In the spirit of feminist praxis, I would like to reflect on my own experience with Jill Dolan's book The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991) as a way of demonstrating the wide-ranging influence of her theories of "feminist spectatorship" on the field of theatre and performance studies.
I first encountered The Feminist Spectator as Critic in 1997 (six years after its publication), when I was a sophomore in college. It was in a theatre class taught by Beth Schachter, one of Jill's students from the CUNY Graduate Center, who was commuting to Princeton University to teach the course. Beth's elective on women in theatre in the twentieth century was offered once and never again, so I consider myself very lucky to have been in that class. It quite literally changed the course of my life. (When I decided to apply to graduate school almost ten years later, I sought Jill out and was fortunate enough to work with her in the Performance as a Public Practice program at the University of Texas.)
I read The Feminist Spectator voraciously, highlighting it almost beyond readability in bright blue and lavender and jotting embarrassingly emphatic reactions in the margins (for example, in one note I exclaim: "FUCK FREUD!"). I was a riot grrrl feminist at what was at the time a very conservative school (although Jill's tenure as Dean of the College would help change that). I was struggling to reconcile my burgeoning political consciousness and sexual identity with not only the rigidity of my highly gendered program of performance training, but also with my experiences as an audience member so often disappointed by the gender politics in the plays I read and watched. The figure of the "feminist spectator," then, provided me with a way of understanding myself.
The book discusses feminisms plural—a concept new and enormously helpful to me as I navigated the cultural feminist politics I encountered in certain women's spaces on campus and beyond. In her first chapter, "The Discourse of Feminisms," Jill offers her oft-cited taxonomy of US feminist thought, and throughout the book, she maps these feminisms onto examples in performance. Jill provides characteristically clear and concise descriptions of liberal feminism, which advocates working within existing systems to secure equality; cultural (or radical) feminism, which she argues reifies gender difference and posits femininity as inherently superior to masculinity; and materialist feminism, the belief that gender is socially constructed.1 A feminist spectator, I learned, is not just content to declare a performance to be feminist, but instead makes nuanced arguments about the particular kinds of feminist politics performance embodies.
A feminist spectator is also, in Jill's words, a "resistant reader," who analyzes a performance's meaning "against the grain."2 Jill juxtaposes the feminist spectator to "the ideal spectator," whom she posits as white, male, middle-class, and heterosexual. Transposing the work of feminist film critics like Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis to the theatre,3 Jill argues that theatre—like film—"addresses the male spectator as active subject," objectifying both women performers and viewers.4 To avoid a choice between identifying with the objectified woman in the representation or empathizing with the objectifying male hero, a feminist spectator must deconstruct the operation of the male gaze. At the time, I was nursing a newfound interest in experimental theatre, and Jill's mode of analysis—particularly as applied to Richard Foreman's work in chapter 3 of the book—helped me put into words the critiques I had wanted to make of avant-garde productions I had seen and been a part of.
Perhaps most importantly, Jill's notion of feminist spectatorship introduced me to a radical kind of theatre practice. The book's final chapter models a materialist feminist approach to criticism, but it also advocates for a method of materialist feminist theatremaking. Engaging anthropologist Gayle Rubin's work on gender and sexuality, Jill argues that the feminist theatremakers she champions use Brechtian techniques to denaturalize gender onstage—calling attention to its constructed and contingent nature—and to disrupt the traditionally gendered operation of theatre itself.5 Of course, her astute analysis written in accessible prose would inspire future feminist spectators and critics—myself included. But for me, this chapter was more than performance criticism; it was a playbook. I found inspiration in her rich descriptions of performances by María Irene Fornés, Carmelita Tropicana, Split Britches, Spiderwoman Theatre, Karen Finley, and Holly Hughes (none of whose work I had seen at the time). Through her discussion of the power of Peggy Shaw's "awareness of her being-looked-at-ness," or the "ironing as gestus" in Fornes's Mud, or the use of song in Hughes's Lady Dick, I could imagine a more radical mode of theatremaking than I had ever experienced—one I would try to emulate in my own creative practice.6
Finally, in archiving these performances—most of which had not yet been reviewed by mainstream publications—Jill also showed us that feminist spectatorship means being in conversation with feminist artists, helping to interpret their work for audiences and also—at times—for the artists themselves. She acknowledges, too, the challenges and risks of this pursuit in the book's afterword, in which she refuses the notion that a feminist spectator must always nurture feminist work. Instead, the responsibility of the feminist spectator, she writes, is to "place the work in a larger critical, theoretical, and ideological context, in which it becomes part of a movement of ideas."7 Jill would revise this stance in the introduction to the 2012 edition of the book, reminding us that feminist spectatorship is a fluid concept. And as I think back on some of the views I had as a 20-something feminist punk, I appreciate the permission Jill offers us to reevaluate our previously held positions (although I do stand by the sentiment "FUCK FREUD!"). But The Feminist Spectator as Critic did start a movement, shaping the thinking of countless feminist theatre scholars who applied Jill's ideas and made them their own.
Footnotes
1. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (University of Michigan Press, 1991), 3–18.
2. Ibid., 2.
3. See Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975); Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1984). 6–18
4. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 2.
5. See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (Monthly Review Press, 1978), 157–210.
6. Dolan, Feminist Spectator, 115, 9, 107.
7. Ibid., 121.