Copyright
by
Sarah Lynn Myers
2009
The Dissertation Committee for Sarah Lynn Myers certifies that this is the
approved version of the following dissertation:
(Re)Embodying Girlhood:
Collective Autobiography and Identity Performance
in Rude Mechanicals’ Grrl Action
Committee:
Deborah Paredez, Co-Supervisor
Stacy Wolf, Co-Supervisor
Charlotte Canning
Jill Dolan
Joni Jones
Mary Kearney
(Re)Embodying Girlhood:
Collective Autobiography and Identity Performance
in Rude Mechanicals’ Grrl Action
by
Sarah Lynn Myers, B.S.; M.F.A.
Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
May 2009
Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to
all the girls of Grrl Action—past, present, and future.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Stacy Wolf for being the most
insightful, inspiring, supportive, patient, and generous dissertation supervisor I could
have imagined—even from 1,700 miles away. I also owe many thanks to my committee
members, Charlotte Canning, Jill Dolan, Joni Jones/Omi Osun Olomo, Mary Kearney,
and Deborah Paredez, all of whom influenced this dissertation in profound ways with
their scholarship, their teaching, their presence at performances, their work as guest
artists, and their overall enthusiasm for my research. It has been a gift to be mentored by
such stimulating professors. Though Julia Mickenberg was not on my committee, her
class on interdisciplinary perspectives on youth/childhood was invaluable to me as well.
Much love and many thanks to the entire Grrl Action family, especially Carrie
Fountain, my dear friend and pedagogical partner in crime, and Madge Darlington, whose
ten-year commitment to the program is an inspiration. I am grateful to every girl who
ever set foot in the Off Center for giving me more to write about than would fit in 100
dissertations and to the innumerable artists and audience members who made the program
active and vital. Thanks too to Rude Mechs Co-Producing Artistic Directors Lana
Lesley, Kirk Lynn, Shawn Sides and Sarah Richardson for making my tenure with Grrl
Action possible and supporting me along the way.
I am deeply indebted to all the generous girls and women who agreed to let me
interview them (sometimes, more than once) in exchange for nothing more than a small
meal or a cup of coffee: Lequita Bradshaw, Sarah Crowe, Bryanna Estrada, Treyneicia
Hendricks, Samantha Hutchinson-Cloud, Isaura Martinez, Christina Rice, Paullee
Wheatley-Rutner, Patricia Anglin, Abbie Navarrete, Kathy Fitzgibbons, Nancy
v
Sutherland, Heather Courtney, Ray Matthews, and Meg Sullivan (who is on her own
journey now as a Grrl Action Program Director). I am especially grateful to Tina Van
Winkle for the insights that helped me focus my critical lens in this dissertation. As a
Grrl Action participant, intern, and stage manager, as well as a Rude Mechs company
member, Tina provided invaluable perspectives and generous reflections on the program.
Words cannot express my gratitude to Rebecca Hewett and Steven Wright,
without whom I would not have survived this process. Rebecca talked me through many
a panicky night, and Steven provided not only moral support, but eagle eyes for
invaluable late-night editing in the final days of writing. I would not be where I am
without my sister Laura Myers and my mother Barbara Weber, both of whom believe in
me with overflowing hearts and minds, and my grandparents Dr. Bernard Rattner and
Mrs. Mollie Rattner, who instilled in all of their children the belief that learning is
lifeblood. Much love and a million thank yous to Jeff Severs for his goodness, humor,
patience, and bigheartedness for many months on end. The hand-delivered dinners,
random errand running, and untold hours talking through ideas didn’t hurt either.
Thanks to my wonderful friends, colleagues, and cheerleaders, Katie Dawson,
Claire Canavan, Clare Croft, Kelly Howe, Carra Martinez, Jaclyn Pryor, Karen LaShelle,
Angie Ahlgren, Jenny Connell, Michelle Dvoskin, and Shelley Manis, for offering
everything from a kind word to a stiff drink during the dissertation process. Thanks too
to the rest of my colleagues in the PPP program, especially my cohort, Susan Todd and
Fadi Skeiker, for creating such inspiring scholarship. And, finally, thank you to Daniel
Alexander Jones and Sherry Kramer for telling me there was no doubt in their minds I
should get a Ph.D., to Suzan Zeder for supporting me in more ways than I can count
through seven years of graduate education, and to Halena Kays for kindly coercing me
into creating a collective autobiography of my own.
vi
(Re)Embodying Girlhood:
Collective Autobiography and Identity Performance
in Rude Mechanicals’ Grrl Action
Publication No._____________
Sarah Lynn Myers, Ph.D.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2009
Co-Supervisors: Deborah Paredez and Stacy Wolf
In 1999, Austin-based Rude Mechanicals theatre ensemble created Grrl Action, an
autobiographical writing and performance program for teenage girls, one of many
advocacy and empowerment programs focused on female youth nationwide. Still today,
Austin-area girls come together each summer to generate original performances based on
their own life experiences. Their final collaborative production, which combines solo
work with group pieces and covers topics as disparate as body image and illegal
immigration, illuminates the ways that girls perform different, multiple, and shifting
identities, both collectively and individually.
This dissertation posits Grrl Action—part of a more general trend towards
collective autobiography in girls’ cultural production—as an ideal lens through which to
examine the complexity of teenage girls’ identity performance(s) in the United States
today. I situate Grrl Action as an embodied site where girls deliberately play with (and
vii
among) multiple selves onstage and, in effect, challenge commercial constructions of
female adolescence and expand the very definition of girlhood. As a former Program
Director and Instructor for Grrl Action, I build on what Dwight Conquergood might call
my role as ethnographic “co-performer” to examine not only live theatre events, but also
the material circumstances that create them.
My introduction provides an overview of identity performance discourse outside
of theatre settings and posits my study of Grrl Action as a means of borrowing back the
language of performativity for girls exploring their identities in theatrical settings.
Chapter One focuses on girls’ performances of non-normative sexuality to examine how
Grrl Action might be considered a new kind of feminist theatre collective. Chapter Two
looks at girls’ I- and you-statements to analyze the ways that female youth cast both
themselves and their audiences in nuanced “definitional ceremonies.” Chapter Three
centers on girls’ tears and traumatic testimony to situate Grrl Action as a site of affective
transference between girl-performers and women-spectators. My conclusion is selfreflexive, as I suggest ways that women who work with girls might put their own identity
performances on the line both inside and outside programs like Grrl Action.
viii
Table of Contents
Introduction
Girls, Identity Performance, and Collective Autobiography................................... 1
Chapter 1
Grrl Action as Feminist Collective: Girls Performing Sexuality .......................... 45
Chapter 2
Grrl Action as Definitional Ceremony: Girls Performing "I" and "You" ........... 100
Chapter 3
Grrl Action as Site of Transference: Girls Performing Trauma.......................... 156
Conclusion
Collective Constructions of Girlhood: Girls and Women Co-Performing.......... 217
Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 236
Vita...................................................................................................................... 248
ix
Introduction
Girls, Identity Performance, and Collective Autobiography
I stand here in the dark, and I ask myself, What am I? Am I…Aztec,
Indígena, Mestiza, Guadalupana, Chicana, Latina, Americana, as well as
Mexicana?
–Isaura Martinez, “I Am Someone” (Grrl Action 2005)
I am your parents’ worst nightmare. I am a meth addict. I am a cutter. I
am a liar. But I am the average American girl.
–Megan Dove, “I Am Megan” (Grrl Action 2006)
I am a spontaneous act of divine grace. I am a rainbow-headed, tie-dyed,
fishnet, short shorts, legwarmers, zebra print Gaudess.
–Leela McGill, “Who Are You?” (Grrl Action 2008)
When I was fifteen—a novice performer, a lover of comic bits and unusual
dialects, a diligent direction-taker, and a keeper of diaries that began “Dear Anne” in
honor (yes) of my starring role in The Diary of Anne Frank—nothing short of a miracle
could have gotten me up on stage to tell my life story. Acting to me was becoming other
people, escaping from the everyday, trying out new ways of being in the world. The last
thing I wanted to do was talk about my difficult relationship with my best friend or my
secret desire to be a boy, let alone the more troubling topics of abuse, neglect,
alcoholism, anorexia, and ethnic isolation. Even now, that last sentence makes me cringe
a little. But I write it with a purpose. As former Co-Director for Grrl Action, the
outreach program in autobiographical writing and performance on which this dissertation
is based, I have been complicit in asking teenage girls to reveal their lives onstage for
nearly five years, yet I still find it harrowing to talk about the stuff of my own girlhood
1
with ease. And what’s more is that, even though I had a few close female friends when I
was a teenager, groups of girls made me incredibly uncomfortable.
Why then my attraction to Grrl Action, as teacher and scholar, administrator and
ethnographer? I have asked myself this question many times. And I’m not sure I’ll ever
have a satisfying answer. Several women have told me over the years that they wish they
had had a Grrl Action when they were adolescents; their adult selves make wishes for the
girls they once were. But I have never had this desire. If anything, I feel like I wasn’t
totally in touch with myself as a teenager. I was busy being just nice enough not to be
competitive, just pretty enough not to go unnoticed, just studious enough not to make it
obvious I was smarter than most of the boys. I was performing myself through a gauzy
everyday habitus I only now recognize—Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the kind of
unconscious, behavioral “second skin” of socialization (Bourdieu 66).
I hesitate to begin with my own story—a girlhood clouded by memory and
inevitable revision over time. My project in this dissertation is not to focus on myself,
but to give the many young women whose impressive performances inspire my
scholarship the close focus they deserve. Yet my research is partially built on discursive
exchange and the collective (re)definition of girlhood—something that can only happen
as I acknowledge my own role in this complex, cross-generational production process. I
have been deeply moved by the girls in Grrl Action. When I first read Jill Dolan’s
Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, I imagined Grrl Action as the
ultimate utopian performative, an exceptional illustration of a wealth of “small but
profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that
lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might
2
be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous,
aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (5). But the more I thought about it,
the more I realized the potential dangers of applying the utopian performative to a context
in which young female bodies are responsible for “[lifting] everyone slightly above the
present.” Youth have long held the burden of tabula rasa, as well as adults’
multitudinous and competing desires for a more perfect future. I began to wonder how I
could evoke those transformative moments of utopian performative in Grrl Action that I
hold dear, while still acknowledging power differentials and deconstructing discourses of
authenticity. As Dolan asks, “How do we theorize such moments, subjecting them to the
rigor of our sharpest analysis while preserving the pleasure, the affective gifts that these
moments share?” (Utopia in Performance 8-9).
I am drawn to Grrl Action because I am inspired by the ways that girls make art
out of their lives and lives in their art. They show me how theatre never hides identity,
but exposes it as discursive, multiple, and excitingly performative. They teach me that
collective performance complicates identity even further, and they make me accountable
for my own performances of self. Further, they suggest that fifteen-year-old Sarah
wasn’t necessarily performing her identity any less than they do; her options were just
more limited. While I had little control over the characters I was cast as in my high
school theatre program (one year the ditz in a sex farce, another year Dr. Dysart in
Equus!), these girls create their own personas and perform their own versions of
themselves within an infinite web of possibilities, illustrating the ways that, as Mary
Celeste Kearney suggests, “Those female youth who insist on their authority to create and
control their own representations, particularly representations that do not adhere to
3
traditional notions of girlhood, exponentially multiply the subversive potential of female
unruliness” (12).
I begin this chapter with three “I am” epigraphs by Isaura, Megan, and Leela to
underscore the potential of theatre to frame the doing and redoing of girlhood over time.1
As Marvin Carlson argues, “All theatre […] is as a cultural activity deeply involved with
memory and haunted by repetition” (11). Three different girls fill the same space with
their authoritative declarations of identity in successive summers. They repeat, and they
revise. In Carlson’s parlance, they ghost each other. Some girls return year after year;
others perform for a single summer and lend their voices to the collective (re)definition of
Grrl Action and girlhood. Girls’ theatrical framings of identity even stir audience
members’ memories of their own teenage years, extending the joint conception of
girlhood beyond generational bounds.
Isaura’s, Megan’s, and Leela’s performances are three of many shared during the
Grrl Action summer workshop run by Austin-based, ensemble theatre company Rude
Mechanicals. Each summer, girls from 13 to 16 come together over three weeks to
“envision, create, publish, and perform original works for the stage based on their own
life experiences” (Grrl Action Summer Workshop). Their final collaborative
performance, which combines solo work with group pieces and covers topics as disparate
as body image and illegal immigration, serves as the culmination of creative exploration
during the summer and illuminates the ways that girls try on and try out multiple
1
Throughout this dissertation, I refer to those intimately and/or directly involved with Grrl Action by their
first names, whether they are youth or adults. I adopt this tactic with the expressed intention of illustrating
my intimate involvement in the program and replicating the kind of first-name culture common to the Grrl
Action performances.
4
identities, both individually and collectively. This dissertation posits Grrl Action—part
of a more general trend towards collective autobiography in girls’ cultural production—
as an ideal lens through which to examine the complexity of teenage girls’ identity
performance(s) in the United States today. I situate Grrl Action as an embodied site
where girls deliberately play with (and among) multiple selves onstage and, in effect,
challenge commercial constructions of female adolescence and expand the very definition
of girlhood.
Grrl Action in Cultural Context
Grrl Action developed in a climate of increased attention to girls’ personal and
academic development both nationally and locally. In many ways, a 1992 report called
Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America by the American Association of University
Women catalyzed a wave of concern over girls’ poor academic performance.2 That same
year, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development by Lyn
Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan contextualized girls’ educational crises as rooted in
profound dips in self-esteem and practices of “self-silencing” at the advent of
adolescence (2-3). In 1994, Peggy Orenstein’s Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem,
and the Confidence Gap and Myra and David Sadker’s Failing at Fairness: How Our
Schools Cheat Girls further exposed gender biases towards boys in U.S. classrooms.
Schoolgirls especially, excerpted in both the New York Times Magazine and Glamour,
spread the discourse of girls-in-crisis to a wide (if predominately white and middle-class)
2
The Artistic Directors of the Rude Mechanicals credit this report (and concurrent studies) as one impetus
for creating Grrl Action and establishing its age specifications as 13-16, since girls between these years
were portrayed in the greatest state of academic and personal crisis (Darlington, 23 Feb. 2006). While
literature about girls’ psychological development and educational achievement has transformed
5
readership, setting the stage for Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of
Adolescent Girls, which quickly reached New York Times bestseller status and stayed
there for three straight years. According to Pipher, a practicing psychotherapist, girls of
the 1990s suffered from an epidemic of eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, school
phobias, self-inflicted injuries, and chronic low self-esteem. Pipher popularized the idea
that girls lose their “true selves” in puberty, when “wholeness is shattered by the chaos of
adolescence” (20). Gender, she implies, begins for girls at menarche; and childhood (as a
presumably pre-gendered state) holds the key to coherent and stable identity.
Pipher’s discussion of girlhood, much like certain cultural feminists’ approaches
to womanhood, essentialized the idea of identity and the identities of female youth, as
studies of white, straight, upper-middle-class girls formed the narrative backbone of
“crisis” writ large. As an answer to writers like Pipher who tended to speak on behalf of
all female youth—and perhaps as an alternative to the self-silencing Brown and Gilligan
exposed—books by girls and young women telling their own stories soon surfaced. At
the same time that Grrl Action began to take shape, Sara Shandler’s Ophelia Speaks:
Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self (1999) illustrated girls’ understanding
of collective autobiography as a powerful tool to represent, if not re-imagine, girlhood.
Built on the idea that “if Ophelia is to be revived then it must be done by the collective
voice and actions of Ophelias everywhere” (xiii), Ophelia Speaks was a teenage
Shandler’s response to Reviving Ophelia, as she began editing and soliciting essays,
reflections, and poems for this project when she was only 17. Yet, despite Shandler’s
considerably over the past fifteen years, I point to these earliest studies because of their role in the advent
and, to a certain extent, ongoing discourse of Grrl Action.
6
best efforts at collectivity, because of the nature of printed text (and the demands of her
publishing house, I imagine), hers is the dominant and most privileged voice in the
book’s representation of girlhood.
As an alternative, anthologies like Rebecca Walker’s To Be Real: Telling the
Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), Ophira Edut’s Adiós, Barbie: Young
Women Write About Body Image and Identity (1998), and Daisy Hernández and Bushra
Rehman’s Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2002) served
not only to challenge the often classist, racist, and heterosexist assumptions of second
wave feminism, but also to foreground (with a look backward) the role girls of color,
queer girls, and working class girls played (and play) in larger discourses of girlhood.
Not coincidentally, these volumes take up the tools of autobiographical storytelling to
counter hegemonic messages about female youth. Again, personal narrative—collective
autobiography—complicates and contradicts essentialized representations of women and
girls.3 Still, the limitations of print media prevail. It is adult women looking back on
their girlhoods who have the access to publishing houses. Certainly, there is merit to
such projects for the field of Girls’ Studies, but anthologies of this kind raise questions
about how well mainstream print media represents actual girls while they are girls.
In many ways, the most obvious form of girls’ own cultural production that
emerged in the 1990s was Riot Grrrl, a grassroots movement committed to claiming
voice through self-produced zines, music, and internal networking. Invested in a do-it3 As Rebecca Walker acknowledges, “It was extraordinarily difficult for writers to produce works for this
book. I spent innumerable hours alternating between therapist and editor. Many pieces didn’t make it
because writers were afraid to expose themselves. The pieces that did make it are strong pieces which open
doors of understanding and prioritize political commitment and self-acceptance” (xxxvii). Here, personal
7
yourself (DIY) aesthetic, Riot Grrrl culture allowed “teenage girls and young women
involved in the U.S. punk scene [to begin speaking] out about their complicated
relationship to the patriarchy, adultism, and heterocentrism perpetuated by commercial
culture as well as the countercultural community with which they were affiliated”
(Kearney 51). In other words, Riot Grrrl and the cultural diffusion of “grrrl power”
discourse and ideology provided both language and tools of self-empowerment as
alternatives to the often subordinate positions girls played in larger punk, profit-based,
and even feminist cultures. Grrl Action itself inherited its name and many of its
principles from this discourse, as the annual anthology mimicked girls’ self-produced
zines and girls were encouraged to transform their writing journals into collage-covered
artifacts of self-expression. Important to Grrl Action’s inheritance (and my analysis in
this dissertation), however, is the fact that, though the cultural production in Riot Grrrl
often challenged the racism and classism in commercial representations of girlhood, the
cultural producers themselves were disproportionately white and middle-class.
Several girls’ advocacy and empowerment programs, led mostly by adult women,
also emerged in this climate of increased attention to girlhood. In the mid-1990s, Austin
alone witnessed the launching of GENaustin, whose “mission is to foster healthy selfesteem in girls” (GENaustin); Girlstart, which strives “to empower girls to excel in math,
science, and technology” (Girlstart); and the short-lived Girl Project, which was in many
ways Grrl Action’s ideological and aesthetic predecessor in its focus on live performance.
Though fewer in numbers than general advocacy organizations, performance- and
narrative becomes a political tool, but one that requires risks and exposure of the writer, a burden of
representation I seek to expose and explore in my own analysis of Grrl Action.
