Staging the invisible: The crisis of visibility in theatrical representation

Recent influential books by performance theorists Judith Butler and Peggy Phelan treat visibility as a representational problematic. While Butler believes the performative nature of visible behavior provides a potential for refusing the stability and definition of both gender and more radically sex, Phelan believes that visibility itself is always a trap, doomed to promise knowledge it cannot deliver and to guarantee disappointment it cannot abate. This essay offers an appreciation of both positions, but also a critique of their shared “theological” assumptions about possibilities for productive cultural subversion and of their underplaying of the materiality and historicity of cultural production. While the argument is theoretical, the context for the discussion is live stage performance.