3.2.i Feminisms and the canon
I will discuss and critique three main branches of feminism that have made significant contributions to critique of the canon before I go on to discuss, in some detail, poststructuralist deconstructions of the canon. The first feminism that I cite is an offshoot from liberal humanist philosophy. Liberal feminism stresses "women's parity with men, based on universal values" (Austin 1990:5), and the sovereignty of the individual. Liberal feminists view canons as a "structure of exclusion" (Pollock 1999:23). Liberal feminism's strategy in bringing about gender equality is to change the face of the dramatic canon by introducing more female-authored texts and productions into the canon. However, merely incorporating women's work into any canon does not necessarily challenge nor change the structure of the canon. Liberal feminism fails to recognise that women can be masculine- identified and thus replicate and reify the already-existing structures and styles of artistic canons. Passing on the phallus, as it were, does not position women to articulate against cultural oppression and negates differences between women.
Radical feminism is a separatist politics that positions women as innately different from men. The position of radical feminists is that the canon is a structure of subordination and domination by men and masculinist aesthetics which relativises all women by positioning them within the power structures of race, gender, class and sexuality. Radical feminists address the idea of a "female aesthetic" and of the necessity of constructing an exclusively female culture in order for women to realise themselves. In the broad category of radical feminism are other separatist feminisms, such as cultural feminism, which posits that women are both different from and superior to men.
Such fundamentalist thinking is based on absolute gender categories and can be criticised for relying on biological determinist arguments to support claims of women's superiority and innate difference from men. In terms of women's performance, radical and cultural feminism identify a similarity in the plays and performances written, choreographed, performed and produced by women. These feminisms look for a through-line or common female aesthetic that informs the idea of an exclusive female culture. The major issue with this approach is that by defining women categorically, radical feminism "...confirms the patriarchal notion that woman is the sex, the sign of gender, perpetually the particular and sexualised other to the universal sign Man" (Pollock 1999:24).
I do not view working with the idea of sexed specificity, as a move away from abstract universalisms, as problematic. However, it is limiting to view feminine difference as biologically determined. A radical line of argument would insist that feminists should not have to concern themselves with men or masculinity at all nor privilege what the "patriarchal notion" (ibid) [of women/culture] might be. This argument assumes that women can have access to women's culture that pre-exists assimilation into patriarchal structures. However, the ontology that underpins performance itself assumes the innate possibilities of transgressing fixed or biologically determined identity, exemplified for instance in acts of cross-dressing. Attempting to group women's cultural production in terms of similarities cannot, for one, be guaranteed by sex and, secondly, it can be argued that these similarities could just as well exist between women's work because women are defined culturally contra men.
Materialist feminism is concerned with how gender difference is constructed by material conditions, that is, how women as a class or socio-economic group have been "oppressed by material conditions and social relations"
(Austin 1990:5). Materialist feminism holds that women across the board are considered inferior to men and this stratification of society on a gendered level makes it more difficult for women to access material resources. Whilst women may not have access to material resources, they nevertheless contribute to the production of material through their labour.
Materialist feminism has links to Marxist philosophy, but it emphasises women as an oppressed class through all strata of social organisation. Materialist feminism emphasises that women's issues necessarily involve questions of race, social class and sexual preference. In terms of theatre, materialist feminists are concerned with the material and historical conditions that allow the production of texts or plays. So then, in order for theatrical canons to change, materialist feminism argues that the material conditions that support the myth of "woman" must be changed. Who performs and produces theatre, how, and why, are affected by material conditions. These aforementioned conditions determine the way in which sex, gender, race and social class are represented: if one has access to material resources it allows access to a wider set of possibilities for representation, whether through, for example, dress, lifestyle, partners or, indeed, the ability to create and sustain performance projects. Materialist feminism has an appeal in a developing nation such as South Africa, where material conditions come to bear heavily upon the construction of
subjectivities. The feminisation of poverty means that women in South Africa (and many other African countries) remain excluded from contributing to cultural production, that is, lack of resources and the relegation of women to economically disempowered positions makes it difficult for women to represent themselves. So, despite differences in social and racial classs, it is assumed that the material conditions of women result in the perpetuation of an inferior gendered class. However, although material conditions determine the sustainability of a particular class, it is insufficient that women's positions be explained only in terms of materialism: having access to resources that allow women to produce theatre and performance in no way guarantees a challenge to patriarchies. The effect may be merely cosmetic. An effective deconstruction of patriarchy needs to be undertaken at a material and symbolic level so that material effects and knowledges shift. These are issues that I will continue to problematise throughout the remainder of this chapter.