8
writing-based workshops for girls soon surfaced nationwide, from year-round solo and
group performance programs like viBe Theater Experience in New York, to arts-based
mentorship organizations like WriteGirl in Los Angeles and Redmoon Theater’s
Dramagirls in Chicago, to large-scale media literacy ventures like the Women’s
Expressive Theater’s Risk Takers Film Series for teenage girls, also in New York. These
programs, all still thriving today, run the gamut in terms of overall objectives, but they
hold several goals in common: providing “safe space” for teenage girls, catering to an
“under-served” population, and “empowering” girls to value their own stories and
experiences over those prevalent in commercial culture (viBe Theater, WriteGirl,
Redmoon, WET’s Risk Takers). In keeping with theatre artists’ interests in female
adolescence, scholars in the small subfield of Drama and Theatre for Youth devoted the
entire 1998 edition of Youth Theatre Journal, the peer-reviewed publication of the
American Alliance for Theatre in Education, to applying “basic feminist theories to
women’s theatre practices for, by, and with children and youth,” and included several
studies of girls, gender, and sexism in the field (Klein i).4
The Advent of Grrl Action
In the midst of this cultural matrix, Grrl Action began as a partnership in 1999
between the Rude Mechanicals and the English Department at the University of Texas at
Austin, with the idea that graduate students at UT would teach creative writing and
Artistic Directors from the Rude Mechs would oversee the performance—a structure that
4
Since this 1998 issue, articles in YTJ about girls and/or gender are sadly few and far between. The next
study of this nature is Cecelia Aragon’s “Mestiza Conciousness: An Examination of Two Plays with
Chicano Protagonists” (2001), followed five years later by Julie Dunn’s “Reflecting Anew on ‘Dramatic
Worlds in Play: A Study of the Dramatic Play of Preadolescent Girls’” (2006) and Lorenzo Garcia’s “Silvia
Gonzalez S’s Alicia in Wonder Tierra an Expression of Love for Chicana/Latina Adolescents” (2007).
9
would later evolve to allow more blurring of creative boundaries and collaborative
teaching methods. Drawing on theories of critical pedagogy, feminist autobiography, and
non-hierarchical theatre-making, the Rude Mechs designed (and redesigned) a program
that considered girls artists in their own right, rather than selves that needed saving. Still
today, programmatic discourse emphasizes the importance of giving girls resources rather
than prescriptive advice and of providing them with opportunities to take the tools of
production into their own hands both collectively and individually. Together, girls create
group guidelines, discuss a range of social issues, give each other artistic feedback, and
take a first stab at ordering the pieces in the final performance. Independently, they pen
poems and monologues, determine which of their pieces they want to publish and
perform, and develop ideas about staging that an adult director later hones.
Girls join Grrl Action through a number of avenues. I, in fact, was responsible for
organizing recruitment efforts from 2004 through 2008 in my role as Program
Coordinator/Director. Methods of recruitment range from formal partnerships with
organizations like The Settlement Home (a group home for children and youth in Child
Protective Services), to strategic recruitment presentations at places like Breakthrough
Austin (a program for low-income, future first-generation college students), Out Youth
(an organization that provides support and services to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
and questioning youth), and, most recently, the Free Minds Project (an adult education
program for low- to moderate-income adults run by the UT Humanities Institute).
Recruitment also involves talks and workshops at a range of local schools in both lowand middle/high-income areas; targeted emails, phone calls, and meetings with other girlfocused groups in the area (like GENAustin and the new Ann Richards School for Young
10
Women Leaders); and ads in local newspapers and on Rude Mechs’ listserv and website.
Hence, girls join Grrl Action from a range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds
and for a variety of reasons. Sometimes their parents or therapists prompt their
involvement in the program; sometimes they seek out Grrl Action themselves or learn
about it through connections of their own. Sometimes they have no performance
experience at all; sometimes they have a great deal.
The application process for Grrl Action is designed for girls to get a feel for the
program and for staff members to get to know girls as artists and thinkers—not to weed
them out based on “talent.” Girls do not audition for Grrl Action; instead, they fill out an
application containing eight questions like, “Pick a word to describe yourself, and tell us
why you picked that word. If you would rather, you may send a drawing, poem, picture,
song or monologue on tape, or any other creative expression of yourself” (Grrl Action
Summer Application).5 By reading the application, girls can get an idea about what kind
of program Grrl Action is; and, by reading girls’ answers, the staff can begin to
understand each girl’s needs and perspectives. Based on these applications and
subsequent phone conversations with girls and parents/guardians, staff members
assemble an ensemble of anywhere from 10 to 18 girls who generally range in age from
13 to 16.6
While there is a small tuition fee ($300 for the entire workshop) for those
whose families can afford it, at least half of the girls in any given summer receive needbased full scholarships, and several others receive partial scholarships.
5 The reference to a “song or monologue on tape” demonstrates just how little the application has changed
over the years, in that it doesn’t reflect new forms of audio production.
11
Once the recruitment and application processes are complete, the Grrl Action
summer workshop generally starts at the beginning of July. All of the classes, as well as
the final production, take place in the Off Center, Rude Mechs’ own performance venue
and a popular rental space for other performing arts organizations—a fact that establishes
Grrl Action as an important mainstage production. Girls meet for three weeks from 9:00
a.m. to noon, Monday through Friday, in classes led by two co-instructors. For the past
three years, Carrie Fountain, a local poet with a background in performance, and I have
co-taught these classes together—each of us alternating between writing exercises and
movement/performance techniques from day to day. During the third week of the
program, the director (who has been Rude Mechs Co-Producing Artistic Director Madge
Darlington for the past four years) and stage manager (often Jazz Miller, a Rude Mechs
company member) join the group and catalyze the rapid shift into staging girls’ writing
for the final performance.7 At this time, instructors transform into individual writing and
performance coaches, while also taking on technical and administrative responsibilities to
make the show happen—anything from creating the playbill to buying props.
Besides the instructors, director, and stage manager, there are a number of other
key staff members who make Grrl Action possible. Two to three interns—recent
6
While the official ages of Grrl Action participants is 13 to 16, we have been a bit more lax in recent years
about these limits and have made a number of exceptions for eager 12-year-olds and a couple of returning
17-year-olds more interested in performing than interning.
7 Carrie Fountain and I co-directed and co-taught the entire Grrl Action program from 2006 to 2008, while
I served as Program Coordinator in a solely administrative capacity from 2004 to 2005, and she as coinstructor with first Angela Kariotis and then Madge Darlington. In 2006-7, Carrie and I led the initiative
to expand Grrl Action into a year-round, arts-based mentorship program, which it remains as of April 2009,
now under the co-direction of Madge Darlington and Meg Sullivan. My focus in this dissertation is on the
Grrl Action summer workshop, as it is the cornerstone of the entire program. While interesting in its own
right, the year-round mentorship program, in which girls work one-on-one with female artists to create artsbased projects in a range of disciplines, is both in flux and too early in its infancy to analyze adequately.
12
“graduates” of Grrl Action themselves or undergraduate college students interested in
grassroots and/or feminist performance—join the program each year. They not only take
on administrative and pedagogical duties, but they also act as sounding boards and
advice-givers for girl participants who are more reluctant to approach adult staff
members. Further, as former participants in the program, they often quell girls’ nerves
and answer questions about writing and performance. Two guest artists, who have
mostly been women of color, conduct day-long workshops with girls in anything from
poetry writing to image theatre-making. We have invited actors, writers, solo performers,
and professors from year to year to expose girls to the wide range of artistic creation
women from many cultural backgrounds engage in. Often, we ask African American and
Latina artists and interns to join us so that girls can learn from more than our
predominately white administrative staff.8 In recent years, we have focused on bringing
in women who can offer girls perspectives on different performance traditions and forms
they might not otherwise encounter—work that can inform their own performances
onstage.
The three-week Grrl Action workshop culminates in two final hour-long
performances, which take place on Saturday and Sunday afternoon after the final week of
the workshop. These performances, which are free to the public, are often filled beyond
capacity, as family, friends, and patrons fill the 100-seat warehouse space. In the final
8
While Carrie identifies as Latina, the vast majority of the Grrl Action staff is white—exposing the
difference between the ethnic makeup of women and girls in the program. (Girls of color comprise about
one-third to one-half of our participants in any given year.) I have to admit to having mixed feelings about
this guest artist process. First, bringing in guest artists does not make up for the fact that so many primary
staff members (myself included) are white. Also, while I deeply want girls to work with non-white adult
role models, I worry that approaching individual guest artists based solely on race and ethnicity is
potentially essentializing to them.
13
days of the workshop, in addition to their onstage creations, girls contribute poetry, prose,
artwork, photography, and collage to the annual Grrl Action anthology. This anthology
has been compiled during the last few years by 17- and 18-year-old interns in my own
attempt to make it more of a girl-produced piece of work. The anthologies, which are
free for audience members who attend the final performances, either complement or
reiterate the staged pieces, as girls include writing that is either better suited for the page,
or work that they want audiences to have a printed copy to take home.9
Girls’ personal writing serves as the cornerstone and catalyst of both the final Grrl
Action performance and the anthology. Girls generate text from prompts and exercises
created and facilitated by adult instructors, and pieces range from free-form responses to
phrases like “I’m sick of…”, to in-depth explorations of themes like home, to
experiments with colloquial language and visual metaphor. Importantly, participants are
never expected to create pieces only about girlhood, but their work often confronts and
even derides commercial representations of girls without any direct adult prodding or
intervention. Girls wield their unique experiences as weapons against universalizing
discourses of female adolescence. Their tones range from political diatribes and satiric
lectures to earnest monologues and comedic odes. Love of every variety (queer, straight,
daughterly, sisterly; of animals, friends, sports, music, and body parts) makes its way into
the performance each year, and anger (at negligent families, former friends, deceitful
lovers, corrupt government) always plays a role as well. In preparation for the
performance, girls also create movement-based, Viewpoints-inspired “compositions” in
9
While the anthology is not the focus of my research in this dissertation, as I concentrate here on live
performance, it deserves its own analysis as an evocative cultural artifact in its own right.
14
which they combine a variety of creative elements (e.g., a two-line poem, a repetitive
gesture, a moment of silence, a hum or whistle, and a surprise). These compositions
serve two main purposes: to provide girls with nascent ideas about staging and to
establish the aesthetic framework in which they perform their identities onstage.
While girls have a great deal of artistic freedom in Grrl Action and the program
endorses a “no censorship” policy, it is important to note the ways that they lack control
over the production process as well. As directors, teachers, designers, administrators, and
audience members, adults play key roles in the larger collective of Grrl Action, and
oftentimes adult women’s ideas of girlhood—lived, remembered, and imagined—
influence the performance of girls’ adolescent identities both onstage and off. It is my
knowledge of this collective definition and redefinition of girlhood—often progressive,
sometimes limiting—that informs my methodology in this dissertation.
Ethnographic Co-Performance
As a former Program Director and Instructor for Grrl Action, I hope to build on
my role in what Dwight Conquergood calls the “dialogical performance” of the
program—one that extends beyond any single theatrical event, pedagogical moment, or
interview transcript (“Performing” 10). I am especially motivated by Conquergood’s
notion of “co-performance,” in which the ethnographer “moves from the gaze of the
distanced and detached observer to the intimate involvement and engagement of
‘coactivity’” (“Rethinking” 188). I came to write about Grrl Action because, during my
pedagogical and administrative involvement in the program, it started to interest me as a
scholar. While I remained an invested co-performer during my entire tenure with Grrl
Action, writing and thinking about the program from a scholarly vantage point
15
complicated and deepened my role. Now, I not only acknowledge and attempt to analyze
my own positionality in and, sometimes, direct influence over Grrl Action; I also write
this dissertation as an attempt at what D. Soyini Madison calls “critical ethnography”:
Critical ethnography begins with an ethical responsibility to address
processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain. By
“ethical responsibility,” I mean a compelling sense of duty and
commitment based on moral principles of human freedom and well-being,
and hence a compassion for the suffering of living beings. The conditions
for existence within a particular context are not as they could be for
specific subjects; as a result, the researcher feels a moral obligation to
make a contribution toward changing those conditions toward greater
freedom and equity. The critical ethnographer also takes us beneath
surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality
and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and
obscure operations of power and control. (5)
Because I have played many roles in Grrl Action (Program Coordinator,
Instructor, and Co-Managing Program Director) and my formal duties have included
everything from recruiting girls and teaching classes to designing playbills and writing
grants, I find myself in a unique position, as Madison suggests, to “unsettle neutrality”
and “disrupt the status quo.” I see this dissertation as documentation, analysis, and
activist intervention—a questioning of the empowerment rhetoric so often taken for
granted in programs like Grrl Action. I seek not to dismiss or dismantle the productive
and even transformative role the program plays in many young women’s lives, but to be a
16
better ally to the girls with whom I have worked by examining how power operates and
discourses of girlhood circulate and transform.
Notably, I am not originator or sole executor of Grrl Action. While I have played
a major role in the program, Grrl Action operates collectively, much as Rude
Mechanicals itself does; its life began before my involvement and extends beyond my
departure.10 Hence, I do not seek to create a comprehensive history of Grrl Action.
Instead, I focus on the years 2005 to 2008, when I witnessed girls’ work firsthand. Each
chapter that follows is grounded in close readings of girls’ theatrical performances—
complex texts that provide insight into larger identity performances both in the program
and beyond. I do not posit my work as the last word on Grrl Action. In fact, I am wary
of reinscribing generation- and education-based power dynamics and fostering the
institutionalized privilege of the researcher by “translating” girls’ performances for an
academic audience. Instead, I hope to embrace what Omi Osun Olomo calls a
“multivocality [that] helps to mitigate the authority of the ethnographer, and provide
varied, even contradictory perspectives that the audience must synthesize” (9). While
this document does not do the same kind of work that performance ethnography does, I
provide thick descriptions of girls’ pieces to enhance the polyphony of my writing. I am
interested in girls’ voices, bodies, gestures, their use of props, light, and sound, the way
they occupy space, and how they relate to their audiences and each other; I analyze not
only what girls say, but how, when, and why they say it.
10
Over the span of its existence, Grrl Action has served over a hundred girls and has been influenced both
directly and indirectly by such artists and teachers as k. bradford, Chris Strickling, Susan Somers Willet,
Theresa Burke, Terry Galloway, Sharon Bridgforth, and Deb Margolin, as well as Rude Mechanicals
Madge Darlington, Shawn Sides, Lana Lesley, and Sarah Richardson, among many others.
17
In all of this, I want to emphasize how critically valuable it is to consider girls’
theatrical pieces as cultural texts worthy of close reading by adult academics and
audiences. Here, I am indebted to Mary Celeste Kearney, whose Girls Make Media
interrogates the ways that girls actively produce media to complicate and expand the
definition of girlhood and counter commercial representations of young women as solely
consumer-oriented. Too often, studies of youth theatre-making sidestep the importance
of careful, intertextual performance analysis by arguing that, when young people share
their voices onstage as a marginalized group, this act of self-definition is an unquestioned
victory. Such undertheorized endorsement of empowerment rhetoric not only devalues
the content, craft, and ideology of young people’s artmaking; it also avoids the difficult
terrain of analyzing differences and struggles for power within communities of youth.
Hence, my desire is not to strip girls of their right to discuss their own work, as much as
it is to join in on the conversation, to analyze their performances with the same nuance
and attention to detail that I would adult artists, and to consider these performances
deserving of scholarly analysis as pieces of collective autobiography.
Collective Autobiography
I employ the term collective autobiography as a way to organize the mass of
individual and group identity performances that girls share with their audiences during
Grrl Action. If, as Lynn Miller and Jacqueline Taylor claim, “creating autobiographical
narrative reconstitutes the self, the audience, and surrounding cultural contexts” (3),
collective autobiography reframes this reconstitution as an inherently collaborative
venture in two slightly more specific (and overlapping) ways. First, collective
autobiography can denote a group with a common purpose for sharing personal narratives
18
together at once (in a performance, anthology, etc.) and who, in effect, “reconstitute” this
group (e.g., girls performing girlhood transgressively in Grrl Action). Second, collective
autobiography can refer to the ways that an individual performs herself as an
amalgamation or collection of many different people’s influences, ideas, and identities—
challenging the notion of a singular self altogether (e.g., Isaura performing herself as a
Chicana, a daughter, an immigrant, an 18-year-old, a Texan, and/or a student).
In my application of this term, I owe a critical debt to several feminist scholars in
the fields of African American studies, Native American studies, and disability studies,
whose work on collective and collaborative autobiography deeply influences my own.
Rather than seeing autobiography in its historically patriarchal role as a solely
individualistic endeavor, these scholars posit self-narration as relational and strategically
collaborative. It is no coincidence that (doubly) marginalized people draw on the notion
of collective autobiography to bolster and validate personal narratives, as well as
establish their identities within their own communities. As Hertha D. Sweet Wong
explains,
For many Native American women reclaiming their own histories and
cultures is not a Romantic retreat to a lost past, but a political strategy for
cultural (and national) survival and personal identity. A Native
autobiographer, whether a speaking or writing subject, often implies, if not
announces, the first-person plural—we—even when speaking in the firstperson singular. “We” often invokes a (sometimes the) Native
community. (171)
19
Here, the “we” inside of the “I” is a means of performing oneself while also evoking
those who are not present, even those who are silenced because of lack of access to
public platforms. This implied and/or stated “we” is a strategy that many girls in Grrl
Action employ, as they situate themselves as young Chicanas, African Americans, or
lesbians, for example, to link themselves to other members of their communities, both
absent and present. In addition, girls’ “I”s can also encompass the “we” of the Grrl
Action ensemble, or even the “we” of girls in general as a marginalized group.
The experience of the individual within the collective is imperative for
understanding the ways that autobiography is at once historically and materially situated
and evocative of past self-narratives. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese explains that, while
autobiographies of African American women are each singular and unique, “their
common denominator, which establishes their integrity as a subgenre, derives not from
the general categories of race or sex, but from the historical experience of being black
and female in a specific society at a specific moment and over succeeding generations”
(178-179). In other words, African American women’s collective autobiography is a
collection of highly individual and historically-contingent experiences over time that lead
to a more complex, nuanced understanding of what it means to be an African American
woman. While Selwyn R. Cudjoe also points to the trend towards collectivity in African
American autobiographical writing more generally, in which “me-ism gives way to ourism and superficial concerns with the individual subject (individualism) give way to the
collective subjection of the group” (280), he exposes the ways that African American
women’s narratives were historically subsumed or silenced in service to the larger
African American story. Hence, in reference to a writer like Maya Angelou, he argues
20
for a collective autobiography in which “the particularity of her experiences [is] collapsed
back into the general experiences of her people” (Cudjoe 304). In many ways I look to
Grrl Action as a similar kind of collective autobiography. How can the experiences of
the girls who perform onstage—especially those marginalized based on class, race, or
sexuality, as well as age and gender—“collapse back” to redefine the experience of
girlhood as a whole?
In the field of disability studies, Chris Strickling describes how collective
autobiography can play out in an actual theatre environment. In her account of the work
of Actual Lives, “Central Texas’ own and only ensemble dedicated to crip theatre with
attitude” (Actual Lives), she explains that the brand of autobiographical performance
employed by the company “[re-narrates] experience from both the individual perspective
and from a collective identity that unites disparate subject positions into a more cohesive
message” (Strickling 297). This message is hardly homogeneous; unique performances
by disabled actors redefine the lived experience of disability as a whole.11 And yet
because people with disabilities are so often ignored and misrepresented in mainstream
culture, collective autobiographical performance allows actors to take up public space,
combat their marginalization through sheer numbers, and form coalition around their
commonalities. As Strickling explains, collective autobiographical performance uniquely
“establishes the shared concerns of ensemble members and creates a visually and vocally
united group identity while still celebrating individual difference” (Strickling 297-298)—
true both for Actual Lives and for Grrl Action.
