Examine the importance of spectatorship issues and audience dynamics in feminist approaches to performance

THEA 201 Feminist Approaches to Performance

I will examine the importance of spectatorship issues and audience dynamics in feminist approaches to performance by comparing a feminist piece, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, with another piece, Ursula Martinez’s OAP, where feminist issues were at work, but not the focus of the performance. I intend to demonstrate how feminist performance tries to call attention to ‘the gaze’ of the spectator and challenge the patriarchal organisation of culture.

To begin my analysis, I must define what I mean by ‘the gaze’. John Berger wrote:

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but also the relations of women to themselves.

(Berger in Wolf [1990] 1991: 58).

It is clear that the ‘active’ gaze in Berger’s analysis belongs to the male (subject), and that the ‘passive’ object of his gaze is the female. When applying this analysis to theatre, it is vital to note that theatre has been theorised as ‘a cultural practice, a practice of representation, and so inevitably enters the arena of ideology’ (Counsell and Wolf 2001: 31). Consequently, if theatre does reproduce this active/male and passive/female, attention to the way the gaze is encoded in theatre could offer insight into the way ‘woman’ is constructed onstage, and how feminist theatre may contest this. Sue-Ellen Case’s analysis of ‘the gaze’ in theatre demonstrates this point:

Given the assumption that stage and audience co-produce the performance text, the meaning of the sign ‘woman’ is also created by the audience. The way the viewer perceives the woman on stage constitutes another theoretical enterprise…in the realm of theatrical production, the gaze is owned by the male…deriving the sign for ‘women’ from their perspective…In the realm of audience reception, the gaze is encoded with culturally determined components of male sexual desire, perceiving ‘woman’ as sexual object.

(Sue-Ellen Case in Aston, in Campbell 1996: 59, my emphasis)

Sue-Ellen Case raises important points in the above analysis: that the implied spectator in a performance is male (De Marinis), who may decode the ‘woman’ on stage as a sexual object. Therefore, feminist performance that calls attention to ‘the gaze’ could be a way to challenge the patriarchal structures of culture.

Nonetheless, when stating that feminist performance aims to challenge the patriarchal structures of culture, it is crucial to note that that there is more than one type of feminism, and that each feminism (bourgeois, cultural, materialist) has different political aims and subsequently different performance registers, resulting in different audience dynamics. For example, The Vagina Monologues I saw was performed in a way that was paradigmatic of the consciousness raising groups of the 1970s: its emphasis on the vagina as a source of shared experience and creativity, and the way it is put together from autobiographical accounts means that the personal becomes the political (‘to feminism, the personal is epistemologically the political’ (McKinnon in de Lauretis 1984: 184)) as the audience are told stories of ‘ the politics of pregnability and mother hood. The politics of orgasm. The politics of rape and incest…of prostitution and marital sex’ (Rich in Forte in Reinalt and Roach 1992: 249). The audience dynamic that could be promoted by this sharing of experience is one of shared solidarity:

The autobiographical nature of performance work in the 1970s was in line with the feminist politics based on sharing personal experience and for searching for commonalities among women.

(Dolan 1988: 62).

The above analysis, by Jill Dolan, did apply to The Vagina Monologues, as any audience member who had experienced any of the issues raised in the play or knew someone who had was asked to stand at the end, and so this principle of shared solidarity was extended to the audience. Thus, I consider The Vagina Monologues I saw to be of the political standing and performance register of cultural feminism.

However, while cultural feminism has been criticised for ignoring social and political differences between women, by casting black and ethnic women to tell the stories in The Vagina Monologues that concerned women from other races (for example the monologue from Sarajevo) this criticism was overcome, to the effect of adding universal appeal and perhaps emphasising the shared solidarity amongst women from all backgrounds.

