Carolyn Gage
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A Lesbian Feminist Playwright Confronts Queer Theory

1/31/2016

6 Comments

 
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Queer theory and politic swept through lesbian communities and women’s studies’ departments in the mid-1980’s, dug in during the 1990’s, and appeared to have become entrenched throughout the first decade of the millennium. Recently, however, a rising generation of feminists has begun to challenge this hegemony, specifically seeking the voices of lesbian feminist resistance that have been censored for so long.
 
Much of my work as a playwright is butch-centric and survivor-centric. Queer theory, with its emphasis on trans identities, its enthusiastic embrace of prostitution as empowering, pornography as recreational, and its historic enabling of child sexual abuse, has been dismissive of the work of lesbian feminist writers like myself. Many of my recent plays are focused on confronting queer theory, and specifically the post-modern philosophy that spawned it. Here are some examples:
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The A-Mazing Yamashita the Millennial Gold-diggers
 

This one-act play is staged as a magic show. Yamashita, the female magician, promises us an evening of entertainment, where she will personally escort her audience “through the secret tunnels and nubiferous passageways of a post-colonialist, global economic maze, more hidden than King Solomon’s Tomb, more baffling than the riddle of the Sphinx, and more impenetrable than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
 
The play incorporates three stunts traditionally associated with the genre: levitating a woman, sawing a woman in half, and causing a woman to vanish inside a magic cabinet. These become explicit metaphors for the wholesale drugging of a generation of young women, the dissociation (splitting) of women through traumatic sexualization and objectification of our bodies, and the disappearing of millions of girls and women through trafficking. Professor Yessir, lending her authority to the proceedings, illustrates the intellectual idiocy and moral complicity of academic theorists, including Lacan, Foucault, Butler, and Kristeva. This is a harrowing play that shatters the fourth wall with a variety of audience plants.  The finale of the performance relies on an improvised recruitment of the audience to stage a protest strong enough to stop the escalating onstage atrocities.

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Hermeneutic Circlejerk
Subtitled “The Founding of Post-Modern Theory,” this slapstick farce features two clowns, Michel-Henri and Jacques-Pierre. Few people are aware that Foucault and Derrida were pro-pedophilia activists who publicly lobbied the French Parliament to abolish (not just lower, but abolish!) the age-of-consent for children. In my farce, the two clown characters purport to found a school of knowledge with its own secret and self-referential language—a language that will effectively deconstruct everything except itself. The ultimate goal of all this initiation and deconstruction is the decriminalizing of their child rapes.

PictureThat Uppity Theatre Company production.
The Ladies’ Room
 
The Ladies Room enacts the collision of queer theory with radical feminism in the space of six minutes. This short-short play takes place outside a ladies’ room in a shopping mall. A teenage lesbian couple is struggling with the fact that someone has reported the butch for being in a women’s bathroom. The butch is on a rant about gender policing, while her girlfriend argues in support of vigilance about male presence in women’s spaces. During the course of the conflict, the girlfriend’s rape narrative emerges, radically altering the direction of the play.

PictureEast West Theatre production in Shanghai, China for Pride Day
Bite My Thumb
 
In the one-act, Bite My Thumb, the conflict between queer theory and lesbian feminism gets down and dirty with a series of on-stage sword fights. Two “gangs” from rival Off-Off Broadway productions of Romeo and Juliet meet in an alley to rumble, sixteenth-century style. A trans man from a mainstream theatre takes on a lesbian butch from an all-women theatre company, with the two combatants hurling accusations at each other, while the members of their respective companies end up firing them both for sex and gender non-conformity. The play ends with the protagonists’ begrudging acknowledgement of the need to forge an alliance.

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Planchette
 
Planchette is a historical play about two fourteen-year old females in 1879. One of them is gender-conforming and attracted to women, while the other is non-conforming, with deep gender dysphoria. I wanted to explore issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in an era when there was no culture, language, or model for anything except heterosexuality and patriarchal gender representation and roles. In the play, Jude struggles to articulate an identity, settling on a fantastical description of girls who grow up to be men. The stage directions never apply gendered pronouns for Jude, leaving the actors and audience to speculate whether today Jude would be a trans man or a lesbian butch. In addition, both of the characters have survived traumatic events, which inform and complicate their identities.