11
Notably, Chris Strickling and Terry Galloway, two of Actual Lives’ founders, were instrumental in the
creation of Grrl Action, and Strickling continues to have a recruitment relationship with the program today.
21
Whether or not collective autobiography is shared in a theatre space,
autobiography itself is inextricably linked to the language of identity performance. Even
in historical and literary studies of female autobiography, as Maggie B. Gale and Viv
Gardner assert, “The notion of performance and performativity is often used as a framing
device in the process of foregrounding the mechanisms of autobiography,
autobiographical analysis, and identity formation” (1). In other words, autobiography
today is dependent on the discourse of identity performance in large part because the
auto- has come to be seen as shifting and multiple, rather than representative of a single,
solitary self. Autobiographers select which information to share when with a given or
chosen audience, rather than tell the whole “truth” of their lives. They perform pieces of
themselves—on the page and on the stage. Hence, this dissertation examines individual
girls’ identity performances in light of their roles in the collective autobiography of Grrl
Action, as well as individual girls’ identity performances as collective autobiographies in
and of themselves.
Identity Performance and Girls’ Studies
In their landmark study, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and
Girls’ Development, Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown propose a method for
interpreting girls’ self-narratives through what they call a “Listener’s Guide.” Inspired
by Kristin Linklater, arguably the leading authority on theatrical vocal training and
technique, Gilligan and Brown develop their guide with an emphasis on voice as both
embodied and relational. They listen to transcripts of interviews multiple times to
discern each girl’s narrative, her conceptualization of self, and the ways she creates and
conveys relationships in light of societal expectations (27-28).
22
Though they don’t overtly employ theatrical discourse, Gilligan and Brown
analyze plot, character, dramatic structure, and audience/performance context much in
the way dramaturgs do, as they “attend to recurring words and images, central metaphors,
emotional resonances, contradictions or inconsistencies in style, revisions and absences in
the story, as well as shifts in the sound of the voice and in narrative position: the use of
the first-, second-, or third-person narration” (27). Hence, they take up the tools of
performance theory on two fronts: in their poststructuralist understanding of identity as
discursive and context-dependent and in their adoption of dramaturgical tools to analyze
girls’ development. Notably, Brown and Gilligan’s Listener’s Guide not only influences
their own studies of girls to follow; it also becomes a common methodological tool
scholars in disparate disciplines borrow to analyze their own qualitative data.12 In effect,
the discourse of performance permeates Girls’ Studies in ways more directly related to
actual theatrical practice than many scholars might realize.
While other studies may not have Linklater as an explicit link to the theatrical
realm, they are often no less informed by the performance paradigm so often associated
with girlhood and adolescence. As a means of understanding how and why identity
performance plays such a major role in the larger field of Girls’ Studies (even as actual
theatre does not), and in an attempt to contextualize my own contribution to the field, I
examine the ways that scholars in different disciplines take up performance discourse to a
variety of ends.
12
See essays by Jill McLean Taylor, Niobe Way, and Amy M. Sullivan in Urban Girls: Resisting
Stereotypes, Creating Identities and Deborah L. Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire for just a few examples of
the ways the Listener’s Guide has been adopted in ethnographic and sociological studies of girls and
women.
23
The idea of girls as performers is not new—though performance was not always
seen as an empowering process for female youth. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de
Beauvoir claims that, even from a very young age, girls are clothed in “sweet little
dresses” and their “hair is done up carefully” to underscore and encourage performances
of young femininity (270). Beauvoir argues that girls are forced to operate on a “play
and dream level,” while boys actively explore their lives through independent and
unencumbered doing (280-282). For scholars like me to see the transgressive potential of
identity performance, earlier feminists like Beauvoir first had to illuminate the ways that
girls were forced into passive, appearance-oriented roles over which they had little
control. Beauvoir sees the performance of femininity as a tool the (white, Western) girl
uses to gain societal acceptance—if she can play her part convincingly enough—but it
also binds her to a false and constricting dramaturgical structure. Hence, the act of
becoming a woman is a controlled improvisation within a given framework, a set of
learned behaviors, gestures, and movements contingent upon context—an idea that Judith
Butler develops further in her oft-cited theories of gender performativity.
Building on Beauvoir, Butler argues that “if gender is something one becomes—
but can never be—then gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity, and that gender
ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or static cultural marker, but
rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” (Gender Trouble 143). The very
notion of gender performativity is tied up in what it means to be a girl, yet Butler, unlike
Beauvoir, allows for “the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic
repetition” that can, in turn, transform the codes of the performed gender over time
(Gender Trouble 179). Hence, Grrl Action participants’ non-normative, queer, and
24
transgressive performances of girlhood are, in many ways, “failure[s] to repeat” or “deformit[ies]” that lead to an ever-transmuting, ever-expanding definition of what girlhood
is and can be.
But the performance of girlhood identity comes to mean different things for
different scholars, depending on their politics and disciplines. Building on Beauvoir
herself, Mary Pipher adopts the theatrical metaphor, as she examines Ophelia’s journey in
Hamlet to argue that the play “shows the destructive forces that affect young women”:
As a girl, Ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses
herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she lives only for his
approval. She has no inner direction; rather she struggles to meet the
demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is determined utterly by
their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to please. When
Hamlet spurns her because she is an obedient daughter, she goes mad with
grief. Dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a
stream filled with flowers. (20)
It is no coincidence that Pipher draws from, retells, and revises one of the most
traditionally revered texts of the Western canon. Ophelia is more archetype than
character, and Pipher uses her to universalize teenage girlhood as tragedy-bound.
Further, her ahistoricism and her essentialization of female adolescence tells a story of
Ophelia with little basis in the text of Hamlet. But Pipher is less interested in textual
accuracy in Reviving Ophelia than in presenting adolescent performance as a corrupting
force.
25
In fact, she dismisses girls’ identity performances as solely chaotic and
destructively fragmentary: “They try on new roles every week—this week the good
student, next week the delinquent, and next, the artist. And they expect their families to
keep up with these changes” (Pipher 20). Families, specifically parents (who in Pipher’s
estimation are always interested in their children’s well-being), are the victims of girls’
mercurial moods and capricious enactments. Performance is dangerous, fragmentary,
false, partial, impermanent. It stands in direct opposition to the kind of “wholeness”
Pipher desires for girls—a wholeness they can presumably find not in another play, but
offstage altogether.13 Thus, a program like Grrl Action, with its emphasis on
performative possibility and a fragmented final performance structure that prompts girls
to try out new identities from one piece to the next, is discursively anathema to Pipher’s
argument.
Many Girls’ Studies scholars draw on a poststructuralist conception of identity in
a far more positive vein as they adopt the language of performativity to analyze texts
outside the space of actual theatre. These scholars, whose projects compare much more
readily with my own, look to performance theory as a helpful tool for examining written,
digitized, and embodied performances. Girls’ identity performances show up in diaries
and zines, websites and text messages, and moments of play in their everyday lives.
Barbara Crowther, for example, claims that “the diary can be an important site for
playing out (as well as, occasionally, writing about) complex struggles within the family,
13 Pipher has received ample criticism over the nearly fifteen years since Reviving Ophelia was first
published for her essentialist argument; my goal here is less to add to this critique than to examine how her
positing of performance as antithetical to girls’ healthy development fits within a larger body of popular
and academic discourse about girls.
26
society, and [girls] themselves, and diary-writing can be a significant weapon of
resistance as well as a tool in subject formation” (198). Crowther’s assertion that diary
writing “constitutes a performance, both a public and a private one” (197) is an idea that
Girls’ Studies scholars from Susannah Stern to Mary Celeste Kearney have applied to
their own disciplines. Stern, for example, argues that girls’ websites are public
performances of “self-disclosure” informed by both “self-clarification” and “selfexpression” (229-230). She draws on Brown and Gilligan’s work to claim that the web is
a space where girls actively combat “loss of voice” through the creation of home pages
that simulate “published autobiographies” (Stern 246). Self-disclosure, in her eyes, is a
strategy, a decision, a presentation, a performance.
In a similar vein, Shayla Thiel Stern devotes an entire book-length project to the
identity performance, play, negotiation, and construction in girls’ instant messaging, as
she examines how “[t]he study of identity within a computer-mediated environment
offers a unique means to facilitate and grasp the fluidity of gender” (5). But Stern’s
argument differs from the bulk of scholarship in her field; while most scholars argue that
online identities differ from or compare to users’ “authentic” selves, she dismisses such
binarism and instead builds on the ideas of cultural studies scholars like Judith Butler and
Stuart Hall to argue for a poststructuralist view of identity as complex, shifting, and
historically contingent (Thiel Stern 7). In her consideration of girls as valuable cultural
producers, Kearney provides a helpful frame for understanding such (non-normative)
identity performances as potentially transgressive: “As the young females who create
zines are often adolescents transitioning from girlhood to womanhood, such texts provide
a space for their creators’ initial exploration of nontraditional identities, especially those
27
that may be deemed inappropriate for individuals of their sex and age and thus are rarely
permitted public expression” (146). Kearney argues that zines in particular provide a
space for girls, marginalized through both gender and generation, to try on identities a
larger culture might not permit them to embody in everyday practice. Though these
written and digitized identity performances are compelling examples of girls’
(re)definitions of girlhood, I am interested in my own work in the ways that live
performance allows for not only (re)definition, but active (re)embodiment. Conversely, I
am curious about how the girl-controlled production apparatus of zine culture sheds light
on the hegemony of performance programs like Grrl Action, in which adults still hold the
reigns of direction.
While the performativity analyzed by Crowther, Stern, Thiel Stern, and Kearney
plays out in text and image, other scholars consider girls’ embodied experiments with
costume, voice, gesture, and movement in their performative play.14 In such play, girls’
identity performances are heightened above the “everyday” Goffanesque variety, and yet
they are not formally staged in a theatre space as Grrl Action is. Because girls are their
own directors and producers in informal play settings, these structures have a great deal
14
The discourse of girls’ identity performance extends far beyond the work of these four scholars. I have
chosen to highlight their research as representative of the range of scholarship available. For a broad,
cultural study of girlhood that draws on age-based gender performativity, see Catherine Driscoll’s Girls:
Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. For additional scholarship on girls’
identity performances through the internet and other digital technology, including the essay that informs
Thiel Stern’s later work, see Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity edited by
Sharon R. Mazzarella. Mazzarella has also edited a volume with Norma Odom Pecora entitled Growing
Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity, which includes several essays with
performance-inflected discourse and a piece by Carol Jennings called “Girls Make Music: Polyphony and
Identity in Teenage Rock Bands” that examines girls’ multifaceted performances of both music and
themselves. Similarly, in her “Authenticating Practices: Producing Realness, Performing Youth” in
Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global, Nicole Fleetwood interrogates the ways that girls
working on a nonprofit film project in San Francisco stage authenticity (and present conflict) in
performances of race, class, and ethnicity.
28
to teach adults interested in facilitating girls’ live performances about collective creation
and power. Drama educator Julia Dunn, for example, examines girls’ improvisational
play in an extracurricular drama club as a means of transforming her own pedagogical
practice. She analyzes the ways that girls play multiple characters, work across genres,
create dramatic tension, and share the playwright function during a series of fruitfully
collaborative, hour-long improvisations. She concludes that “the driving force and
purpose of the girls’ play was the desire to have fun and that this fun was linked directly
to the creation of text that ‘felt real’” (Dunn 46). “Realness” has little connection to
dramatic realism, however, as girls use this word to mean commitment to the rules and
function of the drama, rather than a genre that attempts to mimic “real life.”15 I find this
idea of “realness” especially helpful in my own work as a means of validating girls’
adoption of the discourse of authenticity, without contradicting their (and my) investment
in a more poststructuralist approach to identity exploration.
While Dunn studies girls’ inventions of characters and chameleon-like jumps
between roles, Sarah Louise Baker examines girls’ performances of actual people (and/or
their imagined personas). She analyzes preteen girls’ performances of female pop icons
and boy bands in the bedroom, while arguing that the “musical practices that take place in
this experiential space are complex, highly nuanced, and far from trivial” (Baker 75).
Girls’ bedrooms, long dismissed as sites of triviality and/or passivity, are actually integral
15
Unfortunately, Dunn’s study, at least the published portion of her dissertation, does not directly engage
with issues of gender (or any other identity markers, for that matter). Her work is based more in sociology
and educational psychology than cultural studies, and she seems more broadly interested in children’s
dramatic play, though I am curious as to how and why she then chooses to write specifically about girls
without analyzing the performance of gender.
29
spaces of cultural production, gender-bending, and explorations of Otherness.16 Baker’s
study informs my own as I examine the ways that various girls play icons and take on
personas in an attempt to discover new possibilities for their own identity performances.
Of course, the first and most prominent scholars to reassess girls’ “culture of the
bedroom” were Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber in their landmark essay of the late
1970s, “Girls and Subcultures.” In their revised version of the article in 2000, they argue
that “girls negotiate a different leisure space and different personal spaces from those
inhabited by boys. These in turn offer them different possibilities for ‘resistance’”
(McRobbie and Garber 24). But while McRobbie and Garber emphasize the integrity of
girls’ bedroom culture, Kearney argues that they unwittingly undermine their own goals:
McRobbie and Garber’s revised essay attempted to initiate an exploration
of female youth as active cultural participants, and thus is indicative of
British cultural studies scholars’ privileging of resistance during this
period. Yet, by continuing to focus primarily on the immaterial leisure
activities of girls’ bedroom culture, such as listening to records and
daydreaming about stars, they ignored its material and productive
components, such as letter-writing, scrapbook making, and newsletter
production. (23)
While Kearney’s point is an important intervention, I am curious about the
dichotomization of “immaterial leisure activities” and “material and productive
16
For another study of girls’ bedroom spaces that draws on girls’ identity performance, see Kandy James’s
“‘I Just Gotta Have My Own Space!’: The Bedroom as a Leisure Site for Adolescent Girls.” The bedroom
seems to be a mini-theatre of sorts, in which girls control the audience, design the space, and determine the
activities therein. Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood, edited by Claudia
30
components.” Performance is, for all practical purposes, immaterial, and yet, as I try to
demonstrate in my Grrl Action research, girl performers can make important inroads in
redefining girlhood, in cultural production, with their bodies, voices, and imaginations.
Perhaps the most notable example of the performative and productive nature of
women’s and girls’ fan practices is Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and
Female Spectatorship (1994). Star Gazing, a foundational reception study of female fan
practices, analyzes not only women’s fantasies about stars, but their identificatory
practices involving them. The “extra-cinematic” practices she outlines especially
illuminate the ways performance blurs the line between consumption and production, as
women report “childhood games of make-believe” in which they pretended to be certain
stars by physically inhabiting their imagined worlds, as well as moments when they
imitated stars’ behaviors and actions and copied their appearances (Stacey 160-170).
Drawing on Andrew Tudor’s work, Stacey actually lays out ten separate forms of
cinematic identification—devotion, adoration, worship, transcendence, aspiration and
inspiration, pretending, resembling, imitating, and copying. I point to pretending,
imitating, and copying here as the most obviously embodied fan practices, and the most
influential in my own argument about Grrl Action.
Stacy Wolf, in her Camera Obscura article “Wicked Divas, Musical Theatre, and
Internet Girl Fans,” in fact translates Stacey’s theoretical lens to the field of musical
theatre, as she argues that girls’ fan practices center around Wicked’s queer dual divas,
Elphaba and G(a)linda. While Stacey relies on adult women’s memories of their fan
Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, also contains a number of articles about the performativity of tween
girls’ play in contexts from bedrooms to playgrounds.
31
practices as girls, Wolf examines current girls’ (accounts of their) fan practices online.
She argues that “[g]irls’ distinctly homosocial fandom extends well beyond spectatorship
as they create their own performances—songs, poems, stories, and artwork on fan Web
sites, at Wicked singing contests, and even in Wicked yoga classes” (Wolf 45). Girls’
reception, production, and identity performances are intertwined in a kind of cultural
matrix with Wicked at its center. Wolf’s study provides a compelling counterpoint to
mine, in that she writes about girls’ performative fan practices resulting from women’s
theatrical performances, and I study (in the latter part of this dissertation) women’s
reception practices in relation to girls’ theatrical performances.
In a similar vein, Lisa Lewis studies the ways that 80s-era musicians Pat Benatar,
Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, and Madonna opened new avenues of feminist expression for
(adolescent) female fans who imitated their idols’ styles of dress and speech. Lewis
makes connections between the games of “dress up” girls are encouraged to play as
children and the ways that their “[s]tyle imitation activates a cultivated female area of
knowledge” (165-168). In other words, girls transform sanctioned performances of
femininity into more transgressive and/or pleasurable acts of female fandom. Girls even
imitate their idols as a means of merging traditionally male and female spheres; by
performing (as) these pop icons, girls “demand access to male privileges of money,
power, and authority (which they find embodied in celebrities), but at the same time, they
refuse to dispose of the expressive forms provided by female culture” (Lewis 171). I find
the physical and ideological layers that Lewis attributes to girls’ identity performances
especially helpful in analyzing the complexity and multiplicity of girls’ performances in
Grrl Action as well.
32
Borrowing Back: What Theatre Has to Offer Girls’ Studies
In the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, education, and cultural and
media studies then, performativity is linked to girlhood in both (adult scholars’) theory
and (actual girls’) practice. Jill Dolan, in an attempt to reclaim the performance paradigm
for theatre studies, asks,
How can we (or should we?) articulate the specificity of theatre as
something performative, yet unique among it, as an activity marked by
traveling across or within geographies to be with people in other, often
“othered,” spaces, looking, intentionally, pleasurably, meaningfully? How
can the liveness of theater performance reveal performativity? Theater
studies offers, literally, a place to investigate some of the questions posed
only metaphorically elsewhere. (Geographies of Learning 78-79)
Given the prevalence of performance theory and theatrical metaphors in scholarship
about girls and the appeal of performativity in girls’ own cultural production, how can a
focus on theatrical performance shed light on the field of Girls’ Studies as a whole?
How does framing girls’ identity performances within an actual theatre address
“questions posed only metaphorically elsewhere”? Conversely, how might the field of
theatre studies—especially the undertheorized sub-discipline of youth/children’s
theatre—benefit from a consideration of the ways that girls perform their identities
onstage?
In this dissertation, I argue that the embodiment of identity performance in a
theatre space—a working through of competing versions of girlhood, and even a slipping
into “characters” not socially acceptable offstage—has the potential for even greater
33
resistance to commercial representations of female adolescence than many other forms of
cultural production. Theatre not only hails a live audience to interact with live
performers; it also situates differently behaving bodies together in shared space to create
a multiplicity of meanings. In fact, diary writing, zine-making, and web design—which
allow a level of anonymity that live performance does not—cannot contain the same
intertextual and embodied potential for girls to rehearse (quite literally try on) multiple
identities in the way that theatre requires.
In Grrl Action, bodies are in direct conversation with other bodies on several
levels. As Elin Diamond explains, “While a performance embeds traces of other
performances, it also produces experiences whose interpretation only partially depends
on previous experiences. This creates the terminology of ‘re’ in discussions of
performance, as in reembody, reinscribe, reconfigure, resignify” (“Introduction” 1-2).
