ABSTRACT
Although it’s an old saw of theatre studies that our theory always lags behind other fields from which it borrows (film studies, cultural studies, popular culture studies, especially), this collection of articles first published in TDR indicates how quickly thinking indigenous to feminist theatre and performance has moved, changed, and grown over a very short (not even 20-year) period. This anthology of writing spans a generation of work in which the critical and creative terrain often changed before people had a chance even to locate their direction, let alone their destination. The performers about whom we write also have a new cachet, perhaps in some small part because of our writing. Their notoriety is now exemplified by the astounding popular success of solo performers like Anna Deavere Smith, the perhaps more prurient-but nonetheless nationally reported-contentions around public funding for Holly Hughes and Karen Finley, and the persistent, no less significant body of work developed by Robbie McCauley, Lois Weaver, and Peggy Shaw. Texts by and about and dialogues with these women take up a number of the pages that follow; that their work represents only a small percentage of the amount of performance now generated under the rubric of “feminism” (in all its contentiousness), and consumed, discussed, and theorized from various feminist ideological perspectives, is no small measure of the distance that this discourse has come.
