ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on performance art as a site of feminist intervention, exploring a range of practices, issues and debates from its inception to today. Performance art may be understood as a practice in which the body of the artist is central or is the medium itself. Staged on the street, in a room or in an art gallery, performance takes place in time and space and may involve sound or voice. Performance art by women can also be understood as a response to art politics, which marginalised women as artists and manipulated the body of woman in representation, and women performance artists have sought to insert the female self into art practice. Anne Whitehurst is concerned specifically with contesting the impersonality of bureaucracy and raising awareness of issues around disability and access. She set up the Disability Research Unit which operated as a real office in which the audience is encouraged to participate.