Live performance, in other words, is imbued with a kind of cultural haunting, where we
can see, for example, both past years of Grrl Action performance layered onto present
ones and popular conceptions of adolescent female identity reconfigured in performance
within the bodies and words of single and multiple girls. It is this logic that leads
Diamond to see performance as both a doing and a thing done. Each performance forges
new meanings of the thing performed (e.g., girlhood, class, race, sexuality, the identities
of Isaura, Megan, and Leela) at the same time that it contributes to the thing’s overall
definition for each spectator (e.g., every performance of girlhood I have seen affects my
reception of Isaura’s performance; similarly, Isaura will now alter the way I see every
other performance of girlhood). Meaning-making is negotiated, simultaneously
constituted and reconstituted, much in the way Judith Butler imagines in her conception
34
of gender as “an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space
through a stylized repetition of acts” (Gender Trouble 179). Girlhood too is both
doing/thing done as well as, in many ways, a stylized repetition of acts. It is in seeing
girlhood framed as a doing/thing done in a theatre space that we can also view it as a
stylized repetition of acts outside of this space.
Further, the very age of Grrl Action participants raises questions about how and
when bodies are gendered and sexed. If adolescence is commonly (erroneously?)
identified with the growth of secondary sex characteristics, how do teenage girls’
embodied performances cast light on the relationship between (others’) assumptions and
(self-)identification in gender performativity? How do they cast light on Butler’s concern
that “the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses
and/or disavows other identifications” (Bodies That Matter 3)? How does watching a
group called Grrl Action, in other words, reinforce or deconstruct a gender/sex binary?
In The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture, Anne Davis
Basting looks to the material circumstances and biological functions of aging bodies as
complications to the performative re-: “If the impossibility of identical repetition creates
potential for change, then aging itself might be regaled for its transformative qualities.
Instead, aging is generally regarded as a decline from the peak of youth” (9). Though
Basting’s critique of performance theory (which she later embraces as a helpful tool, even
in light of its shortcomings) is convincing, she herself overlooks the other end of the agebased spectrum. Even as girls re-embody girlhood with each performance on and
offstage, they are gradually growing out of adolescence and into adulthood. Girls’ aging
process—their bodies’ biological development—raises many questions about whether
35
and which gendered gestures are cumulative, and which are shed as girls become women;
as well as how girlhood contains a range of ages in its collective representation and
nebulous chronological borders.
Outside of its potential for framing the performative re- of girlhood, theatre is also
an excellent tool for examining girls’ identity exploration and presentation because it
requires the direct contact of bodies—girls’ and women’s—in a way that highlights
difference, accentuates commonalities, and exposes power differentials. As Karen
Calvert argues, “Any study devoted to children has as much to say about the adults who
made the decisions, formed or accepted the cultural assumptions, [and] purchased and
used goods as it has to say about the children involved” (76). Though Calvert describes
youth far younger than those in Grrl Action, her words are no less true about teenagers.
Certainly, there are hegemonic obstacles for any program run by women for girls (no
matter how progressive its aims) and, moreover, for one in which girls are expected to
share their personal narratives while adults direct, edit, and organize. While Lynn Miller
maintains that “the mantle of otherness is dissipated in a room where speakers/performers
relate their subjective selves to witnesses [and] experience, however idiosyncratic, cannot
remain marginalized if it is shared” (“Witness to the Self” 321), this is potentially
complicated logic to apply to a workshop where power is unevenly distributed across
generations, where adult administrators and audiences play active roles in shaping girls’
narratives both directly and indirectly. This is not to say that I believe adults’
involvement in Grrl Action and other arts and advocacy programs always overdetermines
girls’ identity performances. Rather, I argue that we—as teachers, artists, activists,
36
scholars, and audiences—should remain vigilant of the ways that our own ideologies and
lived histories as former adolescents complicate girls’ ongoing constructions of girlhood.
Part of this vigilance involves rigorous scholarship that posits girlhood as a
legitimate site of academic interrogation. Already, several theatre scholars are exploring
girls’ investment in live performance in ways that examine power differentials and the
negotiation of identity construction. In addition to Wolf’s work on Wicked, Deborah
Paredez and Valerie Walkerdine pose important questions about the performativity of fan
practices, as they explore girls’ consumption and production habits in light of their
culture, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Paredez’s “Becoming Selena, Becoming
Latina” in Women and Migration in the US-Mexico Borderlands and her forthcoming
book, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, examine girls’
performances of Selena Quintanilla Perez as a means of performing young, Latina
identity. Walkerdine’s Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture, especially her
“Putting Your Daughter on the Stage” chapter, explores the ways that young workingclass girls use theatrical song and dance to defy traditional modes of girlhood that
exclude them, while also interrogating the discourse of eroticism that posits workingclass girls as a threat to normative girlhood.
A handful of grassroots and community-based theatre scholars and practitioners
have begun to explore girls’ challenges to normative girlhood in both theatre venues and
site-specific performances. Susan C. Haedicke examines the ways that the Living Stage
Theatre Company’s Teen Mothers of Today Project in Washington D.C. builds on Paulo
Freire’s principle of conscientization to create “a community of artists/social activists
through which the young women remake society for themselves and their children, first
37
in their imaginations and later in their actual lives” (272). And Mary Ann Hunter looks
at the ways that girls who perform in Skate Girl Space—a site-specific community arts
project in Brisbane that uses video images, skateboarding, and physical and comic
skills—operates as both “a process of participatory community-based cultural production
and a feminist commentary on dominant modes of cultural production and consumption
in public space” (336). Dana Edell’s “Ripples of the Fourth Wave: New York’s
viBePoetry,” available at Community Arts Network online, even explores how underserved young women take on leadership roles as they initiate and direct their own
performance poetry program. Edell’s work, informed by her own investment and
involvement in viBe as Executive Director and Founder, is especially illuminating to my
own study of Grrl Action, as she and I share the challenge of writing about girls and
performance as both scholars and practitioners.
Chapter Outline
I hope to add my own voice to theatre and performance studies about girls, as I
ask how Grrl Action, as embodied collective autobiography, illuminates the complexity
of teenage girls’ identity performances and, in effect, acts as an ideal site for challenging
popular constructions of female adolescence and expanding the very definition of
girlhood. This central research question encompasses and interacts with a host of others:
How might young women use live performance to seek greater representation for those
marginalized by not only gender and generation, but also nationhood, ethnicity, race,
class, and sexuality? When and how does difference among girls operate as a site of
conflict in identity performance? As a site of coalition? As both? When and how do
girls privilege one identity performance over another and/or employ what Gayatri Spivak
38
calls strategic essentialism? When and how do girls’ autobiographical performances
enact what anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff calls definitional ceremonies: “collective
self-definitions specifically intended to proclaim an interpretation to an audience not
otherwise available” (235)? To what end? In other words, how might girls’ identity
performances—their collective autobiographies—inside of a theatre space open up
possibilities for girls’ identity performance outside this frame? And why are girls still
drawn to live performance in an increasingly mediatized culture? Finally, who controls
the tools of cultural production in Grrl Action, and how does this control relate to girls’
negotiation of identity?
As many cultural studies and feminist performance scholars have done, I employ
a poststructuralist lens for understanding identity in my work, as each girl’s performances
of multiple and shifting selves interact with other girls’ (and women’s) performances of
multiple and shifting selves. I eschew discourses of authenticity that reinforce the idea of
a single, static identity because, in large part, of the ways such discourses have cast girls
into victim narratives in which they are cut off from their “true selves.” I am careful,
however, to respect and carefully analyze girls’ self-positioning; the material reality of
their ethnic, racial, and sexual identities; and their embrace of spaces in which they feel
they can exhibit the widest range of identities. Understanding Grrl Action as one such
space allows me to build on Stuart Hall’s assertion that “identities are never completed,
never finished; they are always, as subjectivity itself is, in process” (47).
Each of my chapters is built on close readings of select pieces from Grrl Action
performances between 2005 and 2008, supplemented by more nuanced discourse
analyses of these pieces based on information about their production processes gleaned
39
through ethnographic co-performance and personal interviews. Thus, I attempt to
demonstrate the ways that identity performance can and should be understood not only at
the moment of utterance in performance, but also as the accumulation of events,
perspectives, interactions, and material circumstances.
While my co-performance is based on my everyday investment and observations
as both Grrl Action Instructor and Program Director, the personal interviews were
designed as supplemental research and focused specifically on the act of live
performance. I did, however, want to maintain a sense of myself as implicated in the coperformance of Grrl Action, so my interview techniques were fairly conversational, and
my research interests quite transparent. As I conducted interviews at coffee shops,
restaurants, and even (once) my own home, I invited girls and women to challenge,
critique, and comment on my ideas, which they often did. I by no means consider my
interview sample to be comprehensive, or my interview methodology to be “scientific,”
but I did attempt to interview people from a range of research groupings, as well as
socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. I interviewed eight girls, four individually
(Lequita Bradshaw, Treyneicia Hendricks, Samantha Hutchinson-Cloud, and Isaura
Martinez) and four in pairs (Bryanna Estrada and Christina Rice, Sarah Crowe and
Paullee Wheatley-Rutner). Most often, my interviewees were with girls who returned to
Grrl Action for more than one summer, or who had disclosed intriguing insights during
rehearsals and performances that I wanted more information about. I even experimented
with a couple of paired interviews with closer friends to see how girls built on each
other’s ideas.
40
In terms of the adults in my study, I interviewed two parents (Patricia Anglin and
Abbie Navarrete), two Impact Austin members (Kathy Fitzgibbons and Nancy
Sutherland), and three mentors (Heather Courtney, Ray Matthews, and Meg Sullivan).
Impact Austin is the granting organization of over 500 women that facilitated Grrl
Action’s transformation into a year-round program. While this new mentorship program
is not my focus in this dissertation, it was invaluable to interview Impact Austin members
with no prior connection to Grrl Action, as well as mentors who, though close to
individual girls, were not part of the everyday workings of the program. Importantly, all
of these adult interviewees were also audience members, and I focused in my interviews
on their perspectives on this role. In addition, I interviewed Madge Darlington three
times—twice formally and once informally and briefly after a rehearsal—as she has been
a cornerstone of Grrl Action in many ways since its advent. And, finally, I interviewed
Tina Van Winkle twice because, as a former Grrl Action participant, stage manager, and
intern, as well as a Rude Mechs company member, she was an invaluable asset. I did not
opt to interview Carrie Fountain, per our mutual agreement; but as Co-Directors, Carrie
and I engaged in a four-year-long conversation about Grrl Action that deeply informs my
perspective here. Most interviews made their way directly into the dissertation, while
others informed my perspective more broadly.
Though my theoretical approach throughout the dissertation is intersectional, each
of the chapters that follow focuses on a different performance strategy employed by Grrl
Action participants and a different lens for reading Grrl Action itself. I consider Grrl
Action as feminist collective, definitional ceremony, and site of trauma to understand the
various reasons why and methods how girls perform a range of identities onstage.
41
Chapter One, “Grrl Action as Feminist Collective: Girls Performing Sexuality,”
explores the ways that Grrl Action might be considered a new kind of feminist theatre
collective. I focus on girls’ performances of non-normative sexualities onstage as a
means of exploring feminist collectivity and difference. I examine both their overt and
covert queer enactments and the playful parodies that combat commercial representations
of girls as victims in a hyper-heterosexualized world. I build on Anita Harris’s
“Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know: Adolescence and the Production of
Femininity” and Barbara Hudson’s “Femininity and Adolescence”—which both question
the role of age in the theories of gender performativity initiated by Beauvoir and
popularized by Butler—to examine the discourses of containment that frame girls’ bodies
today. I then go on to argue that Grrl Action, as a new feminist collective, provides
embodied alternatives for girls who are otherwise taught to take on what Joan Jacobs
Brumberg calls appearance-oriented “body projects.” After an in-depth discussion of the
major tenets and organizing principles of feminist collectives of the 1970s and 1980s, I
consider how Grrl Action compares and contrasts as a collective in its own right. I then
look to the ways that collectivity and collective difference play out in live performance
by focusing on six specific girls’ pieces. As I conduct close reading of these
performances, I point to queer theory by scholars like Jill Dolan, Judith Halberstam, Eve
Kosofky Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Susan Driver as a way of reading girls’
resistance to mainstream (mis)representations. Throughout the chapter, I examine the
tension between individual identity performances and collective autobiography in
(re)defining girlhood, and I consider ways that Grrl Action is (and/or sets the groundwork
for) a new kind of feminist collective.
42
My second chapter, “Grrl Action as Definitional Ceremony: Girls Performing ‘I’
and ‘You’,” situates the final Grrl Action performance as a negotiated definitional
ceremony (and a collection of individual ceremonies)—negotiated in that girls’ control
over the production process of their ceremonies is sometimes partial or compromised.
Building on the work of bell hooks, Sidonie Smith, and Brown and Gilligan, I examine
girls’ I- and you-statements to analyze the ways they cast both themselves and their
audiences in more nuanced ways than their straightforward declarations might imply.
Here, I examine how girls’ identity exploration complicates the theories of
poststructuralism and liminality so prevalent in studies of both performance and female
adolescence. I pay special attention to girls’ performances of ethnicity and class in this
chapter, with a focus on the ways that girls employ a form of what Gayatri Spivak calls
“strategic essentialism” at opportune moments. I trace the range of I-statements
delivered during the ensemble-based “intros” and “outros” from 2005 through 2008 to
expose both the opportunities and restrictions inherent in these moments of selfdefinition. I conclude my chapter with close readings of Isaura’s “I Am Someone” in
2005 and Sketch’s “Princess” in 2006 as a way of exploring how I- and you-statements
expose each girl’s unique performance of class and ethnicity.
In Chapter Three, “Grrl Action as Site of Transference: Girls Performing
Trauma,” I translate and reframe the concept of psychoanalytic transference to explore
Grrl Action as a place where girls and women engage in affective exchange around the
performance of girlhood trauma. Drawing on Nancy K. Miller, Jason Tougaw, Wendy
Hui Kyong Chun, and Dori Laub, I focus specifically on the ways that traumatic
testimony can both create community and leave girls with the affective burden of
43
representation. Inspired by Elizabeth Grosz’s and Mary Douglas’s ideas about bodily
“excess,” as well as, once again, Harris’s discourse of containment, I look to the material
reality and metaphoric significance of tears as an organizing principle for understanding
the ways that power circulates among actors and audiences, girls and women. This
chapter relies more readily on interview-based ethnography and reception theory to
examine adults roles’ (including my own) in the production and performance of girls’
collective autobiography and individual identity performances. I conduct close readings
of Isaura’s “Lucha Diversa” (2008), Trey’s “Just Like You” (2008), and Megan’s “Where
I’m From” (2006) in relation to my own autoethnographic reflections. I examine the
ways that traumatic testimony and affective exchange can divert attention from the very
real material disadvantages certain girls face outside of the theatre space, and I consider
the responsibilities that Grrl Action staff members in particular have in this regard.
My conclusion is a self-reflexive and practical one, as I suggest ways that women
who work with girls might put their own bodies—their own identity performances—on
the line both inside and outside programs like Grrl Action as a way both to redefine
collective autobiographical performance more broadly and to disrupt generation-based
power differentials in the cultural production process. Further, I examine how women
and girls might acknowledge and embrace their interdependence in programs like Grrl
Action, and in culture more broadly, to continue to collectively (re)imagine and
(re)embody girlhood in transgressive and liberating ways.
44
Chapter 1
Grrl Action as Feminist Collective:
Girls Performing Sexuality
Paullee lies on her back three feet in the air. Except for the girls who hold her
there, she looks like she’s levitating. They are waves. They are wind. They are the
supporting cast of swimmers Paullee evokes in a poem that begins, “I speculate, I
skinnydip, I shimmy.” Her words sound through speakers while her body rests in
capable, undulating arms: “Sometimes a bare chest presses my naked shoulder blades,
and your pubic hair is a heart on the small of my back.” Paullee’s language radiates
electric androgyny, but by the poem’s end it is clear that the naked bodies of her memory
all belong to girls.
Melissa sings Selena’s “Como La Flor” with a sly smile, animating lyrics of loss
with the sway of her hips and heels. She has an uncanny knack for imitation, she says,
and it is this talent that fills her with a sense of purpose. As she dances, a crowd of
squealing girls engulfs her. They are devotees, frenzied fans who clamor for the star’s
autograph and run after her screaming when she exits with a wave. The girls transgress
the heteronormative boundaries of traditional fan culture. They sway, they swoon, they
desire. And it is Melissa who directs their gaze.
Paullee’s and Melissa’s pieces, both shared during the 2005 Grrl Action summer
workshop, illustrate the ways that girls’ onstage identity performances are both individual
and collective constructions. In this chapter, I focus on the productive, and sometimes
troubling, tension within these performances. As a program that stresses collaboration
45
and group creativity as much as individual reflection and exploration, Grrl Action is, in
some ways, a new kind of feminist collective. It implicitly renegotiates the politics of
both cultural/radical feminist theatre collectives of the past and poststructuralist
approaches to feminist performance today, while raising important questions about the
ways that female adolescence complicates the very notion of feminist collectivity and
difference.
Though Grrl Action participants negotiate collectivity and difference in a number
of ways, I focus on sexuality as an organizing principle in this chapter—partially because
it is so prominent a topic in girls’ writing and partially because of the potential for
feminist transgression in so many of the girls’ queer and non-normative identity
performances. Throughout my discussion of sexuality, I consider the material
circumstances and cultural context of girls’ bodies. Rather than defining female
adolescence as a physical or hormonal shift, I see it as a process that leads (when girls
successfully follow their social scripts) to what Anita Harris calls “a female maturity
connected to three kinds of responsibility and containment” (“Everything a Teenage Girl
Should Know” 114). The first kind of responsibility/containment Harris defines is bodily
and involves “covering up, concealing ‘leaks,’ and being as physically attractive as
possible”; the second is sexual and entails “responsibility for sexual behavior and
‘correct’ sexual identity and containment of sexuality, particularly lesbian desire or nontraditional heterosexual desire”; and the third, which I explore in greater depth in chapter
three, is emotional and relates to the management of interpersonal relationships and
“inappropriate emotions” (114).
46
I find Harris’s essay a helpful framework for understanding the potential of
collective autobiographical performance to confront and defy the discourses of bodily
repression so prevalent in girls’ lives. In this chapter, I draw on her first two types of
containment, as I connect girls’ performances of non-normative and “hyper” sexuality to
their attitudes about bodily maintenance. I also look to queer (performance) theory as a
tool for understanding girls’ bodies as sites of pleasure, activity, transformation, and
resistance, rather than victimization.17 While commercial culture may always already
contain, sexualize, and objectify girls’ bodies, queer performance affords them actual
opportunities for transgressive embodiment.
The unfortunate alternative to such transgressive embodiment is what Joan Jacobs
Brumberg calls “body projects”: girls’ efforts to manage and maintain their bodies
through “expenditures on clothes and personal grooming items, with special attention to
exterior surfaces—skin, hair, and contours” (xxi). Body projects are girls’ internalization
of commercial culture’s gaze, their attempts at self-objectification. These projects are
most often consumerist practices, as girls buy clothes, make-up, gym memberships,
bikini waxes, and skin and hair products to transform their bodies into the purported
ideal; but they are also tied to the everyday performance of femininity that Beauvoir
evoked more than half a century ago. Brumberg, in her efforts to advocate for girls and
provide them with alternatives to the impossible demands of an appearance-driven
culture, unfortunately takes a strangely reactionary stance on what girl advocacy might
17
Here, I enter into conversation with girls’ studies scholars like Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick, and
Harris herself, who argue that “[y]oung women are at the epicenter of the sexual/embodiment debates: their
bodies, in varying degrees of (semi-)nudity, are repeatedly and routinely depicted, not only in media
specialized in sexual content, but even in other contexts, such as in music videos and advertisements of
various types of products and services” (135).
