ABSTRACT
Feminist scholarship in recent years has been centrally concerned with the theoretical discourses of representation articulated through the texts of a number of cultural fields: art, cinema, media, advertising, theatre, etc. In consequence, feminist analysis of representation has identified the oppressive discourse of engendered representation which constructs and positions ‘woman’ as ‘the other-from-man’ (De Lauretis 1984:5). This chapter aims to survey some of the key areas of feminist study where critical intervention in the fictional construct of ‘woman’ has been taken up in feminist approaches to the study of theatre, beginning with a brief overview of feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the theoretical apparatus which underpins work on the construction of the feminine subject. (The reader who is unfamiliar with this field may find it useful to refer to the two introductory chapters in Mitchell and Rose (1982), which were used to shape the contextualizing section of this chapter; see below.)
FEMINISM AND LACAN
Understanding how the feminine subject is constructed, examining feminine sexuality, ‘goes beyond psychoanalysis to feminism, as part of its questioning of how that sexuality comes to be defined’ (Rose, in Mitchell and Rose 1982:27). Furthermore, Jacqueline Rose explains, ‘psychoanalysis is now recognised as crucial in the discussion of femininity-how it comes into being and what it might mean’ and identifies the centrality of Jacques Lacan to ‘the controversies produced by that recognition’ (ibid.). Lacan, director of the école freudienne in Paris from 1964 until 1980, proposed a reframing of Freud, a ‘reorienting’ of ‘psychoanalysis to its task of deciphering the ways in which the human subject is constructed’ which has since been taken up
by feminism in order to critique the construction of the ‘feminine’ (Mitchell and Rose 1982:5).
