Afterword

The artists featured within Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure are creating work at the cutting edge of experimental theatre and performance practice. Many have contributed to what I will call the ‘rebirth’ of identity politics while simultaneously querying the hegemonic drive to label and categorise. They exploit self-reflexive performance practices associated with a postmodern praxis of performing failure whilst refusing to be stymied by the postmodern tendency to ‘reduce all others to the economy of the same’ (Irigaray 1985: 74 original emphasis). They borrow techniques associated with performing failure or employ a form of radical negativity, which robs the subjugated value of associated shame. After José Muñoz and Sara Jane Bailes, their exploitation of failure is ‘generative’ and optimistic (Muñoz 2009; Bailes 2011). For example, they: construct vulnerability as form of ‘radical softness’; draw upon anger as a powerful catalyst for change; and discover a sense of joy in being ‘othered’. They share a sense of euphoria in identifying as non-binary or diversely constituted ‘women’ and hold gendered strictures of behaviour up for ridicule. In the live moment of performance they shrug off the burden of oppression and insist upon a progressive way forward. They share stories about prejudicial and discriminatory behaviour but ultimately refuse to identify as victims. Like Amelia Jones they refuse the idea that we are ‘post-identity’ or ‘post-race’ (Jones 2012). The artists discussed have used performance-making as an act of self-care; they have created alternative, heterotopic spaces-within-spaces to draw attention to the exclusionary nature of space and plundered what Lorde has called ‘a well-stocked arsenal of anger’ to reconfigure stereotypes of ‘angry black women’ and ‘angry feminists’. They have interrogated notions of gender fixity and fluidity and pushed back against constructions of trans* people as agonised or unhappy; they have used irony as a form of satire, rendering their own ideological position inscrutable. They have borrowed postmodern form and yet identify with recognised identity categories. This presents a 202theoretical dilemma because, as Hill Collins and Bilge have pointed out, ‘[f]or those who embrace postmodern anti-categorical thinking, intersectionality’s identity conceptions are essentialist and exclusionary’ (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016: 100). Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure sets out to interrogate this tension and map contemporary theories of subjectivity on to postmodern praxis. Lavender has described subjects as being ‘diversely centred’ after postmodernism, and argues that in the current moment we are participating in a post-postmodern ‘age of engagement’ (Lavender 2016: 21). This book interrogates what it might mean to be ‘diversely centred’ and contemplates what the poststructuralist and postmodern turn might have leant but also taken away from feminism, gender studies and performance practice.