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Head in the Game
 
Head in the Game was inspired by an interview with prostitution survivor and abolitionist Rachel Moran. She gave a very simple analogy to help liberal feminists understand prostitution as abuse. She explained how paying someone money in exchange for their allowing themselves to be slapped in the face does not in any way keep the slap from hurting. She points out that there is harm every time a woman has sex that is unwelcome and unwanted, and the fact that money is exchanged for the act does not alter the fact that it is unwanted. As she says, “Money is not magic.”
 
I took her analogy and ran with it in the play, positing a franchise of “Boxing Girls Gyms,” where men pay money to “box” with “sparring partners”—except that the “sparring partners” (all female) are not allowed to hit back, and in fact, the only person “boxing” is the client. In the play, the batterer attempts to kill the “boxing girl,” who manages to call the police. What we see is the difficulty in naming abuse when the entire nature of the so-called enterprise is paid abuse.

PictureAngelina Moline in the Portland, Maine production.
Little Sister
 

Little Sister was written with the assistance of Chris Courchene, a member of the Fort Alexander First Nation, whose tribal affiliation is with the Plains Ojibway. This is another play that explores historical figures who today might be considered trans men or lesbian butches. In the play a butch-femme couple on a Chiricahua reservation find themselves drawing on the legendary example of a female, Two-Spirit ancestor, Lozen, in order to respond to the needs of their niece, a young incest survivor struggling with intense gender dysphoria.

PictureTristan Rolfe and Elizabeth Freeman in the Portland, Maine production.
Valerie Solanas at Matteawan
 
In this play, I wanted to call out both queer activists and radical feminists for their ignorance of trauma studies.
 
In the play, two radical lesbian feminists are visiting Solanas in the state mental hospital shortly after her shooting Andy Warhol. Enamored with her iconic SCUM Manifesto, they are hoping to recruit her as a spokeswoman for the rising Women’s Liberation Movement. The two activists are shocked and disillusioned to find that Solanas is only interested in performing her play Up Your Ass.
 
Up Your Ass, written in the 1960’s, is actually very post-modern in its reification of patriarchal butch-femme roles and its representation of prostitution as an ennobling act of resistance. Solanas frames her internalized misogyny as empowering, while her visitors frame it as an enemy action. I depict it as a testament of an unrecovered incest survivor, challenging the audience to consider whether trauma literacy might open up common ground between queer theorists and radical feminists.
 
I invite queer-identified artists to engage with this work, to move away from the blanket dismissal of butch identity, and especially to interrogate the lack of feminist archetypes of lesbian survivors in the canon of queer work.


6 Comments

A Review of A Crown of Violets

1/6/2016

0 Comments

 
PictureBig Bad Gina covering Teresa Trull's "Sway of Her Hips." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkTITPdbbwE)
By Renée Vivien
Translated by Samantha Pious
 
… I spot a young woman…
She was dressed in white linen,
She fired a missile of truth
By simply passing by.
It was the sway of her hips,
Sway of her hips,
Sway of her hips…
I  think I saw God.

 

Those are song lyrics from “Sway of Her Hips” by Teresa Trull and Barbara Higbie.  I cite them here, because they are the first thing that came to mind when I sat down to review a new collection/ new translation of poems by Renée Vivien. The collection is A Crown of Violets and the translator, Samantha Pious, is a doctoral student whose specialties are medieval courtly poetry and women’s writing.


Picture Renée Vivien and Friends
The life of Vivien (née Pauline Tarn) reads like a French novel from the Belle Époque … replete with a nefarious plot by her mother to acquire her inheritance, involuntary incarceration in a mental asylum, a fraught court case that resulted in a court-appointed guardian, a lifelong obsession with  a childhood friend who died young, a wildly passionate affair with the infamous heiress and salonist Natalie Barney, and a tormented descent into alcoholism, drug addiction, and anorexia. She died weighing seventy pounds at the age of thirty-two.
 
… and yet… somewhere amid all that drama and all those bouts with addictions and compulsive behavior, still… Vivien managed to produce 17 volumes of poetry—not including compilations—and 16 volumes of prose, in addition to a sizable stash of juvenilia and correspondence.
 
Pious has collected some of Vivien’s most iconic and tantalizing poems, and—as near as I can tell—she attempts to retain rhyme and rhyme schemes in her translations. Inevitably, this is at the expense of literal translation. That said, I appreciated the effort to communicate the lyricism and the musicality of Vivien’s exquisite work. My own preference would have been to publish the originals side-by-side with the translation. For the curious, they are available online at the Lavender Review website.