47
look like, as she romanticizes “the Victorian ‘protective umbrella’ that sheltered and
nurtured [girls] well into the twentieth century” and laments the “curious decline in
maternal involvement and supervision of girls over the past century” (197-198). Rather
than idealize the past or essentialize the mother-daughter bond, I prefer to examine the
subversive potential for girls in shifting the performance paradigm from everyday
enactments of femininity to framed theatrical doings of transgressive girlhood. How, I
ask, can autobiographical performance become an alternate type of body project—one
that gives girls a far wider array of identities to choose from?
Live performance suggests ways that girls find pleasure and subversion, rather
than anxiety and pain, in their bodies. Theatre provides performative alternatives for
girls who are taught that “the body is to be held away from oneself, considered critically
and judged by its attractiveness or unattractiveness” (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 136137). In autobiographical performance like Grrl Action, one cannot hold the body away
from oneself. The body is the material of performance—of creation and signification.
As such, it is also, as Rebecca Schneider suggests, “a site of social markings, physical
parts and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, sexuality—all of which bear
ghosts of historical meaning, markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and
disprivilege” (2). Because adolescent girls are often bound together in the cultural
imaginary through biological rites like menarche and breast development, it is especially
important to consider the ways that they eschew universalizing corporeal discourses and
claim authorship over their bodies in diverse and disparate ways. Collectivity does not
amount to accord, and girls’ performances of sexuality exemplify an impressive
heterogeneity of experience and perspective.
48
Hence, theatre—specifically the collective autobiographical performance style of
Grrl Action—is a site where new body projects are born, where identity making is done
pleasurably through many bodies’ multiple enactments of self. This kind of performance
complicates the protectionist narratives that posit girls solely as victims and their bodies
solely as objects; it allows them to control their own narratives, to challenge commercial
representations of their physical and sexual selves, and to embody alternatives as part of
an eclectic collective of female youth.
Inspired by the work of Mary Celeste Kearney, I focus implicitly on girls’ roles as
producers—both of their autobiographical performances and of their own complicated
subjectivities as artists. Otherwise, my methodology in this chapter is deliberately
eclectic. I first highlight the collective components of Grrl Action and analyze the ways
the program compares to and differs from feminist collectives of the 1970s and 80s,
while providing new age-inflected perspectives on feminist theatre-making. Focusing on
the summer of 2005, I then conduct close readings of four performance pieces that deal
with sexuality in different ways, and I draw on anecdotal accounts and interview excerpts
to highlight certain points when appropriate. I conclude my chapter, still in 2005, with an
interview-inspired ethnographic sketch of two girls who perform the same piece on
alternate afternoons in an attempt to illustrate the unexpected alliances non-normative
sexuality produces.
While I focus primarily on the 2005 workshop in this chapter, I do not trace an
entirely chronological route in my analysis. Instead, I make thematic and content-based
connections over time to illustrate the polyvocality of the program as a whole—an
approach I adopt throughout the dissertation. I consider this temporally fluid approach
49
part of my ethnographic co-performance. My experience of Grrl Action is layered: my
re-reading of 2005 is now colored by experiences from then-future, now-past workshops;
and I would argue that this is often the case for many girls and audience members who
take part in and witness Grrl Action year after year.
Grrl Action as Contemporary Collective
Grrl Action does not call itself a feminist collective. I am most interested here in
what might be gained, both in scholarship and practice, when I read it as such. How, in
other words, might interpreting Grrl Action as a collective open up new possibilities for
and understandings of feminist theatre-making in general? Girls have long been excluded
from larger feminist debates, disparaged as post- or anti-feminist, or construed as (not
fully formed) feminists-in-process.18 Even the word girl has been derided by women
concerned with its connotation of infantilization; girlhood and girlishness are what many
(adult) feminists have sought to distance themselves from.
In opposition to this distance, I read Grrl Action as a full-fledged feminist
collective, in an attempt to address Jennifer Eisenhauer’s question, “What does the ‘girl’
mean for the construction of feminisms when she becomes an/other subject rather than an
object of study, woman’s ‘other,’ or a state of becoming?” (80). Building on Eisenhauer,
I investigate how a nuanced analysis of girls’ actions and embodiments—the
theatricalized enactment of their girlhood experiences—can unravel generation-based
dichotomization and expand the boundaries of what feminist collectivity means. Rather
18
Certainly, girls themselves have sometimes eschewed the title “feminist” in alienation, distrust,
ignorance, or fear; but their perspectives and actions are often feminist in practice. Sinikka Aapola,
Marnina Gonick, and Anita Harris’s Young Femininity provides examples of scholars exploring girls’
feminist practices sans feminist label (196-197). While I want to honor girls’ chosen appellations, I also
50
than calling Grrl Action participants future feminists, I consider how their performances,
their theatrically framed doings of girlhood here and now constitute feminist acts.19
Feminist theatres of the 1970s and 80s provide an evocative point of comparison
for Grrl Action as collective autobiography, in large part because their approaches to
feminist collectivity were eclectic and diverse. As Charlotte Canning notes in reference
to these earlier theatres, “the ‘collective’ worked as a label to cover disparate and
idiosyncratic methods of structural organization and creation” (67), suggesting that there
is perhaps less a true collective than a spectrum of feminist practices motivated by
collectivity. Some feminist theatres employed collective authorship, as women created
texts together with little to no artistic hierarchy; some ran their companies by consensus
or with shared administrative labor; and some saw collectivity as a tool for developing
and rehearsing their work (Canning 111).
Ensembles like It’s All Right to Be Woman Theatre tended, in fact, to minimize
theatricality and dismiss production values in favor of dramatizing the consciousnessraising process explored in rehearsals; hence, the audiences for IARTBW “acted like a
kind of extended CR group that listened to the individual member articulate her
experience of being a woman” (Case 65). IARTBW, in fact, exposes three common
seek to salvage the word feminist for current and future generations and explore it as a potential site of
coalition.
19 As I explore feminist collectivity, I implicitly consider how girls’ poststructuralist and materialist
approaches to identity-making pose new questions about female coalition and identification. Rebecca
Walker, for example, argues that third wave feminists, including teenage girls, “[seek] to create identities
that accommodate ambiguity and […] multiple positionalities: including more than excluding, exploring
more than defining, searching more than arriving” (xxxiii). While Walker’s ideas underscore my own in
regards to identity performance, I deliberately avoid wave discourse that creates further age-based divides
and undermines the kind of intergenerational collectivity and exchange that I hope Grrl Action can
facilitate. I certainly do not want to suggest that feminist collectives of the past were wholly
cultural/radical and feminist performances today are entirely poststructural and/or materialist. My project
51
characteristics of feminist theatre-making during the 70s and 80s: the reliance on
consciousness-raising in both artistic process and product, a breaking of the fourth wall to
disrupt “aesthetic distance” (Case 65), and a positing of the audience as invested
“participants joined with the performers in a common moment” (Canning 33). Linked to
the objectives of the larger feminist movement, these theatres were less interested in
aesthetic polish than finding new ways to create and sustain community.
The roles of artist and activist, in fact, often merged in feminist theatre ensembles,
as women framed the personal as political. Just the act of putting non-normative female
bodies onstage was itself a novelty for many women. As Deb Margolin explains, “I
never saw theatre like this. I never saw women that weren’t skinny blondes singing
arpeggios. These were skinny women, large women, of different ethnic backgrounds.
They affirmed that women’s lives have theatrically viable images” (Malnig and
Rosenthal 203). Here, Margolin points to the transgressive potential of the
unconventional female body in performance and the combination of different versions of
these bodies to (re)signify “woman” and “women.” This kind of diversely-bodied
collective was oftentimes dependent on, as scholars like Sue-Ellen Case argue, a liberaldemocratic tradition, as opposed to a Marxist one: in radical collectives, “women [were]
not represented as members of a class or race, but as people with individual rights”; in
effect, each unique woman could “find her own female voice and break her own silence”
(Case 68). Moments of individual exposure and revelation were dependent on other
here is not to create a progress narrative of feminisms, but to honor ideological overlaps, interrogate
differences, and ignite conversation among feminists of multiple generations.
52
women insofar as the ensemble created an environment conducive to the sharing of
personal narrative.
Not only did feminist collectives publicly sanction women’s stories, they also
explored, as was the case with Women’s Experimental Theatre, the limitations and
cultural embeddedness of gender roles. Common themes in this exploration were
mother-daughter relationships, patriarchal control over women’s sexual rights, violence
against women, and female body image and objectification. Material for these
performances often resulted from CR sessions and/or what Spiderwoman Theater called
“storyweaving,” but many collectives also employed workshops, improvisations, and
interviews to generate text—techniques still employed by grassroots and communitybased theatres today. During actual performances, ceremony and ritual often played a
role, as was the case for ensembles like IARTBW, which began and ended shows with a
group song affirming women’s lives and history (Canning 10, 37, 68). All of these
elements situated feminist theatres as spaces that sought to create community around
women’s lived experiences in opposition to patriarchal controls and traditional theatrical
hierarchies.
But while patriarchy was a commonly explored theme in early collectives, many
feminist theatres did not overtly address the larger issue of hegemony—especially white,
straight middle-class women’s culpability in the marginalization of women of color and
queer and working-class women—until years after their inceptions. At the Foot of the
Mountain theatre, for example, conducted workshops in anti-racism and hired a new staff
comprised of several women of color nearly twelve years after its founding. When an illconceived attempt to revive two of its original plays and rewrite its own whitewashed
53
history ended badly, AFOM soon realized that inserting non-white bodies into extant
texts (and, by extension, a predominately white company) was a short-sighted experiment
in coalition-building (Canning 84-87).
Theatres like Lilith, which made multiculturalism part of its original mission, also
suffered from ongoing conflict and company burnout; Lilith’s efforts to revitalize itself
by bringing in women of color from outside the ensemble left several of these newcomers
feeling tokenized and typecast. Even Spiderwoman, which dealt head-on with racism,
classism, and homophobia, eventually split into two separate companies, Spiderwoman
Theater and Split Britches, as a result of trust issues and artistic and ideological
differences (Canning 80-83). As Canning explains, many feminists in the 1960s and 70s
“wanted to foster discussion and change but were unsure as to how to go about it”:
There were no models for the kind of work they wanted to do and this
made the task very difficult. The initial struggle over differences was
made far more explosive and divisive than it might otherwise have been
by the unwillingness to admit to difference and the confusion over how to
make it a positive resource, not a negative barrier. (78)
As Canning indicates, these early collectives saw difference more as an impediment than
an opportunity, and many feminist theatres disbanded when they could no longer address
the competing desires of their members.20
Ten and fifteen years after the demise of many of these feminist theatres,
performance programs like Grrl Action, as well as general advocacy organizations for
20
Certainly, dwindling financial resources also played a large part, as did burn-out, administrative
disorganization, and conflicting artistic visions (Canning 202-209, Malnig and Rosenthal 212).
54
adolescent girls, began to surface nationwide. When ensembles like Women’s
Experimental Theatre disbanded, it was in large part due to the fact that “feminists had
entered a period of self-reflection and criticism and were grappling with issues of sexual,
class, and racial differences within their own community” (Malnig and Rosenthal 212). I
cannot help but wonder whether this “period of self-reflection and criticism” led in part to
the creation of girls’ performance programs (and other arts- and writing-based ventures)
soon afterward. I do not want to imply that these women felt that feminist collectives had
failed and so consciously and deliberately turned their attention to the next generation of
feminist artists who might be able to get it right. However, I do want to consider the
possibility that girls sometimes operate as conduits for women’s artistic and political
desires. This process is not necessarily displacement, as much as it is an opportunity for
women and girls of multiple generations to collectively reframe notions of difference in a
new historical moment when identity is commonly understood as more fluid, variable,
and contradictory.
While the women who run and have run Grrl Action are too young to have joined
feminist theatres of the 1970s and 80s themselves, the influence of these early collectives
is both indirect and ideological. Many of the women integral to the creation of Grrl
Action even had direct ties to earlier feminist collectives and/or found inspiration from its
leaders. Deb Margolin, for example, a former member of Split Britches who has
performed her solo work in the Off Center, was an NYU graduate school professor of
Shawn Sides, one of the Rude Mechanicals’ Co-Producing Artistic Directors and a
former teacher and director for Grrl Action. Margolin’s pronouncement in an NYU
performance composition class, “Your everyday lives are worthy of theatre”—uncannily
55
close to her earlier observation about WET affirming the viability of women’s lives—has
become a mantra of sorts in Grrl Action. This directive lies at the heart of the program’s
mission, as girls learn to make both mundane and exceptional moments of their lives into
solo and group performance.
Beyond its connection to luminaries like Margolin, Grrl Action exhibits a number
of characteristics common and comparable to collectives of the 70s and 80s. Even its
name—an allusion to Riot Grrrl’s empowered growl of female adolescence merged with
an evocation of feminist activism—brings to mind words like womyn, womon, and
wimminm. But while alternate spellings of woman and women were an attempt by
cultural/radical feminists of the past to express essential differences from men and
opposition to patriarchy (Case 64), grrl and grrrl are reactions to the pejorative use of
“girl” in terms of both gender and age, as well as race, ethnicity, and class. To understand
Grrl Action as a collective is to recognize the multiple and intersectional ways that both
the idea of “girl” and actual girls are marginalized. Certainly, feminist theatres of the
past dealt with (or failed to deal with) interlocking oppressions women faced, but the
very nature of the word girl—its multiple connotations, reclamations, and usages—posits
girls’ collectivity as more obviously influenced by intersectional oppressions at its core.
Grrl Action’s particular approach to collectivity draws on a range of practices
employed by past feminist theatres: collective authorship, consciousness-raising,
consensus, collaborative development/rehearsal, and an extension of collectivity into the
audience itself. Notably, Grrl Action does emphasize individual voice in the liberaldemocratic tradition Case ascribes to earlier collectives. However, while most
performance pieces are “solo” in that each girl conceptualizes, writes, and creates initial
56
staging for her piece, even so-called individual performances depend on the ensemble to
play key roles, create environment, and facilitate scene changes. In addition, when girls
write short responses to a single prompt, their pieces are often staged as one. The
summer 2006 workshop, for example, included a montage of girls’ odes to different body
parts, which they wrote after reading the poetry of Lucille Clifton and Pablo Neruda.
While this writing process was not necessarily collective in its inception, by the time girls
reached the point of performance, their voices overlapped, intertwined, and created a
collective meditation on the female body.
Girls also take on several topics and themes in their writing that occupied earlier
collectives. While their pieces are not a direct result of the kind of overt consciousnessraising feminist theatres of the 70s and 80s engaged in, they are often personally
influenced and inspired by other members of the collective, as classes involve a sort of
“writer’s workshop,” in which girls share work in-process, contemplate common themes
and ideas, and offer both support and feedback. Bryanna and Christina, for example, two
multiyear Grrl Action participants, report being influenced by Anna’s meditation on
mother-daughter affection—both in their performances and in their lives (Estrada and
Rice). The mother-daughter relationship, in fact, often plays a role in girls’ pieces—a
potentially risky endeavor given that most of them are still effectively under their
parents’ control—as do pieces about absent and/or negligent parents. Girls actively
complicate the notion of matrilineage, so important to earlier feminist ensembles, as they
interrogate adoption and question the meaning of family. They also explore physical and
sexual violence in their pieces, much as earlier collectives did, but, again, their work
bears the mark of age, as well as gender, race, and class: while adult women spoke out
57
against rape and sexual harassment, girls describe physical and sexual abuse by adults
with ongoing material power over them, as well as the violences they do to their own
bodies through self-mutilation and eating disorders.
As girls share pieces like these in rehearsal, an unspoken CR culture develops;
participants provide support for each other beyond creative feedback, and their shared
writing elicits physical affection and catalyzes unexpected coalitions and friendships. As
bonding over eating disorders and favored body parts suggests, girls in Grrl Action—
perhaps even more than the adult women who battled the male gaze before them—
examine their complex relationships with beauty culture and body image nearly every
year onstage. But girls explore the CR-process most obviously when they share
particularly difficult stories—about suicide attempts, abuse, neglect, and abandonment—
first with each other, and then in performance. These revelatory, frequently vulnerable
pieces—in which girls often speak directly to the audience through a hidden lavalier
microphone—evoke IARTBW’s earlier emphasis on the staging of CR. Girls either sit or
stand during these simply-performed pieces, and, as they break the fourth wall, the
audience becomes part of the collective Grrl Action community as allies and witnesses.
Besides pieces about victimization and violence, girls also share meditations on
anything from their messy rooms to their sense of Southern identity, their athletic
accomplishments to their relationship to shoes. They take on labels and cliques,
demeaning rhetorical questions, spoiled stepsisters, and George W. Bush. During the
signature opening and closing for Grrl Action performances each summer, girls dance
and pose as a group to a popular, girl-themed song that they decide upon together; but,
unlike theatres such as IARTBW, in which women sang songs themselves and invited
58
audiences to join them, Grrl Action intros and “outros” focus on collective dance, while
also giving girls opportunities to present their unique identities through physical poses,
shouted-out (nick)names, and high-energy answers to fill-in-the-blanks like, “A grrl is…”
This yearly intro/outro ritual highlights the diversity both among and within single girls.
Part of Grrl Action’s power, in fact, comes from the ways that individual stories, poems,
and ideas interact, complement, and contradict each other, even as they collectively
redefine girlhood.
When it comes to the artistic development process, Grrl Action’s structure differs
from feminist theatres of the past, in that it is collective in some ways and hierarchical in
others. Early on in the workshop, girls cooperatively construct, record, and post group
guidelines. They engage in discussions of artistic process, risk-taking, and what it means
to be a “grrl”; during certain years, they have even recorded these competing definitions,
questions, convictions, and concerns on large sheets of butcher paper that the ensemble
and instructors add to during the course of the three-week workshop. In a distinctively
feminist gesture towards bringing the process into the final product, these writings even
made up part of the set during more than one summer workshop.
Perhaps the most harrowing task the girls must complete together is deciding the
order of the performance, based on how they think individual pieces act in conversation
aesthetically and thematically. This is an undertaking that the girls complete entirely on
their own, without adults in the room, by arranging and rearranging individual sheets of
paper, each with the title of a solo or group piece on it, in a long line along one wall of
the Off Center. This show order stays up for the entire final week of the workshop, as the
adult director (most often Madge) tweaks and rearranges these sheets of paper in
59
consultation with girls, interns, and instructors to meet the needs of the larger
performance. Madge is hardly seizing power at this moment; she simply builds on girls’
efforts, tries to honor their desires, and fulfills a leadership role that is expected of her as
director.
However, the issue of artistic decision-making does bring up essential questions
about who controls the tools of production and program implementation in a collective.