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In addition, worldwide performances of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues is part of the tradition of the ‘V-Day’ she created, making it not only a performance but also a political demonstration. One of the cast members (a friend) mentioned to me how amazing it was to think that when they performed The Vagina Monologues over a million women worldwide would be performing it on that same day. Hence, a text such as The Vagina Monologues has clear spectatorship issues for a (knowledgeable) feminist spectator: instead of analysing performance ‘by reading against the grain of stereotypes and resisting the manipulation of both the performance text and the cultural text it helps to shape’ (Dolan 1988: 2), she may have found herself to be both the ‘implied’ and ‘real’ spectator (De Marinis):

In cultural feminist theatre, the imaginary formation of “Woman” becomes the text’s point of entry, and the female spectator is constituted as the new, ideal, generic spectator.

(Dolan 1988: 9)

Moreover, De Marinis analyses how ‘gender is a crucial determining factor’ (Aston in Campbell 1996: 59) for the model (implied) or real spectator, and how the model spectator is ‘open’ or ‘closed’ (ibid.). Closed performances are those which ‘predict a specific addressee, requiring different kinds of competence for their correct interpretation’. (De Marinis in Aston in Campbell 1996: 61) Thus, The Vagina Monologues could be considered a ‘closed’ performance, which may result in pleasure for the feminist spectator, and is conceivably a reversal of the frustration she may feel with other performance.

An example from The Vagina Monologues of how a ‘closed’ performance may work to constitute the feminist spectator as its ideal spectator is the monologue ‘Reclaiming Cunt’. The term ‘cunt’ is a derogatory term for the vagina used against women. Yet, on-stage, the women of the cast re-own it as the main performer (of this monologue) spoke about how she loved the term ‘cunt’, from ‘the c…to the…u’ (etc.), and the women on-stage around her imitated orgasm, as if to suggest that they too got pleasure out of the word. Thus, the cultural value of the term was changed to something positive for the feminist spectator.

Likewise, a polemic gesture such as this may unite the separateness of female experience through their body parts; instead of the vagina being called something deprecating, it is given a voice and used to express women’s sexual pleasure. This may go some way to challenging the patriarchal structures of culture, as women being open about their sexuality are usually silenced. A further example of how this succeeded in The Vagina Monologues was the monologue ‘The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy’. Here, the audience was presented with a performer playing a Japanese prostitute, who was asked by the hostess to demonstrate the different orgasms she had managed to cause in the woman she had had sex with. These ranged from the ‘washing machine’ orgasm to the ‘Oh Canada!!’ orgasm. As well as being a source of comedy, the different orgasms demonstrated were clearly not of the ‘vaginal passivity’ that is usually imposed on women: ‘A girl must learn several things to properly assume her feminine role. She must give up clitoral masturbation and channel her sexuality towards vaginal passivity.’ (Freud in Dolan 1988: 11). Furthermore, the audience was told these orgasms liberated women, which could mean liberation from the passive ‘uterine norm’ Freud describes in the Dolan quote above.

In addition to repressing sexuality in order to ‘assume her feminine role’, Luce Irigaray argues that women have other cultural roles imposed upon them:

Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed upon women…neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman any right to her own sexual pleasure.

(Irigaray in Counsell and Wolf 2001: 63 – 64)

Thus, using a lesbian prostitute as a source of liberation from sexual repression may call into question the roles culture imposes on women, because by choosing to be a lesbian (and a prostitute) she too gets (sexual) pleasure from giving other women sexual pleasure, therefore, she creates her own right to it, and is not ashamed of it.

Yet, while stating that The Vagina Monologues may provide most viewing pleasure for a spectator competent in decoding the feminist message, analyzing the spectatorship issues ‘The Woman Who loved To Make Vaginas Happy’ present to a non-feminist spectator is important in order to investigate how feminist performance tries to call attention to ‘the gaze’. Taking into account what Elin Diamond says about the potential of Brechtian distancing techniques for feminist performance may be useful for The Vagina Monologues:

Brecht’s theatre…has certain concerns: commitement to ‘alienation’ techniques and deliberate discontinuity in theatrical signification; ‘literalization’ of the theater space to produce a spectator/reader who is not interpellated into ideology.

