ABSTRACT
As was discussed in the last chapter, poets Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith performed the marginal spaces of womanhood in order to challenge the norms of femininity, but they were ultimately identified with their roles and dismissed as eccentrics. Contemporary artists Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay have managed to avoid the fate of their predecessors by creating an art that is always in motion, always fluid. In a statement that could apply to both artists, Anne Varty has written that what distinguishes Lochhead’s work is ‘its protean character.’3 The two women work across the poetic to dramatic continuum, sometimes producing poetry, sometimes drama, and sometimes unnamed hybrids.4 They ventriloquize a wide array of voices-from Lochhead’s suburban materialist, Verena, to Kay’s dying AIDS patients. Both on the page and in performance, they transform themselves, in the process becoming continual shapeshifters of identity, or, as Kay describes in the epigraph, ‘women faking it.’