As Mary K. Bentley claims, girls, unlike adult women, may have a greater need for role
models based on their age, experience, and more frequent bombardment with negative
representations in popular culture: “Girls need to see women in their daily lives who
summon the courage to speak and who insist on taking up space, in both public and
private spaces” (220). This transgression of traditionally gendered spaces and the
prescribed activities that occur therein can be a means of bringing both girls and women
into collective, intergenerational conversation through feminist discourse. Though any
instructor possesses a certain degree of power in a pedagogical relationship, Grrl Action
teachers and artistic staff attempt not only to place girls’ voices at the center of the
program, but also to engage in artistic interchange by sharing their own stories and
responses to writing prompts and exercises, a process that requires a certain degree of
vulnerability and active engagement in collectivity. And cross-generational community
is facilitated by the involvement of the high school- and college-aged interns, who serve
an essential role in keeping the program valid and vital to girls’ lives.
Besides their connections with adult administrators and interns, girls also develop
relationships with their audiences in ways that challenge the notion of feminist
collectivity. While feminist ensembles of the past often performed for other women
60
whom they considered an extension of their CR community, Grrl Action participants
perform for audiences comprised of family members, other youth, and anonymous adult
supporters, many of whom are Rude Mechs patrons and/or Austin-based teachers,
professors, and college students. Even though these audiences are overwhelmingly
supportive of their work, girls themselves cannot and do not assume they are speaking to
others who share their experiences or sympathize with their beliefs.
While company members in ensembles like WET “consciously performed for an
imagined feminist spectator, perceiving each audience member as an ‘acting partner’”
(Malnig and Rosenthal 204), girls in Grrl Action regularly report directing their pieces to
chosen spectators that they often “cast,” not as allies, but as ignorant individuals in the
truest sense of the word—those who, because of age, ethnicity, or sexuality, cannot
understand certain girls’ struggles first-hand.21 This casting process is incredibly
complicated, as girls (particularly those who return for multiple years) are also acutely
aware of the overwhelming support actual audience members give them. Girls’ “doublecasting” of audience members belies some of their own anxieties about including relative
strangers in their collective community. Their lack of control over who makes up their
audiences reveals a key difference between Grrl Action and feminist collectives of the
past, and illuminates the ways that collectives are not always in accord.
Even as girls create and evade community with adults involved in Grrl Action,
they also organize as a generational collective apart from them. Madge herself
21
I explore this “casting” issue in detail in chapter two. Briefly, every personal interview I conducted with
girls elicited an admission of a conscious casting of individual spectators and/or whole audiences, though
this is not a directive girls receive from faculty. The structure and diction of several girls’ pieces actually
evoke an antagonistic relationship between girls and their perceived audience, leaving their actual audience
in a precarious state when it comes to collectivity.
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emphasizes the fact that the informal time girls spend together may be just as valuable as
structured classes in terms of their collective development:
I think it’s important that the teachers step back and go to the office or
whatever, and just let the culture of the group kind of continue and the
teachers don’t have to be privy to every moment. […] There are so many
pedagogically valuable moments that happen with us completely out of the
room, and it’s the stuff that takes place before and after and during the
break. (Darlington, 23 Feb. 2006)
The relinquishing of (pedagogical) control is a necessary part of any collective,
particularly one in which adults facilitate for youth. Further, girls count on each other for
comments and suggestions, not just in whole-group sessions inspired by Liz Lerman’s
critical feedback method, but, more importantly, in casual and unmonitored conversations
among themselves. Bryanna and Christina even describe watching other girls’ physical
reactions during rehearsals of their pieces so that they know how and when to improve
their performances; they gauge body language and facial expressions as a means of
deciphering what is and is not working in their pieces—an indication of their trust in
other girls as artists and audiences (Estrada and Rice).
Hence, girls in Grrl Action create coalition, not just based on generational
similarities, but also around their shared identities as artists. Whereas feminist theatre
collectives (most) often included women who identified as artists in their larger lives
outside of the collective, Grrl Action participants discover what it means to be an artist
through their participation in the program. This discovery of a new commonality with
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multiple manifestations and entry points potentially bonds girls in ways less possible and
more problematic for adults.
Though Grrl Action has much in common structurally and strategically with
radical/cultural feminist collectives of the past, its relationship to female difference is
markedly different for at least two main reasons: 1) we now tend to see race, class, and
sexuality as shifting, complex, and performative, instead of potentially polarizing; and 2)
the age of Grrl Action participants creates new opportunities for coalition and
contemplation of difference within formerly monolithic identity markers. Teenage girls
often find affinity through categories less (apparently) pertinent to adults—cultural
interests (music, books, sports), familial situations (divorce, adoption, single-parent
homes), or slight differences in age (13 versus 16)—as well as the socio-economic, racial,
and sexual identities that often shift for them on an almost daily basis. Differences of
race, class, and sexuality that fractured and dissolved many early feminist collectives
actively exist in Grrl Action today, but their constructive power outweighs their capacity
to distance and divide. This is not to say that Grrl Action is a playground of universal
girlhood, where goodwill and commonalities conquer all. Beyond differences in
historical context, coalition may simply be easier for girls today than women thirty years
ago because female youth find identity in (and are marginalized by) a position defined
not only by gender, but by generation as well.
The girls who join Grrl Action all exist in the liminal space of adolescence, a time
defined principally by identity exploration and experimentation. While this liminality
can involve a great deal of performative pleasure, Barbara Hudson points out the
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challenges of girlhood’s particular brand of liminality in her influential essay “Femininity
and Adolescence”:
If something can be seen as a ‘phase,’ as normal albeit undesirable
youthful behavior, then the expectation is that increasing maturity will
bring about its end; but if a form of behavior is regarded as genderinappropriate then there are fears that a girl is seriously disturbed, that she
is not following the pattern of normal social and emotional development,
and the behavior comes to be judged not by its own seriousness in terms of
consequences, social harm done, degree of delinquent motivation, or any
other common-sense notion of seriousness, but it comes to be overblown
as a predictor of future, more serious trouble. Adolescence is, after all, the
status a teenager is moving out of, so that adolescent failings can be
tolerated; but femininity is what a girl is supposed to be acquiring, so that
any signs that she is rejecting rather than embracing the culturally-defined
femininity are treated […] as necessitating active intervention and urgent
resocialization. (44)
As Hudson’s argument suggests, examining girls’ identity performances as part of what it
means to be female in our world must be an essential project of feminism as a whole if
we are to continue to offer women of every age a wider and wider spectrum of identities
to choose from. Further, the idea that girls are always growing into their gender roles,
that they are rehearsing womanhood—an assumption exposed and exploded in each Grrl
Action performance—must be an essential concern for feminism and feminists if we are
to fully understand the implications of what it means, in Beauvoir’s words, to be a
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“woman made.” When girls are positioned solely as future feminists/women/artists, their
present contributions to feminism/femaleness/art are easily dismissed.
Rather than allowing Hudson’s “gender-inappropriateness” to stymie them, girls
today who are resistant to the normative feminine (and female) script can and do take on
roles as cultural producers to collectively redefine femininity, femaleness, and girlhood
itself. They act out subversive and multiple identities for an audience of relative
strangers who watch while they take center stage and perform the pieces of their choice—
an act of insubordination in almost any other context. It is only in performance that the
impact of girls’ collectivity and the nuance of their differences are fully realized.
Onstage, they do and undo and redo girlhood in each performative act and utterance. It is
these acts of doing and subversion that I look to next, as I examine the ways that specific
girls perform sexual identity and difference both individually and collectively.
Paullee’s “Skinny Dip” & Melissa’s “Sing”: Collective Queer Performativity
Both Paullee and Melissa, whose performances open this chapter, demonstrate the
breadth of girls’ attempts to negotiate the complexity of sexuality in the terrain of all-girl
spaces. Though one of these girls identified at the time of her performance as a lesbian
and the other as straight and they share neither ethnicity nor socioeconomic status, what
the girls and their pieces have in common is their queering of essentialist notions of
gender and sexuality and their deliberate play with the possibilities of subversive
girlhood. While I make no claims about (and have no interest in prescribing) either girl’s
sexuality today, my emphasis on the time of the performance is in keeping with theories
of queerness as a doing, as well as Judith Halberstam’s understanding of “queer
temporalities” as productively disruptive to hegemonic adult/youth binaries. However, in
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terms of Melissa’s self-labeling, I also acknowledge the importance of Eve Kosofky
Sedgwick’s claim that “the ability of anyone in the culture to support and honor gay kids
may depend on an ability to name them as such, notwithstanding that many gay adults
may never have been gay kids and some gay kids may not turn into gay adults” (42). By
reading these disparate performances queerly, I hope to illustrate Susan Driver’s claim
that “listening to the queer desiring voices of girls throws into question the very
typologies that restrict girls” (Queer Girls 2). In effect, my goal is to provide other girls
and women with performative alternatives to the “culturally-defined femininity” Hudson
denounces and the culture of containment that Harris condemns.
Queer performances eschew containment. Jill Dolan’s discussion of queer
performativity in her introduction to The Queerest Art provides a helpful frame for
understanding how queerness plays out in Melissa’s and Paullee’s pieces:
Queerness has come to encompass numerous strategies, all of which carry
the charge of multiplicity, openness, contradiction, contention, the
slipperiness of sexual practice seeping into discourse, into fashion, into
style and politics and theater. Queer skids on the slipperiness of its
investments, its identities, its human composition, the multifacetedness of
its interventions in culture. To be queer is not who you are, it’s what you
do, it’s your relation to dominant power, and your relation to marginality,
as a place of empowerment. (5)
Queerness—as performance, as action—allows the exploration of identities without
obliging an actor to choose only one or one part. Girls’ queer performances speak at least
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doubly to dominant power, as their youth is further grounds for marginalization. But
young women use the margins to their advantage in innovative ways in Grrl Action.
Paullee’s “Skinny Dip” begins as girls stand in a horseshoe shape around her and
she utters aloud the first three lines of her piece, “I speculate, I skinnydip, I shimmy.”
She then closes her eyes and leans back into a trust fall, dependent on the other girls to
support her weight and buoy her up to elbow/breast/heart level. She does not speak aloud
again until the very end of the performance. Instead, her prerecorded voice sounds
calmly through speakers that surround the space, while the seven girls, with Paullee in
their arms, walk in a wide oval that evokes the edges of a pool. The voiceover recounts a
skinny dipping expedition with girlfriends who giggle and gossip and talk about sex. The
poem is filled with abstracted and evocative language, including phrases like “the only
things keeping us from rolling out of the plastic isolation were our toes and hugs” and
“sometimes a bare chest presses my naked shoulder blades, and your pubic hair is a heart
on the small of my back.” During this narration, Paullee herself “floats” silently around
the space, each girl supporting a different part of her body from beneath. The recorded
skinny dipping account ends with the words, “Conversation becomes seamless, and until
the scramble for towels…,” as the sound of moving water washes in. The girls set
Paullee gently on the ground, and she finishes her voiceover’s sentence live with, “…I’m
floating.”
Throughout “Skinny Dip,” Paullee plays with the novelty of sexual exploration
and the excitement of nudity, while simultaneously drawing on more traditional tropes of
girlhood adolescence: “I forgot about exhibitionism when boobs hit tubes hit boobs hit
tubes 8000 times over” and “little girls, girls, girls anticipating every word spoken out of
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turn, sex tips and story time, awkward and warm.” She unmoors and embraces the
innocence of girlhood gossip in her poetry, all the while reminding her audience that this
exchange of sex tips and stories happens not at a traditional slumber party (though that
too could be easily eroticized), but on a tubing trip amongst naked girls. The vividness of
her imagery and the evocation of naked body parts (claimed for a sphere reserved entirely
for girls) hint at the potential underlying eroticism of girls’ friendships. Notably, not a
single reference to boys enters Paullee’s account of either the skinny dipping event or the
conversation that accompanies it. Paullee’s performance underscores Christie Milliken’s
assertion that queerness in general, and Judith Butler’s work in particular, has “enormous
appeal” to youth today, “in that queer identity has an authorizing/playful/performative
power offering an in-your-face inducement to have fun and make trouble” (287). For
girls like Paullee who offstage identify as straight, the playing space of the Off Center is
exactly that: a site where playing with sexuality and trying on alternate (and alternating)
roles can be a way to work through (and against) the heteronormativity of commercial
culture.
In many ways, Paullee uses this performance to create what Judith Halberstam
calls a “queer temporality” as she adopts “nonnormative [logic] about organizations of
community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (6). While
theatrical performance in general reframes time and space, the conventions of Paullee’s
particular performance intensify this shift. In the middle of the piece, the girls stop their
undulations for a moment, and Paullee is suspended in midair; she appears as she might
in an impromptu light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board slumber party game—an image that
queers not only the performance space and the space of her memory, but other imaginary
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contexts in which girls’ touch is commonplace. Hence, time is layered and multiple in
this moment—we see tubing adventure, slumber party, and Off Center all rolled into one.
Paullee ends her poem with a nod towards the conclusion of her tubing adventure,
when “seamless” conversation is interrupted by a “scramble for towels.” During the
performance itself, however, time and space are layered and intertwined, as we watch the
girls set Paullee gently on the ground with a soft smile on her face, just in time for her to
share her last live line with the audience: “I’m floating.” This is the one moment of the
performance when Paullee is not, in body, floating. It is an inversion of words and
worlds, at the same time that it is an evocation of sleep, a dream that flickers for an
instant.
As Paullee lies on the theatre’s cold, concrete floor, the sound of gurgling water
begins to trickle in. We can now see the invisible tube on which she lies, the presently
absent girls of her memory in tubes of their own around her. Even the live girls have
gone now, but Paullee never loses her smile. The covering of bodies is a return to the
quotidian, the everyday interactions in which this degree of bodily transgression is rarely
possible. But this physical embodiment, the enactment of Paullee’s memory as she floats
in the arms of Grrl Action performers, marks the Off Center as a space where she can
relive, albeit briefly (and clothed), the embrace of girls. The theatre allows her to play
with the permeability of sexuality, re-imagine the exhilaration of the original event, and
adopt a queer lens for reframing and refocusing the possibilities of and in female
adolescence.
Paullee’s piece opens up spaces of transgressive sexuality not only for her, but for
the other performers as well, as they become both the girls of Paullee’s memory and
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instant coconspirators in her reconfiguration of the meaning behind girls’ touch. Though
hers is an example of what would be considered a “solo” piece in Grrl Action, the girls in
the ensemble play several key roles: they do the actual labor of lifting Paullee; they
create a multilayered, trans-temporal environment onstage; and they facilitate the
audience’s (re)reading of girlhood sexuality. While Paullee’s identity performance is
built on her oral narrative and the individual experience that shaped it, her theatrical
performance is dependent on the collective efforts of girls who help her physically tell
her story with their bodies. It is only in a theatrical space—where ghosting is a premise
of live performance and multiple bodies collide in real and imagined time—that
autobiography can be both embodied and collective.
Melissa’s performance of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez plays on an even deeper level
with the meaning of collectivity and the complicated nature of desire—desire to be, to be
like, to have, to have sex with, and all the intricate spaces between and intersections of
such desires. After a brief introduction of herself and her relationship to Selena and to
singing in general, Melissa launches into a rendition of Selena’s “Como la Flor,” sung
through a hand-held microphone directly to the audience as she deftly imitates her icon’s
dance steps.
Melissa’s costume, culled from her own closet, demonstrates the layered
complexity of her identity performance from the very start of the piece. The click of
spiked, black heels signals her entrance, and a few faint whistles sound from the house.
Melissa has changed out of the pink polo shirt and jeans she sports in every other Grrl
Action piece and stands before her audience in black stretch pants and a red, glittery,
midriff-bearing, single-strapped tank top. She has accessorized her outfit with a gold,
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butterfly-shaped navel ring; and the wireless microphone she holds deftly in her hand
completes her transformation. While the black pants and tank top recall Selena’s own
performative body suits, Melissa wears gold hoop earrings and a hair bun throughout the
entire Grrl Action performance—an evocation of her own everyday appearance, as girls
have been told to wear clothes they feel comfortable in as their primary “costumes.” In
this seemingly insignificant costuming combination, Melissa’s performances of self and
Selena merge. Further, her addition of the belly button ring demonstrates the personal
flair she brings to her performance of Selena and, hence, of herself. Both erotic (in
placement) and youthful (in design), this accessory signals a level of ornamentation
beyond the everyday and allows Melissa to assert her own playful sexuality onstage.
This shift is built on more than one of Jackie Stacy’s extra-cinematic (or, in
Melissa’s case, extra-musical) identificatory practices: Melissa both copies Selena’s
appearance (or parts of it) and imitates Selena’s voice, gestures, and dance steps—all the
while asserting her own identity through her portrayal of Selena. As Stacey asserts,
imitation “involves a form of pretending or play-acting, and yet it is also different from
pretending, since pretending is represented as a process involving the whole star persona,
whereas imitation […] indicate[s] a partial taking on of some aspect of the star’s identity”
(163-164). Interestingly, Stacey herself reveals that many female film fans are drawn
specifically to stars’ singing and dancing onscreen. While these fans’ imitations take
place on streets and buses and private homes, Melissa’s staging of her identification
occurs in an actual theatre, rather than as an interruption to everyday life—situating her
imitation as a more obvious form of active cultural production.
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Melissa’s complicated costuming is in direct conversation with the introduction
she provides to her rendition of “Como la Flor”:
I love to sing. I love to sing when I’m sad. I love to sing when I’m happy.
I think I was born to be a singer. Since I was a little kid, I had, I have had
a lot of talent to imitate singers—how they sing and how they dance. I
tried to kill myself with pills and by jumping under a car, and it did not
work. I know that God don’t want me to die because He has something
special for me to do in this world. I know it’s singing.
Melissa frames her vocal performance within her own autobiographical material, layering
her life onto and into Selena’s, experimenting with the possibilities of identity and
implicitly asking her audience to understand the gravity of her embodiment, as well as its
potential pleasures and self-conscious acts of imitation.
Deborah Paredez’s analysis of young Latinas’ performances of Selena provides a
helpful lens in understanding Melissa’s enactment, as she argues that young Latinas
create “imaginative cartographies of identification through their participation in the
Selena phenomenon” (Paredez 479). Drawing on Elin Diamond’s claims in Unmaking
Mimesis about the “radical power of identification to override the constraints of identity”
(Diamond 126), Paredez explores the ways that young Latinas perform Selena “as a
means of self-discovery and collective articulation of Latina identity within the contested
terrains of Latinidad and larger transnational imaginaries” (Segura and Zavella 29). In
other words, Melissa’s particular performance of Selena—one of many she has
presumably enacted for friends and family—allows her to try out her own identities
onstage. Not only does Melissa (re)define what it means to be a girl both inside and
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outside the walls of the Off Center; by performing (as) Selena, she also links herself to a
transnational collective of cultural producers attempting to negotiate their own Latina
identities.
Melissa’s particular performance of Selena and her exploration/expansion of
Latina identity operate most noticeably in conjunction with a subversive experiment in
sexuality. As the pre-performance whistles signal, Melissa has deliberately sexualized
her appearance with Selena-inspired, figure-clinging, midriff-baring clothing. But, while
such costuming might seem to illustrate Aapola, Gonick, and Harris’s fears about girls’
media and cultural depictions in “varying degrees of (semi-)nudity,” Melissa’s assertion
of a body-confident, youthful sense of sexuality demonstrates the ways that female youth
can subvert and transform the gaze for their own performative purposes. Specifically,
Melissa never names her sexuality or even discusses it overtly onstage, but a queer
aesthetic plays out in what she does. When she stoops to pick up a rose and hand it to an
audience member in a decidedly romantic gesture, it is a woman she chooses as the object
of her affection.22 Similarly, her rendition of “Como la Flor” is punctuated by the squeals
of adoring fans played by other girls in the program. The affective markers of ecstatic
fandom—high-pitched screams, gaping mouths, and hands plastered across euphoric
faces—have long been associated with girls’ heteronormative reception practices in the
U.S., but Melissa claims and recontextualizes such fandom in a way that highlights the
queerness of diva worship and connects it to her shifting Latina identity.
