The Feminist Possibility of Reader-as-Performer

Abstract

For decades, performance artists and playwrights have grappled with how spectators view women’s bodies on stage. Thwarting those patriarchal structures that constantly shape how we see gendered bodies has proven difficult. This article asks: what happens when we remove the visible body altogether? Exploring the experimental performance poetry of Caroline Bergvall, I reconsider the text/performance divide to suggest that the divide itself holds within it a fundamental anti-feminist tendency: the ultimately empirical claim that a body must be ‘seen’ to exist. As the poem affectively inscribes the experience of the female in the text onto the body of the reader, there is a performative and affective resistance to performance’s obsession with the supposed positive politics of the non-reproductive and the ocular. Engaging critically with works by Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, Brian Massumi, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (among others), I find that in opposition to the work of much performance scholarship, reproduction is feminist performative writing’s raison d’être in so many ways. Indeed, the opportunity for using reproductive processes for a feminist imagining of possibility catapults us into a reconfiguration of language wherein marginalized experiences can be reproduced on live bodies themselves.