Post structuralist feminism moves away from the essentialist tendencies of the three former feminisms. Poststructuralist feminists (see Weedon 1997) view power relations and knowledge production as discursively produced, that is, produced within a discursive field. " The discursive construction of language and the construction of the subject in language is central to poststructuralist theory's understanding of discourse as historically and culturally contingent. Not all discourses carry equal weight or power, and certainly the masculinist discourses that have constructed the female body have tended to medicalise and pathologise female bodies to the exclusion of other possible readings and at the cost of other modes of representation. Poststructuralist analysis is concerned with power structures and power relations, and at its most basic level, poststructuralist feminism is concerned with power relations between women and men and the discursive structures (material and symbolic) that reproduce these relations. Power in this instance is not located in an identifiable, repressive monolith but enables and produces the subject as such. Feminist poststructuralists locate the oppression of women in masculinist discourses that include grand historical narratives, psychoanalysis, politics, biomedicine, literature, art and theatre. However, this deconstructive approach does not include an assumption that 'woman' has an essential and unfettered position that is beyond
" The concept of 'discursive fields, developed in the work of Foucault, is explained by Weedon (1997:34) who states that discursive fields consist of ".. .competing ways of organising social institutions and processes". However, the concept of a 'discursive field' is dynamic and hence its meaning and the interpretation of Foucault's thinking on the matter may be contested.
patriarchal domination but that patriarchy produces particular and negative versions of femininity in its discursive operations. Poststructuralist analysis is useful insofar as the deconstruction of discursive formations can lead to "the production of radically new knowledges" (Pollock 1999:26). This is because no central meaning or truth is assumed to exist in any given text but that specific power relations determine the kinds of cultural production that take place in a society. Thus, the subjects, meanings and material excluded from dominant texts can be read into the frame of dominance. Poststructuralist analysis moves across a field of discourse, cultural texts and their psychic foundations in order to deconstruct existing power relations and imagine possibilities beyond these. (Note that the term "text", unless specified, can refer to anything from the body to a play to day-to-day activities). By drawing on a broad range of texts, analysis is also rendered more complex, which enables the researcher to "render a thick description..." of the issue at hand.14 This explains why I have not used a formalist methodology to analyse the performance artists included in Part Two but have drawn upon a variety of critical discourses in order to theorise what these artists' bodies are 'saying'. Poststructuralism's multifocal methodology is antithetical to the production of canons or standards because the 'measure' is considered relative to its production within a matrix of discursive relations and is thus not viewed as the result of a prediscursive or fixed origin.
A poststructuralist analysis of the body offers the possibility of reclaiming the female body from classical and homogenising forms of representation. This process of reclamation comes from re-reading cultures not for universal truths (about women's bodies specifically), but for particularities in the structures of power that reinforce social hegemony. The emphasis that poststructuralism places on historical analysis, appropriated broadly from Foucault's term 'genealogy', can offer a form of resistance to historical narratives that silence the voices of marginalised identity groups that "lie a little beneath history" (Sawicki 1991:28).15 Dramatic/artistic canons, in poststructuralist feminist analysis, are read as institutions whose textual structure is "an enunciation of western masculinity" (Pollock 1992:26). By deconstructing the material,
1 I have borrowed the term "thick decription" from Dr Claudia Ford's lecture on violence, sexual violence and child rape in South Africa (Issues of Consequence: Why Do I Scream At God For The Rape of Babies?, presented at the Winter School, Grahamstown National Arts Festival, 2 July 2005). Dr Ford used the term
"thick description" with reference to the effective results of interdisciplinary research, such that
"interdisciplinarity consists in creating something new that belongs to no-one".
'" Sawicki provides examples of "marginal and submerged voices", such as the "voices of the mad, delinquent, abnormal and disempowered" (Sawicki 1991:28).
symbolic and historical conditions of canonical structures, the way in which representations of male bodies are produced can be traced. This frees the body up from notions of fixity and, I argue, enables the production of discourses that represent alterity or otherness that transgresses phallic necessity.
Poststructuralist feminist theory offers a methodology, that is, a technique or conceptual framework, for reading bodies, cultures and change. It does not offer a solution for emancipating all women everywhere. In terms of the application of poststructuralist feminism to deconstructing performance, it is a particularly useful framework precisely because it does not fall back upon abstract universalisms and generalisation that inform the production of canonical theatrical works, works that enunciate the intelligibility of the female body as an object of aesthetic contemplation or negated abjection. Rather, the body viewed from the point of poststructuralist feminist deconstruction is a text that is produced by the interweaving, so to speak, of various discursive threads. The female body (in performance) and the aesthetic object, then, are never neutral entities, but are invested with the fears and expectations of the dominant phallic imaginary that sublimates alterity.