Instead of a keyword from the Jill Dolan glossary, I want to focus on a cluster of concepts in Jill's third monograph, Geograhies of Learning (2001). This constellation—theory, practice, activism, and performance—anchors an intersection of forces that Jill beautifully brings together to argue for making our field more relevant and responsive to the urgencies of the now. Examining historical and enduring tensions between theory and practice in the work of performance and activism, she shows us how the academic fields of theatre and performance studies, LGBTQ studies, and women and gender studies might best assemble their communities and mediate their work within and beyond the academy. This includes practices of artmaking, teaching, and activism. In doing so, Jill advances an ethics for our practice as scholars, artists, and citizens of the academy and provides useful advice for undertaking these efforts.
If you have not read Geographies of Learning ever or in a while, let me recommend this 23-year-old gem as a valuable, necessary guide for this very moment in the academy, our theatre communities, and, more broadly, in our society. Jill's exposition of our disciplinary tensions advances like an intimate ethnography of our field. The academic conferences, university classrooms, and, of course, the feminist and queer theatre and performance spaces she has documented, theorized, and advocated for throughout her career appear as sites of friction, pleasure, and possibility. She proposes elegant solutions, loving recommendations, and high order charges for all of us—scholars, artists, activists—to commit to the practices of mediation and translation that will make viable our collective future—across the geographies of learning she maps out for us.
In Geographies of Learning, Jill approaches our possible interventions from the vantage point of one of our most feared but necessary forms of academic labor: professional service and leadership. And yes, I invoke fear purposefully to first and foremost thank Jill for working to persuade us, her students and colleagues, to think of the practices of administration as works of imagination, strategy, collaboration, and activism. As a scholar who entered the academy from the place of activism and who moved onto a storied career of leadership and administration, Jill's careful attention to this work as serious matter for the queer feminist materialist critic to unpack, theorize, and return to practice has truly transformed our field. And in honoring her contributions, I too want us to consider Jill's advocacy for the work of theory, balancing a sustained insistence on translation as a form of activism while protecting the necessity to articulate new concepts and worlds in the form of theory. Similarly, she asks for our artistic practices to be rigorous and activist while centering pleasure and community.
Our professional organizations and our field have been changed by her leadership and intervention. During her ATHE presidency and beyond it, she has empowered student voices, like my own, and encouraged us to find new directions and opportunities to make our artistic practices, our teaching, and our activism increasingly more inclusive, attuned to both our organizations' and field's historical shortcomings and their better hopes. I am particularly fond of her examples and the stories they tell about our ways for advancing the field in gatherings and conferences, such as the original ATHE session in which this very text was delivered. New Focus Groups, an increased interdisciplinary focus, and a robust advocacy wing are among the enduring, still thriving results of her efforts as ATHE leader. From her approach to leadership, we inherit the generous mentorship, rigorous materialist acumen, and fierce advocacy that she modeled for us.
In her work of professional service and throughout her career, Jill asks us to subject our intellectual homes to a deeper level of scrutiny around our institutionality, materiality, and sociology. And she does so with an investment, an indefatigable commitment, to the power of theatre and performance to make a difference, and an ethnical call for us to wrestle with the historical wrongs and the enduring capacity to hurt of our current society. Invoking her turn to pleasure, to the utopian, at the end of her book (and what a beautiful set up for the magnus opus that would be her next monograph, Utopia in Performance), she states:
Regardless of our methods or contexts—whether theoretical or practical or both, in the academy, in the street, in the theatre or all three—aren't those of us committed to progressive change united by a deep desire to see more love determine the course of events in the world, and less oppression, cruelty, and exploitation in the name of profit, religion, colonialism, or imperialism? Don't we all hope that how we move across geographies of learning, of art making, of idea generating, of policy making, or world building, of culture forming will reconfigure them radically, making them more humane, valuing all their subjects, finding in them pleasure, fleetingly fulfilled desire, and even peace?1
Thank you, Jill, for the force of your provocations and the impact of your care for our field, for our humanity, and for our future. We love you.
Footnotes
1. Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 149.