Citation

Kuppers P. Drama Rev. 2008; 52(4): 174-182.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, MIT Press)

DOI

10.1162/dram.2008.52.4.174

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Given the media frenzy over Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential bid, and the ensuing questions about the state of feminism, it seems a serendipitous moment to feature two pieces—written by the women who conceived and performed them—that offer very different but complementary takes on agency, identity, and the conflation of the public and private as one's body becomes the locus of the gaze. Petra Kuppers's dramaturgical meditation on her experiences as part of Tiresias, a disability culture performance project, investigates erotics, change, mythology, and identity. A collaboration between photographers, writers, and dancers, the project, occurring over six months in 2007, posits the body as the site at which myth might be reshaped and movement might become poetry. Lián Amaris critically analyzes her feminist public performance event Fashionably Late for the Relationship, which took place over three days in July 2007 on the Union Square traffic island in New York City. Informed by Judith Butler's citational production of gender, the piece focused on exposing and critiquing the marked visibility of gender construction and maintenance within an extreme performance paradigm.