22 Each summer, girls stage two final performances for live audiences. I have chosen to focus on the second
(Sunday) performance in my analysis here because it incorporates Melissa’s rose-giving gesture. While the
rose gesture was planned for both performances, because of the accelerated pace at which tech and dress
rehearsals occur in Grrl Action, Melissa mistakenly left it out of the first performance. Notably, in the
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Further, Melissa’s queer identity performance is part of her Latina identity
performance and vice versa—only two of the many she might explore in the moment. By
performing these identities in all their multiplicity and complexity, Melissa does the work
of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “mestiza consciousness”: she “break[s] down the subjectobject duality that keeps her a prisoner and [shows] in the flesh and through the images in
her work how duality is transcended” (80). In other words, Melissa uses her performance
to embody the ambiguity, contradictions, and possibility that mestiza consciousness
entails for a queer, adolescent Latina; and her body itself becomes a counterhegemonic
site.
As a more detailed look at the rose gesture suggests, this embodiment is in direct
conversation with Melissa’s vocalization. Notably, Melissa, like Selena, sings in
Spanish. Unlike Selena, however, Melissa performs for an audience in which many, if
not most, of the spectators do not understand the language.23 But Melissa makes no
attempt at translation; the audience members must meet her on her own terms. She casts
them into the performance as witnesses to her identity-making, some more literally than
others. In the last verse of her performance before the final chorus, Melissa stoops to
pick up a red rose and hand it quickly to a female audience member with a closed-lipped
smile—enigmatic, playful, and shy. She finishes singing, “Si vieras como duele perder tu
amor (If you were to see how it hurts to lose your love),” but she veers from the
traditional lyrics in the line that follows, borrowing instead from the first verse, “Sin
Saturday performance, Melissa mentions Gloria Trevi and Olga Tañon, in addition to Selena, as singers she
likes to “imitate”—extending the repertoire of her performance of Latina identity.
23 I count myself among these spectators. My own knowledge of Spanish is limited, a fact that forced me
to research Melissa’s performance in a way that cast me as novice and she as expert, a necessary and
appropriate inversion prompted by the complexity of her performance.
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embargo te deseo lo major (Nevertheless I wish you the best).” The actual lyrics, “Con tu
adios te llevas mi corazon (With your farewell you take with you my heart),” are never
uttered aloud. Though the replacement line might suggest an act of empowerment, as
Melissa holds onto the core of herself (her heart) instead of giving it away in the end, it
also seems that the moment of rose-giving is one in which she is, quite simply, nervous.
During the performance, Melissa, in fact, seems to forget her place in the song,
distracted from the lyrics for a moment as she concentrates on finding the flower and
handing it to the woman of her choice. This gesture of connection with a stranger—a
tiny moment of communitas, of kindness, of sexual energy—is one that entails actual risk
for Melissa at the same time that it operates as a utopian performative. What would
happen, for instance, if the audience member rejected her offer? And, conversely, how
can this mutual kindness of giving and accepting—this performance of queer,
intergenerational love—lift an audience above the immediate moment, give us hope for
the kinds of connections still marginalized in mainstream culture? Melissa’s young,
queer Latina identity performance takes on extra weight in this simple gesture, as the
audience laughs in recognition of the romantic resonance of the rose and, in this laughter,
creates community.
Melissa’s individual identity performance and Selena “imitation” could not occur
without the ensemble of Grrl Action girls, who support her work both physically and
emotionally. Melissa begins her performance of “Como la Flor” alone onstage,
mastering a simple dance in which she twists her feet and hips from side to side in
Selena-inspired steps. As soon as she voices her first words, “Yo sé que tienes un nuevo
amor (I know that you have a new love),” however, the entire ensemble of girls runs out
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screaming; they flank Melissa on either side, sometimes shrieking, sometimes dancing a
messier version of her own steps. As soon as they enter, Melissa’s face relaxes into a
grateful, amused smile; her center of gravity drops and she breathes a little more easily.
The collective reminds her that she is supported—not just in her role as Selena and theirs
as fans, but also in all of their performances of self.
Dancing is a logical site for girls’ interests and investments to merge.24 In her
essay, “Dance and Social Fantasy,” Angela McRobbie writes about the embodied
freedom of girls’ public dance practices in dancehalls and discos, which one might
translate to clubs, parties, and concerts in more contemporary American parlance:
Dance evokes fantasy because it sets in motion a dual relationship
projecting both internally towards the self and externally towards the
‘other’; which is to say that dance as a leisure activity connects desires for
the self with those for somebody else. It articulates adolescence and
girlhood with femininity and female sexuality and it does this by and
through the body. (144-145)
When the kind of leisure dance that McRobbie describes is framed within a theatrical
performance, we can see more clearly how desire might work queerly between and
among girls onstage. Certainly, Melissa’s fantasy “other” is at times the Off Center
24
Melissa is not the only Grrl Action participant who embraces the transformative role of dance.
Bronwynn, a four-year Grrl Action veteran, writes in her 2006 application, “I love dancing when I feel like
nobody’s there, and when we got to dance onstage to Selena, that made my summer” (Ollington). While
Bronwynn highlights the fact that she enjoys dancing by herself, she somehow connects this act not only to
the other participants in Grrl Action, but to an entire public audience. She does not write “but when we got
to dance onstage”; instead the private and public spheres are bridged with an unexpected and. Bronwynn’s
pleasure in the placement of an otherwise private activity on a public stage allows her to make the private
public on her own terms, and collectively transform public space itself by performing for people who
would not ordinarily be listening.
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audience, but it is also the crowd of screaming girls that surrounds her and clues in
audience members about how they are to read/frame the performance themselves. Their
desire for Melissa-as/through-Selena facilitates Melissa’s own sense of (queer) desire and
desirability. When these fans clamor for her autograph at the end of her song, looking as
though they might faint at her sheer proximity, Melissa can smile big and wave goodbye,
enjoying her own sexual and performative magnetism on multiple levels. It is only
through a collective re-envisioning of girlhood that Melissa’s transgressive experiment
with queer, Latina sexuality can fully thrive.
Sarah’s “Fuzzy Chica” & Zoey’s “Thongs”: Collective Body Projects
Sarah likes body hair. She delivers a manifesto against shaving of any kind.
“Pubes,” she tells us, are a kind of “dry lube during sex,” and armpit hair disperses
pheromones instrumental to “fucking.” Paullee appears in a shiny gold bathing suit, and
Sarah pokes and prods her body to illustrate key points: “I’m just saying this would hurt
a lot more if Paullee was bald.” The girls field questions from the audience about the
merits of hair until Bronwynn enters with vaudevillian dismay at the length of the sketch:
“I didn’t shave just for you,” she says.
In a separate piece, Zoey tackles the trope of the infomercial with exuberant
parody: “Are you sick and tired of the exposed thongs and bellies of perfect strangers…?
Me neither!” She goes on to deliver an homage to the versatility and variety of the thong,
casting the rest of the girls as audience to two minutes of mock-television. All the while,
Zoey wields her microphone like a weapon. She asks Sarah, “How many thongs do you
own?” proffering the mic for a moment before yanking it away. Sarah only gets a chance
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to say, “Actually…” before Zoey responds: “Are you serious? I have too many to count
too!”
As they explore the relationship between sexuality and beauty culture in two
different pieces, Sarah and Zoey illuminate the ways that performance uniquely frames
differences among girls to create more complex understandings of girlhood as a whole
and, at times, to illustrate the potential pitfalls of collectivity. While both pieces are
comic in tone, they are stylistically at different ends of the performative spectrum: in
Sarah’s playful demo-lecture and Q & A, she performs a casual, conversational version
of herself; and in Zoey’s heightened parody, she takes on a more obvious
character/caricature to mimic the discourse of mainstream media. But both identity
performances implicate other girl performers in ways both liberating and constricting.
Sarah’s “Fuzzy Chica” moves from her self-reflective observation about the antibody-hair messages women receive, to her own narrative about when and why she
stopped shaving herself. After recounting her conflicting feelings about her desires to
both eschew shaving and hide her body hair, she discusses the basic benefits of hairy
legs: “You can feel the wind, and you can feel water, and stuff tickles more….” But soon
Sarah calls for help with a loud, “Paullee, get out here!” and Paullee enters in a gold lamé
bathing suit and heels as Sarah’s model. As Sarah refers to Paullee’s leg, pubic, and
armpit hair while lecturing the audience about their respective purposes and pleasures,
she explains that she is happy to answer questions about her own body hair, but that most
people are too scared to ask about it. She tells the audience, “Really, you don’t have to
be afraid of a girl with hairy legs! If you have any questions, just ask me!” This
imperative is a genuine one, as both Sarah and Paullee prompt the audience to ask
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anything they want about body hair. After the pair skillfully improvise through a few
questions, Bronwynn enters with the line, “I have a question: Are you guys done?”
before urging the girls offstage.
Sarah’s piece begins, “Seventeen says, ‘Love your body…as long as your legs
look like Chihuahuas.’ Nair says, ‘You need me.’ Venus says, ‘You’re a real woman if
you use me’,” an explicit evocation of the limiting and contradictory messages girls and
women are sent through commercial media. She speaks these lines to a small rag doll, a
prop she has actually picked up during Zoey’s piece. As Sarah unpacks the contradictory
discourse of the mainstream beauty industry, this doll—an object loaded with
associations of girlhood innocence—changes roles in her hands. It is now the recipient of
her message, a tiny, inanimate girl who Sarah counsels, consoles, and commiserates with.
The doll is both an extension of Sarah and a tool for framing her audience as students in
her lesson to follow. She is the doll, and we are the doll.
Here, Sarah embodies what Susannah Stern points to as one functional form of
adolescent self-disclosure: “When adolescents discuss their opinions, beliefs, attitudes,
values, and standards, their disclosure typically facilitates self-clarification. The
articulation process helps them to formulate their thoughts more clearly, and it also often
elicits direct feedback from others” (230). In Sarah’s case, self-clarification is carefully
and cleverly built into the performance structure itself, not only as she describes her
former ambivalence about her display of body hair to the doll, but also as she initiates
and maintains actual dialogue with her live audience while critiquing the ultra-feminized,
predominately white, heteronormative homogeneity endorsed in magazines like
Seventeen. Here, Sarah provides an embodied alternative to McRobbie’s claims that
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most commercial magazines for girls and women, like the Jackie magazine she herself
studies, address girls as a homogenous group, which “serves to obscure differences of, for
example, class or race, between women”; McRobbie argues that Jackie “asserts a classless, race-less sameness, a kind of false unity which assumes a common experience of
womanhood or girlhood” (“Jackie Magazine” 69). But Sarah’s performance is an active
protest against the erasure of difference found in so many popular media representations
of girls.
Further, Bronwynn’s interruption at the end of this performance is a reminder that
Sarah’s opinion, though passionate and compelling, is not the only view on girls’ hair
growth and sexuality. Their brief encounter is an overt acknowledgement of girls’
differences, but not a foil to Sarah’s incisive comic commentary. The frame of collective
performance allows room for both girls’ voices to be honored, and while Bronwynn’s
clipped tone and final word might imply an upper-hand in the argument, Sarah’s
engaging edification of the audience tells another story.
Bronwynn is not the only girl to complicate and collectivize Sarah’s performance.
Paullee, in her glittering gold bathing suit, plays another integral role in this collective
identity exploration, as she rewrites the rules of feminine costuming and sexual appeal.
Most notably, she allows and even encourages Sarah to playfully prod parts of her body,
from the legs to the bikini line, to illustrate her points. There is mischievous, queer
performativity between these girls, as they collaboratively counter heteronormative
representations of female adolescence. Paullee especially, who kisses her own armpits
and fields audience questions with ease, undoes easy ideas about objectification and the
male gaze. By standing before an audience in gold lamé and inviting Sarah to touch her
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in intimate ways, Paullee demonstrates an awareness of a culture that would otherwise
objectify her and, in defiance, manages to reclaim her own body even as (or perhaps
because) it is on display. While Sarah’s performance critiques the destructive nature of
the beauty industry, it also does important work positing girls as active agents and
sexually desirous subjects, rather than merely passive victims of the male gaze. Sarah’s
lecture, in fact, is rooted in an assumption of sexual desire and pleasure among girls, a
discourse far less common in commercial culture than her straightforward talk might
imply.
In effect, Sarah and Paullee situate the Off Center as a transgressive space where
girls can subvert hegemonic (hair) discourses, while also exploring what Michelle Fine
calls a “genuine discourse of desire” (33). In a landmark study of girls’ sex education,
Fine cites four major discourses of sexuality available to young women: sexuality as
violence, sexuality as victimization, sexuality as individual morality, and the much less
prevalent discourse of desire (31-33). Instead of buying into any of the first three
options, Sarah’s performance takes the fourth as a given, as her discussion of hair as a
“kind of dry lube” and her liberal touching of Paullee’s body exemplify Fine’s argument
that “a genuine discourse of desire would invite adolescents to explore what feels good
and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experiences, needs, and limits. Such a
discourse would release females from a position of receptivity, enable an analysis of the
dialectics of victimization and pleasure, and would pose female adolescents as subjects of
sexuality, initiators as well as negotiators” (33).
Hair—namely women’s leg, armpit, and pubic hair—is generally part of the
bodily landscape that must be kept private, so private in fact that it is often expected to
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disappear altogether, and yet Sarah defies societal expectations by not only growing hair,
but performing it onstage. Tellingly, in an entire volume about “body projects,” Joan
Jacobs Brumberg reserves a mere paragraph for shaving, perhaps because it is a practice
so naturalized into the habitus of feminine girlhood that it evades in-depth analysis. But
Sarah stages the (supposed) excess of the female body in a hair-based body project of her
own. She not only publicizes and deconstructs “personal” grooming rituals; she also
actively sexualizes girls’ experiences with the very hair commercial culture warns
against. In so doing, she opens up a range of representational opportunities for other girls
and women to “try out” their own hair. It is the unique power of live performance that
allows her to do so.
Through her brief, interactive faux lecture, Sarah uses the tools that theatre offers
to sort through a complicated issue in ways that often elude other artists and writers.
Carolyn Mackler, in an essay entitled “memoirs of a (sorta) ex-shaver,” provides a
helpful example of the power and limitations even performative writing has in addressing
narratives of containment in reference to girls’ bodies:
What body hair needs is more visibility. It needs a publicity agent and a
marketing campaign. It needs models and actresses to flounce around
with hairy legs and pits. When those trailblazing, unshaven singers and
songwriters like Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams stomp onto stage, it
sends a loud and clear holler into the hairless vacuum. It propels us to see
it, to think about it, to actually make the connection that this is a real
woman, not the reverse. It cracks open a door that will eventually lead to
women having the choice (not the compulsory burden) of whether they
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want to shave. Maybe someday I’ll become a poster child for body hair.
For now, I’m just revving up to go an entire summer without shaving, to
storm the office in a sundress and sandals, to wear whatever the hell I
want to the beach, to not feel ashamed to show my hairy armpits to the
world. (61)
In almost uncanny synchronicity, Sarah’s theatrical performance does the very thing
Mackler claims to exist only for female singer-songwriters and future versions of herself.
Sarah’s and Paullee’s explicit bodies in performance (to borrow from Schneider) are
evidence that Mackler’s dream is possible, but this performance sheds light not only on
what it means to be a woman (though I find the phrase “real woman” unfortunate), but on
the possibilities for subversive girlhood. If girls—as Hudson, Harris, and Beauvoir
argue—are in the process of learning what it means to be a woman, how can women like
Mackler learn what it means to be a girl like Sarah and Paullee, who are comfortable
wearing not (only) a “sundress and sandals,” but leg-baring shorts and a gold lamé
bathing suit?
Sarah and Paullee have created, in regards to female body hair, yet another
utopian performative—in this case an embodied exchange that “persuade[s] us that
beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression and unequal power relations lives a future that
might be different, one whose potential we can feel as we’re seared by the promise of a
present that gestures towards a better later” (Dolan, Utopia in Performance 7). The girls
work collaboratively with each other and collectively with the audience to imagine this
“better later”; their performance evokes a utopian performative of girls’ non-normative
body projects, as well as a utopian performative of what cross-generational, collaborative
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feminist collectivity can entail. The Q & A with the audience reveals the depth of
commitment many spectators have in creating a community of support for the girls. Most
of their questions are playful demonstrations of affinity, “Why are you so cool?” and
“You must be a Republican…”, and the girls answer these queries with ease: “It’s the
body hair” and “Yup!” respectively. When one man complains that his girlfriend has
hairy legs, but she’s “mean to [him] sometimes,” Paullee smartly intervenes with, “It’s
the bald parts of her that are mean.” The girls’ grasp on comedy, improvisation, and
feminist politics situate them as experts to a novice audience.
Zoey’s performance also takes on the power of the gaze and girls’ sexuality, but
hers is a politics of parody that implicates other girls and audiences in ways more
potentially problematic. In “Thongs,” she plays the part of a perky, thong-wearing
television personality, using the handheld microphone to espouse her ideas about and
endorsements of the thong, while periodically asking her audience seemingly genuine
questions she never waits for the answers to. In this way, her performance productively
contrasts Sarah’s genuine exchanges with spectators. At the end of Zoey’s (or, rather, her
character’s) meditation on how and where and why to buy thongs, the rest of the Grrl
Action cast parades past her carrying thongs of their own, and stopping to perform their
attitudes towards these garments in a range of gestures and poses.
Every member of the ensemble plays a role in Zoey’s piece; in fact, her
performance could not be realized without the collective efforts of the girls—both to
create a TV-viewing environment and to complicate the notion of girls as passive fashion
consumers. At the start of Zoey’s performance, before she herself even enters, girls
gather on and around a couch that signals the intimacy of home, and focus on an
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imaginary screen as Bronwynn announces, “Let’s watch some TV!” A song that sounds
like a cross between commercial jingle and shopping mall muzak begins, and Zoey enters
in a sleeveless, midriff-baring, black t-shirt emblazoned with a sun that says, “Smile!”
She affects a hip-swaying glide and an artificial grin, and, as she holds a wireless
microphone to her lips, we see two pairs of thong underwear strangely hanging from her
fist. From the first seconds of this performance, Zoey’s physicality, costuming, and
affect, along with the perky, banal music and Bronwynn’s exclamation about TV, cue the
audience into the satiric nature of the piece and Zoey’s critique of commercial media
representations of girlhood.
The nonverbal elements of Zoey’s performance are matched by her exuberant
tone and overzealous diction. She asks questions like, “Do you prefer the sexy, lacy
ones, or the more plain, simple simpleton ones?”—one of many rhetorical queries that
make up the recurring gag in which she proffers her microphone to girls and spectators
before pulling it away to answer questions herself: “I like them both too!” Here, Zoey’s
false questions and overdetermined answers not only provide a humorous critique of
commercial culture; they also cast her entire audience as successfully interpellated girl
consumers.
Zoey’s emphasis on (false) choice when it comes to thongs underscores what
Angela McRobbie calls the “‘post-feminist masquerade’ where the fashion and beauty
system appears to displace traditional modes of patriarchal authority” (“Top Girls?” 718).