(Diamond 1997: 44)

Instead of the women on stage psychologically inhabiting the roles they were playing, they demonstrated them in such a way that could have made the audience aware that they were looking at a ‘hybrid’ (Diamond) of woman depicted/performer. For example, using a hostess to narrate the piece and speak directly to the audience meant that each monologue was given a background based in fact, and that as each performer stepped forwards to perform, the audience was presented with someone literally stepping into a role, perhaps adopting the accent of the woman portrayed, but because the whole cast remained on-stage throughout the piece, and because the audience were watching someone demonstrating someone else, we were aware that we were we looking at her as she performed, but also that she was free to look back at us as she had been when she wasn’t performing. Thus, as Elin Diamond explains:

‘In my hybrid construction – based in feminist and Brechtian theory – the female performer, unlike her filmic counterpart, connotes not ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ – the perfect fetish – but rather ‘looking-at-being-looked-at-ness’ or even just ‘looking-ness’.

(Diamond 1997: 52)

So, for a non-feminist spectator, Brechtian distancing techniques could work to call attention to the gaze by making the spectator aware of how they look at the woman depicted/performer, maybe even going so far as to detach them from the ideology theatre and accordingly culture ‘interpellates’ them into.

As well as women being openly sexual, The Vagina Monologues focused on the functions of the vagina that culture would normally prescribe to being kept hidden. An example of this was the monologue ‘The Flood’. The audience was presented with (a demonstration of) an old lady talking about ‘down there’. The flood in the story was a metaphor for sexual arousal, but it was also used as a metaphor for her anxiety about this process. The metaphor was extended to ‘down there’ being the cellar of a house where no-body wants to go. This illustrated not only the stigma about such bodily functions, but because it was an old lady discussing a function that would be kept hidden, particularly in women of that age, it perhaps revealed the ideology behind what culture prescribes as ‘ugly’. In her book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf says: ‘there is a whole literature of ancient revulsion against the tastes and sights of women’s bodies’ (Wolf [1990] 1991: 152), and that ‘the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control’ (Wolf [1990] 1991: 10).

Thus, while ‘The Flood’ could be said to have called attention to how a spectator perceives ‘age’ and accordingly the ideology of beauty in women, I wish to consider Ursula Martinez’s production of OAP as a point of comparison as to how ideological issues of ‘the gaze’ may be perceived at a not overtly feminist performance, in order to demonstrate the importance of calling attention to ‘the gaze’ in feminist performance.

Ursula Martinez, as a female body ‘by virtue of entering the stage space [entered] representation’ (Diamond 1997: 52). By displaying the traits of a middle-aged woman paranoid about getting old, for example, wailing, ‘I don’t want saggy tits’, it could be argued she reinforced the dominant ideology by acting as a woman living in fear of it:

Inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful…women there is a secret ‘under life’…infused with notions of beauty…the terror of aging and dread of lost control.

(Wolf [1990] 1991: 10)

However, after collapsing on the floor in a fit of hysterics at the horror of ‘saggy tits’, Ursula jumped up and said ‘did you like that? That was me being dramatic’. Therefore, she played with audience expectations of the performance; she had been demonstrating gender dynamics, not embodying them, which may have made the audience change how they perceived her as a woman on the stage.

Also, audience expectations may have again been thwarted with the ‘morphing sequence’, where, under the guise of recording advice for herself when she was older, we saw Ursula’s face transform from young to old on a TV screen. This ‘old Ursula’ immediately fell into all the ‘old lady’ stereotypes, such as dancing to ‘all the songs we used to dance to’, but she too was demonstrating these traits, there was irony in her performance. This irony was made more apparent when both old Ursula and young Ursula were on stage at once. At this moment, the gaze of the spectator could have been disrupted, through a ‘triangular structure of subject/actor – character – spectator. Looking at the character, the spectator is constantly intercepted by the subject/actor, and the latter, heeding no fourth wall, is theoretically free to look back’ (Diamond 1997: 54).

