term (Fall, 1994), I had one of those experiences which reminded me of the complicated and often troubled relation between my own life "as an academic" and the field in which I claim some expertise. Perhaps it was the context-another role, this one comprising one aspect of the "service" component of my job-that made what Ric Knowles very carefully argues about the "dizzying range of very different disciplines" so powerfully troubling. As a member of the University of Calgary's President's Committee on Sexual Harassment (a group that works on both policy and education), I chaired a post-production panel for a special performance of the Alberta Theatre Projects staging of David Mamet's Oleanna. I listened to panellists talk about "the case"-as if what we had just watched were an actual experience of sexual harassment and where the university's policy and the actions of the individuals had contravened general practice; I listened to other speakers critique the structure of Mamet's play and his realization of "characters" as if their behaviors were somehow unrelated to what happens in the 'real world' (if the academy can be thought of in this way); I heard women from the community offer accounts full of pain about the kinds of violence against women's bodies, part of their direct experience of the world and taken for granted-indeed, exploited in this particular production; and, finally, I heard from two actors with the company that we were all overreacting: that this was theatre, that their job was to entertain us and our task to be entertained. All this analysis, they implied, was no good whatsoever since it wrecked the whole premise under which we were all in this particular space at this particular time.
At the end of all this discussion-passionate, interested, interesting and infuriating-I left the theatre to carry on talking with academic and non-academic women friends, to go over the various arguments and to insist on my own (that Oleanna, like the recent film on the same topic Disclosure, is all about a white male anxiety about what is perceived as "feminism"- whether that's the mysterious "group" who support Carol in Mamet's play or Demi Moore's oiled body which represents her character's sexual and career avarice- and that good men, as a result of this feminism, lose their jobs, their homes, and their families). But really what troubled me more was "an essentially reproductive (and culturally affirmative) theatre" (Knowles) that provoked essentially reproductive questions from a group of people, myself included, who should have known better or at least differently.
Yet the problem is perhaps not how do we ask different questions of ourselves and of each other, but how do we ask questions at all. Ric Knowles suggests that we might start by thinking of "theatrical practice as research and theory, and for theatre less as a product to be (re)produced, than as laboratory experimentation." And, like Knowles, I believe in this possibility for performance, that it can be "culturally productive." I suspect it is precisely this possibility that keeps many of us engaged with this problem of theory and practice, imagining we can do either and occasionally both. This belief in such possibility echoes Jill Dolan who has described her recent work in the university theatre as "a renewed faith in my own commitments to performance as a laboratory for culture" (19).1 Dolan further reflects on this notion of the theatre as a laboratory (interestingly this time for theory rather than culture):
[I]n the continuing balancing act between theory and practice that theater studies conducts, the productions on which I've worked recently have allowed me to simply reorder my thinking, rather than rejecting one side of the binary for the other. One of the commitments of feminist theatre and performance criticism has been to finding ways to meld theory and practice into praxis, to challenge the hierarchical function of the two terms (31).
Certainly it can be argued that the feminist materialist approach identified here by Dolan has been instrumental in bringing us to the place, albeit an often frustrating and seemingly impossible place, that enables Knowles to stage the challenges that he does. And this is one of the achievements of the last few years of theatre studies in North America and elsewhere.
But just what is it we (Ric Knowles, Jill Dolan, and myself) imagine we are doing when we enter, even hypothetically, the theatre-as-laboratory? What are the dangers in the "utopia" posited at the end of "This Discipline Which Is Not One"? To mark some of what is elided in our entry into this disciplinary laboratory, I want to think a little of the source usefully parodied in Knowles's title, Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One. Iragaray argues a woman's femininity is a masquerade in which "the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity" (84) and proposes replacing the oppressive masculine/feminine binary (always the property of Man) with women's hommo-sexuality. Yet, of course, Irigaray has been subject to charges of counter-essentialism and what Judith Butler names "its globalizing reach" (13). What Butler proposes as a more generative site (for the production of gender) is the field of parody so that bodily surfaces "can become the site of dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself' (146). Butler's notion of gender trouble can, I think, be usefully adapted for the discipline-that the stylized repetition of theoretical and practical performatives, with their fissures and omissions made palpable, may well be what the laboratory is all about. But about those dangers: Knowles's title-while it performs precisely a Butlerian parodic practice-also runs the risk of femininizing the discipline and at the same marking its (our?) existence only as a locus of competitive exchange.
NOTES
1 See also Dolan's earlier article, "Gender Impersonation Onstage" Women and Performance
Journal 4 (1985), reprinted and revised in Laurence Senelick, ed., Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts (Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1993) 3-13.
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WORKS CITED
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.
Dolan, Jill. Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.