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Conference Affairs, Tough Break-Ups and Marriage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2015

SUE-ELLEN CASE
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Extract

Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’. In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.

Type
Forum: Contemporary Queer Theatre and Performance Research
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 96 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 3Google Scholar.

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