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But getting back to the opening song lyrics… For some lesbian artists, the celebration of a woman’s body is an end in itself. Desire for desire’s sake. For others, the lesbian body represents a touchstone of integrity, a “true north” for navigation through patriarchal lies. The sway of her hips fires a missile of truth.
 
This was the case for Renée Vivien. In fact, she responded with disgust and contempt to displays of carnal desire that did not lead to transcendent experience. Emphasizing this aspect of her work could lead one to conclude that Vivien was morbid, prudish, and/or homophobic.
 
Nothing could be further from the truth, and I appreciate how conscientiously Pious has selected poems that balance out this polarity.
 
Starting with the poems of disgust:
 
In “The Grazers of Grass” Vivien calls out the idyllic conventions of earlier pastoral poets. The entire poem is a rant about the horror of grazing sheep:

 
“Innocent, just like the little lambs of Holy Writ,
They ruminate in burblings of spit.
 
Indifferent to the buzzing of the flies,
They never raise their greedy-glutton eyes.
 
And, more overbearing than a host of victory calls,
The greasy noise of chewing rises from their jaws.”


PictureThe infamous Natalie Barney, whose physicality was so upsetting to Vivien.
In “Litany of Hate,” she makes more explicit her objections to the world of nature:
 
“… We hate the smirking song-and-dance of day,
The sunlit springtime’s harsh returning gaze…”
 
We hate the brutish rut that soils desire.
We shun it as anathema, the cry
In which the unborn sorrows of life are sired.”

 
Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ll just give one more example. This is from “Gray Eyes,” where Vivien is describing what it’s like to gaze into the eyes of her carnal lover, presumably Natalie, whose hedonism was everything Vivien despised:
 
“… I interrogate your pupils’ stagnant pools.
They have the void of winter, dusk, and graves:
I see eternal Limbos drifting there,
The terrible dull endlessness of ocean waves.
 
Nothing lives within you, not one tender dream.
Your dark, soulless eyes extinguish all you see,
As though a silent home an ashy fireside…
And time grows tedious as a rosary...
 
...Within your eyes I’ve found the stillness and the death
One breathes from sleeping near the dead too long.”


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Well, all righty then. No sheep, no spring, no staring into the lover’s eyes. What does float Ms. Vivien’s boat? 
 
She tells us in “Words to My Love:”
 
“I love the dying day extinguished gradually,
The fire, the cloistered closeness of a chamber
Where the lampshades, veiling their transparent amber,
Blush red the bronze and blue the pottery.
 
My eyes upon the rug more worn than sand,
I lazily invoke the gold-grained shore,
The glimmers of the drifting tides of yore…
 
And I had the terrible audacity to year
For sister-love, of bright, white, pure light,
The gentle voice uniting with the night,
The furtive step that doesn’t break the fern.”


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In “Sappho Lives Again,” she affirms a lesbian embrace without the risk of loss:
 

“Our mistresses could never do us wrong,
For, in their forms, we love infinity…
And since their kisses grant us immortality,
We have no fear of Hell’s oblivion.
 
And so we sing, and our souls overflow,
Our days, with neither sorrow nor remorse,
Uncurl themselves like long, melodious chords,
And we love, as they loved on Lesbos long ago.”

 

Vivien suffered from an occupational hazard not unknown to this lesbian writer. She fell in love with the utopian worlds of her own artistic vision, and this enabled her to refuse accommodation with the imperfect world of fleshly, lesbian mortals. Throw some drugs and alcohol into the equation, and her fate was sadly sealed.


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What she has left behind is her siren song, calling us to remember that time that never was, to entice us to join her in the realm of dreams… and may heartier spirits than hers apply these visions toward the creation of a flawed, but kinder lesbian reality.
 
“Ocean violets shall pour down before us
Within the green and violet windowpane…
And, in suspense, I taste the perfect pain:
The wait for joys that only come at dusk.

In silence, I await the hour I envision…
Night passes, trailing light and shadows, by…
My boundless soul is scattered in the sky…
The air is mild, and see: the moon has risen.”


A Crown of Violets is available is at Amazon. I have a one-act dream play about Vivien's summer on Mt. Desert Island with Natalie Barney in 1900, Souvenirs from Eden.



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    Carolyn Gage

    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

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