In addition to a ‘triangulation’ of the gaze, interesting spectatorship issues were in play at the end of OAP. Young Ursula, after having interviewed pensioners in Morecambe about getting old, and showing what they said in a negative light, tried to interview old Ursula but without success, as she refused to be negative. Young Ursula then makes her ask the audience to come forward and kiss her passionately. By doing this, old Ursula became the object of our gaze, and even dressed herself in the short dress and high heels she had discarded earlier in the piece, clothes that looked out of place on her old body. Yet, this gesture still made a point about the stigmatism associated with old age, as by dressing herself up in young ladies clothes to make herself more attractive to the audience, old Ursula revealed how ‘the body…is invested with cultural meaning, its materiality obscured by signs, so that our conception of our bodies reflects and re-enforces the ruling socio-symbolic order’ (Grosz in Counsell and Wolf 2001: 140).

Therefore, as a not overtly feminist performance, OAP still engaged with feminist issues. By adhering to the dominant ideologies of beauty and age, and then undermining them through Brechtian performance techniques (for example, the demonstration of gender dynamics) OAP made age a feminist issue by allowing age and feminism to intersect, permitting the feminist spectator to engage with the piece. Using Brechtian techniques to unsettle ‘the gaze’ was a key element in this process, as by undermining the stereotype of an old lady, the performance text helped to shape a different kind of cultural text (Dolan 1988: 2).

In conclusion, although OAP was undoubtedly successful at making age a feminist issue, The Vagina Monologues, by virtue of being a hybrid of political demonstration/performance, was ultimately more successful at challenging the patriarchal structures of culture. By creating an audience dynamic of shared solidarity with other women, who were the implied and real spectators of the piece, The Vagina Monologues was searching for political change, and all feminism ‘must be defined with a political edge’ (Reinalt and Roach 1992: 225). OAP was not seeking political change, but effectively brought to attention the ignominy suffered by its real spectators, particularly the female ones, who were the pensioners Ursula interviewed in Morecambe.

References

Aston, Elaine (1996) ‘Gender as Sign System’ in Campbell (ed.) Analyzing Performance, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, pp 56 – 69.

Counsell, Colin and Wolf Laurie (2001) ‘The Politics of Performance’ in Counsell, Colin and Wolf, Laurie (eds.) Performance Analysis: an introductory course book London, New York: Routledge, pp 31 – 43.

De Lauretis, Theresa (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, pp 158 – 186

Diamond, Elin (1997) Unmaking Mimesis, London, New York: Routledge.

Dolan, Jill (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Ensler, Eve (1996) The Vagina Monologues, perf. Lancaster University Feminist Society, dir. Jess Lewin, Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, Lancaster. 14th/15th February 2004.

Forte, Jeanie ‘Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis and Pleasure in Feminist Performance’ in Reinalt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R (eds.) Critical Theory and Performance, University of Michigan Press, pp 248 – 259.

Grosz, Elizabeth (2001) ‘The Body of Signification’ in Counsell, Colin and Wolf, Laurie (eds.) Performance Analysis: an introductory course book London, New York: Routledge, pp 140 – 146.

Irigaray, Luce (2001) ‘This Sex which is Not One’ in Counsell, Colin and Wolf, Laurie (eds.) Performance Analysis: an introductory course book, London, New York: Routledge, pp 59 – 65.

Martinez, Ursula (2004) OAP, perf. Ursula Martinez and Joan Godfrey, dir. Mark Whitelaw, National Tour: Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, Lancaster. 4th February 2004.

Reinalt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R. (1992) ‘Feminisms’ in Reinalt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R (eds.) Critical Theory and Performance, University of Michigan Press, pp 225 – 290.

Wolf, Naomi, ([1990] 1991) The Beauty Myth, Vintage.

http://centerstage.net/theatre/articles/vmonologues.html

201 feminisms essay Page

See also appendix one for set design, in particular how all the cast are seated onstage, where they stayed throughout the piece.

A brief background here, from a review of The Vagina Monologues performed in Chicago: Ms. Ensler tells us up-front that she interviewed a myriad assortment of women, and that these monologues came directly from these interviews. (http://centerstage.net/theatre/articles/vmonologues.html)

That is, one that is aware of V-Day and what it stands for.

See set diagram, appendix one

Played by an old lady acting as old Ursula.

These pensioners watched the performance in Lancaster and added their own input, for example ‘Jesus loves you’ when no one came forward to kiss old Ursula.