McRobbie argues that fashions like “spindly stilettos and ‘pencil’ skirts” escape
denunciation as constraining and entrapping styles because wearing these items is “now a
matter of choice rather than obligation” (“Top Girls?” 723). Zoey’s satirical presentation
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of girls’ delimited fashion choices—“simple simpleton” versus “sexy lacy,” rather than,
say, thong versus long underwear or no underwear at all—illustrates the absurdity and
limited scope of girls’ choices in commercial culture.
Zoey’s performance also illuminates the mixed messages girls (and women)
receive in regards to the aging process and sexual appeal, as is evident in one of Zoey’s
earliest rhetorical questions, “Don’t you just love going shopping on a Friday afternoon at
stores such as Victoria’s Secret, Forever 21, Limited Too, and Gap Body?” While
Limited Too, owned by Tween Brands, Inc. (formerly Too, Inc.), targets girls from 7 to
14 (Too, Inc.); Forever 21, “one of the top three teen shopping brands nationwide” is,
according to the store’s website, popular “not only with young shoppers but also
customers who are young at heart” (Forever 21). The range of stores Zoey lists not only
exposes the sexualization of undergarments for girls and “tweens”; it also demonstrates
the ways that commercial culture simultaneously encourages girls to aspire to an age at
which their purchasing power is greater and their sexual practices legal and older women
to desire to stay forever at an age of purportedly perpetual (hetero)sexual appeal.
Zoey’s claim that one can wear her thong backwards, but only over jeans or shorts
to avoid “that camel toe, which is a no no!” further illustrates her sense of the absurdity in
these marketing schemes. With this line, Zoey’s character endorses what even the thongignorant in the audience know is an obvious breech of fashion convention and know-how.
Since the “camel toe” line is delivered with the same faux sincerity as the rest of the
performance, Zoey prompts her audience to see the absurdity in all thong culture and, in
effect, in an industry that tries to define girls’ identities for them through sexualized
fashion.
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Further, Zoey’s emphasis on the appeal of thongs that stick out of jeans or
pajamas pants and her directive, “Don’t overexaggerate by pulling it up over your hip
bones—ouch!” illustrates the culture of containment that Harris denounces. Not only
would pulling a thong too far above the hips physically hurt, it would also be too overt a
suggestion of sexualization. Displaying just a glimpse of the thong demonstrates a girl’s
mastery of bodily containment at the same time that it shows just the right kind of barely
visible heteronormative eroticism. Zoey’s instructions about the “right” way to wear a
thong can be read as an implicit critique of a kind of commodity feminism, in which
purchasing power begets a false sense of freedom and control over one’s selfpresentation. This sense of fashion “rightness” illustrates Catherine Driscoll’s argument
that “fashion provides a range of already sanctioned codes for coherence and recognition
to be cited by the girl in pursuit of identity” (245). Hence, Zoey’s performance is an
opportunity for her to explore her own identity in light of and through thong fashion. But
Zoey’s performative exploration of the thong is far more than mere satire; the visual and
embodied languages of the stage expose another layer of Zoey’s relationship with this
sexualized clothing item: actual enjoyment.
While Zoey does adopt many satiric elements in her piece, there are a number of
embodied details in her performance that undercut her work as purely parodic. First, she
herself wears a thong that the entire audience can see creeping out from her jeans at just
the right hip level, a visual effect that suggests there might be some pride in or
exploration of her own sexual identity embedded in the comedy that bridges the gap
between performance and everyday life. Further, the additional thongs that Zoey shares
with the audience are, in fact, her own; and the content of her piece belies an insider’s
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knowledge of thong culture—where to buy them, how to wear them, what types of thongs
one can choose from. Even as she critiques the thong, she also takes pleasure in wearing
one. Without ever overtly acknowledging her dual perspectives, Zoey exploits the tools
that theatre provides—costuming, movement, gesture, vocal tone, and staging, as well as
written text and ensemble work—to demonstrate the complexity of her identity
performance and ambivalence about her role as both sexual agent and object.
The equation of identity exploration with a garment that both contains and
(arguably) heterosexualizes the female body is, in many ways, a pedagogical and feminist
dilemma in a program like Grrl Action that prides itself on free expression. Zoey’s
performance, in fact, raises many questions for me as a Grrl Action instructor,
administrator, and scholar: Is there a way to read the thong as feminist, or at least outside
of a heteronormative narrative of desire? Need the thong be read as feminist for Zoey’s
performance to be critically astute and/or legitimate? Can feminist collectivity
encompass non-feminist perspectives? Further, is Zoey’s satire harder to accept as such
because she is a thin, attractive, upper-middle-class, white girl who also takes pleasure in
wearing thongs both in and outside the theatre space? Perhaps most importantly, if
Zoey’s performance were an unaffected, all-out endorsement of the thong, would hers
still be a legitimately empowered Grrl Action performance, or would certain adults
dismiss her as duped by commercial culture?
This last question reveals the cross-generational pedagogical predicament of Grrl
Action—how, when, and why adult instructors intervene in girls’ performances. While I
explore the role adults play in girls’ collective autobiography and identity performance in
great detail in chapter three, it is worth mentioning here that it is often quite difficult for
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staff members to determine when and how to give girls the cultural capital they need to
critique the discourses that constrict them, and when and how to listen and learn from
their own experiences of girlhood. As a progressive educator, I fear dismissing Zoey as
unskilled in the art of coherent satire as much as I fear seeing her as misguided in her
attempt to merge a critique and an embrace of the thong. Both sides of this dilemma
hinge on interpreting Zoey as too young (i.e., inexperienced and naïve) to know what she
is doing.
Gabby’s “Mix It Up”
A brief anecdotal detour from Zoey’s 2005 piece sheds a bit more light on this
complicated question of sexual identity exploration and pedagogical responsibility.
During the 2007 Grrl Action performance, another girl named Gabby choreographed an
original dance inspired by Beyoncé’s “Baby Boy.” With a refrain like, “Baby boy, you
stay on my mind, fulfill my fantasies. I think about you all the time. I see you in my
dreams,” the song sanctions both heterosexual desire and female sexual passivity.
Gabby’s dance—filled with belly-dance-inspired twists of her hips and splits and flips
that showcased her flexibility—left a few adult audience members I spoke to lamenting
how disappointingly hyper-heterosexual and reifying of girls’ objectification this
performance was.
Certainly, I can see how several spectators would receive Gabby’s dance in this
way, but the lens through which I read it was inflected by my insider knowledge of
Gabby both during and outside of Grrl Action rehearsals. She and another girl in the
program nursed an ongoing flirtation that staff and interns alike all noticed separately; I
read Gabby’s dance in part through the lens of this flirtation, so it was difficult for me to
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see her piece as an example of heterosexual self-objectification. In addition, I saw
moments during her “Baby Boy” performance that merged traditionally masculine and
feminine gestures—punches and kicks with spins and twists. Where Beyoncé’s video
depicts submissive, bed-bound, writhing bodies, Gabby’s dance was acrobatic and active.
Overall, I found her performance an intriguing complication of the heterosexual gaze,
rather than an endorsement of it. I also feared that those who saw Gabby’s dance as
hypersexual were subconsciously imbuing her Latina body—young, slim, and
curvaceous—with a degree of sexualization she herself did not intend.
But, after listening to the observations of feminist audience members without my
background knowledge, I began to wonder if what I imagined as the preferred reading of
Gabby’s performance might not matter as much as the majority reading: that Gabby was
merely replicating hypersexual images of female bodies to attract the male gaze. As a
Grrl Action instructor, how might I have helped Gabby anticipate and, if she wanted to,
avoid such a reading of her dance? If, on the other hand, she was intending to
hypersexualize herself, how might she and I have entered into a conversation in which I
could try to understand, without judgment or condescension, why such a self-portrayal
was important to her?
Two years later, I am still ambivalent about Gabby’s performance—how to read
it, how I might have helped her clarify her intentions, how audiences make meaning of
girls’ bodies onstage. Four years later, I am even more ambivalent about Zoey’s. Her
piece prompts more questions in terms of collectivity because it casts other girls into a
dramatic structure they may not have chosen for themselves—a fact both liberating and
limiting.
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Zoey’s “Thongs” Revisited
Throughout Zoey’s piece, each girl rises from her place on the couch and walks
across the stage holding—and interacting with—a thong of her own. In these brief
gestural exchanges with spectators, girls demonstrate their attitudes towards the thongs
through reactions ranging from eager grins to skeptical, raised eyebrows. Melissa
actually flings her thong into the house with a faux “oops!” and holds her hands up to her
face in mock dismay. Lequita sticks her tongue out and points two thumbs down in
protest. Jackie parades by with a large stuffed frog dressed in a thong. Isaura holds no
thong at all, but sports an awkward and embarrassed smile and shakes her head in a
barely discernable no.25 In these gestures, girls assert their own identities while also
aiding Zoey in her particular identity performance.
The range of girls’ reactions illustrates not only their collective reframing of
girlhood through multiple depictions of thong attitude, but also how some girls have more
at stake than others when it comes to the sexualization and containment of their bodies.
As Harris argues, “Whilst sexuality is presented as problematic for all young women,
young ‘ethnic’ women are more closely monitored by the majority culture; for both too
much and not enough (hetero)sexuality is deemed to be trouble, and their assumed
‘culture clash’ status causes problems in achieving the balance” (“Everything a Teenage
Girl Should Know” 118). Harris certainly raises questions as to why Melissa, Lequita,
Jackie, and Isaura position themselves with a more critical relationship to the thong than
Paullee, Bronwynn, and Rosa, though I am loathe to jump to conclusions about
25
While girls’ reactions varied a bit between the Saturday and Sunday performances, I draw from the range
of salient performative practices employed on both afternoons.
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motivation without soliciting their opinions on this issue. But no matter the motivation,
Zoey’s performance does point to the importance of reflecting on who can afford to
engage in which discourses when.
Just the thong parade itself runs the risk of mooring certain girls in a dramatic
structure that implicates rather than empowers them; simply the exploration of sexuality
of any kind can be difficult for certain girls. As Madge explains, girls bring a variety of
sexual experiences and attitudes into the program: “Some of them have had sex, some of
them have had a lot of different kinds of sex with a lot of different partners and different
genders, and then some of them come in having very little experience, and I feel that pain
too of just the inherent peer pressure” (Darlington, 23 Feb. 2006). In effect, I wonder
whether the thong performance, though it gives girls the opportunity to express their
different attitudes towards and relationships with these items, might be oppressive to
someone like Isaura who walks across the stage without one, looking sheepish and
awkward, as though she is not proud of her difference as much as embarrassed by her
opposition.
Further, if certain constraints were put on Zoey’s performance, somehow limiting
its execution or scope, would this then undercut the program’s stand against censorship or
its commitment to giving Zoey, along with all of the girls, as much voice as possible in
her solo piece? Though there are certainly no easy answers to these questions of
difference, their consideration is imperative in thinking through both critical pedagogy
and feminist collectivity with female youth whose emergent identities complicate the
performance of sexuality in its many manifestations.
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Samantha & Lequita’s “I’m Sick of It”: Collectivity and Difference
There are differences among those we think of as the same, and
similarities among those we think of as different. When we speak to each
other, it is not as simple as a clash of identities. […] To embrace the
complexity, to accept the ambiguity of the human experience, is to
understand that what we think of as “self” and what we think of as “other”
actually need one another to exist. To understand this is to look at
“difference” and not judge.
–Mocha Jean Herrup, “Virtual Identity”
On Saturday, Samantha stands in a small spotlight that glows bright in a wash of
darkness. Feet planted firm, arms bent at the elbows, she reads from a half sheet of
paper, her eyes darting up to the audience only briefly: “I’m sick of going to school and
pretending that my mom isn’t gay because Georgetown is like the most conservative
place I know.” The rest of her performance, without much more movement than the
opening moment, is an avalanche of words:
If everyone there was like the people in Austin I wouldn’t have a problem,
but they’re limited. It’s like the only thing they’ve ever known and
everything else is like weird or foreign, untouchable, and it won’t ever
affect them because they have a safety net for now. I can’t wait to see
them in the real world where everyone is different, where gays and
lesbians do exist, where there is really such a thing as a ghetto.
In her critique of Georgetown, Samantha points to the embeddedness of a
heteronormativity that serves as a far-reaching and invisible “safety net” for all those who
take its conventions as a given rather than an imposed, constructed, and/or direct threat to
their freedoms. She illuminates what Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant call “a whole
field of social relations” fueled by a “privatized sexual culture [that] bestows on its sexual
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practices a tacit sense of rightness and normalcy” (Warner 194). The heteronormativity
that Samantha cites is, in Berlant’s and Warner’s words, “more than ideology, or
prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of
the forms and arrangements of social life” (Warner 194). As Samantha implies, public
schools are certainly some of the greatest culprits in this production.
Because in part of the impact of this poem, Samantha actually wound up moving
with her mother and her mother’s partner to the more politically progressive Austin,
where Samantha began classes at a new high school in the fall of 2005 with, in her words,
a “more diverse bunch of friends” (Hutchinson). While such a move certainly does not
remedy the homophobia and prejudice that still pervade her former community,
Samantha’s piece is an illustration of the ways that the frame of autobiographical
performance can give girls the opportunity to not only perform their non-normative
identities, but also enact material changes in their everyday lives. While Samantha
idealizes the more urban Austin as a utopian alternative to the suburban Georgetown, her
desire for a “real” world of difference and her emphasis on her new “diverse bunch of
friends” demonstrate a desire for multiple ways of understanding not only what it means
to be a girl, but also what it means to be a human being trapped in, not saved by, the everpresent net of (hetero)normativity.
Samantha’s piece is not a performance of her own sexuality, but it takes up the
topic of queerness in ways that facilitate and embolden other girls’ performances of
sexuality. On Sunday, Lequita stands in a small spotlight that glows bright in a wash of
darkness. Feet planted firm, arms bent at the elbows, she reads from a half sheet of
paper, her eyes fixed on the audience in a steady gaze: “I’m sick of going to school and
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pretending that my mom isn’t gay because Georgetown is like the most conservative
place I know.” Lequita’s version of this piece is prefaced by a one-sentence introduction:
“I’m reading this for Samantha Hutchinson.” Samantha has had to miss this second Grrl
Action performance because of an unanticipated family emergency. Lequita’s rendering
of the writing is more deliberate and emphatic than Samantha’s, and the lines resonate
differently in her mouth, particularly the assumption about Austin’s idyllic tolerance—
ironic because Lequita, an Austinite herself, has not reaped the benefits of a purportedly
more liberal climate, raising questions about the class- and race-based politics Samantha
seems not to consider. Lequita has asked Samantha how to read her piece, and Samantha
has told her that style does not matter as long as she conveys “the message of how
uncomfortable it is to have a gay parent and not be able to tell people about it”
(Bradshaw). In this directive, Samantha acknowledges the fact that there are multiple
ways that youth experience gay parents—that difference exists in affective style even
within what may look to an outsider like a homogenous category.
Partly because of the impact of this poem, during the very last week of the
summer workshop, Lequita revealed that not only was her own mother a lesbian, but she
herself identified as gay.26 Lequita then decided to come out on stage during the last
moments of the performance when she knew her father, with whom she had not discussed
her sexuality, would be in the audience to hear her. Her performative utterance, “I’m a
lesbian with a dream to become someone,” is part of the Grrl Action finale, in which girls
26
Here, I privilege the words gay and lesbian over queer because they are the words that Lequita herself
chooses.
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enter one-by-one and form a line across the front of the stage, each sharing her own
version of the sentence, “I’m a ____ with a dream to become a ____.” Thus, Lequita’s
“I’m a lesbian with a dream to become someone” occurs after Winona’s “I’m a
multiethnic girl with the dream to become someone,” and before Jackie’s “I’m a girl with
a dream to become a woman.” Her performance of “lesbian” is strategic in light of other
girls’ self-definitions. In a personal interview I conducted with her several months after
the performance, she herself acknowledged that her choice of statement was based
partially on the fact that “lesbian” was unrepresented in the Grrl Action collective as a
whole: “I just was like, you know, I’m gonna do that because no one else was doing that”
(Bradshaw). She foregrounded her sexuality, in other words, while (and because) other
girls were focused on ethnicity, aspiration, avocation, age, and gender. Implicit in
Lequita’s decision is a belief in the importance of multiple vantage points in a true
collective.
Since the 2005 performance, Lequita’s ideas about and performance of her own
sexuality have changed. In my most recent conversations with her, she named herself as
“bi, I guess,” underscoring the fluidity of sexuality, the difficulty of self-labeling, and the
fact that, as Halberstam argues, “preadult, preidentitarian girl roles […] are not absolutely
predictive of either heterosexual or lesbian adulthoods; rather, the desires, the play, and
the anguish they access allow us to theorize other relations to identity” (177). In other
words, Lequita’s identity performance opens up possibilities not just for other girls, but
for the ways we understand sexuality in general as fluid, mutable, and multifaceted.
Further, while Lequita’s expression of identity is indeed shifting, her particular
performance of “lesbian” in 2005 is rooted in her corporeal and material circumstances.
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Drawing on E. Patrick Johnson’s evocation of “quare studies,” Susan Driver emphasizes
the importance in Girls’ Studies of understanding the “racialized, class, and national
contours of youth, situating sexuality and gender variance within rich and interwoven
narratives that defy scientific reification” (“Introducing” 13). Hence, Lequita’s coming
out, though fluid and performative, is situated in her unique, 16-year-old, African
American, working-class experience. Further, it is influenced by any number of contextdependent factors: the fact that her father is in the audience, the fact that there is an
audience, the ways that other girls perform themselves, the discourse of Grrl Action, and
the space of the Off Center, among many others. So too her coming out influences her
father, the audience, other girls, and the future discourse of Grrl Action. It even ghosts
the space of the Off Center, offering new ways of viewing future Grrl Action
performances. Lequita’s performance is, in other words, both doing and thing done.
Lequita and Samantha, like many of the girls in Grrl Action, come from different
backgrounds culturally and socio-economically, but in many ways they are the clearest
illustration of Mocha Jean Herrup’s conviction that “there are differences among those
we think of as the same, and similarities among those we think of as different” (250).
Lequita did not, at least consciously, join Grrl Action with the intention of performing her
identity, sexual or otherwise. Her mother’s sexuality was something she rarely discussed.
As the program unfolded and Samantha shared her story openly, Lequita decided to come
out as a lesbian first to the group of girls and teachers and afterwards to a public audience
because, as she says, “I felt like if I’m going to be open with the girls I’m in this camp
with, why not be honest with the audience? I don’t want to have to fake who I am”
(Bradshaw). Here, Lequita raises an essential point about more general issues of
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collectivity and difference. She sees girls in Grrl Action as somehow linked in their
difference from their own (more homogenous) racial or socio-economic communities
established outside of the program and, hence, brought together in Grrl Action by
similarity in their differences from these other, perhaps more obvious communities: “It
felt like it didn’t matter what I said. I was going to fit in regardless because we all had
different problems in our lives, reasons we weren’t accepted either by our parents, or just
people, just our peers flat out, or maybe by our culture” (Bradshaw).
Hence, the Off Center is not only a site where girls of various socio-economic,
racial, and ethnic backgrounds, and with a range of relationships to sexuality, explore
their differences from each other; it is also a place where they can find others who have
similar interests in exploring the complexity of identity, queer or otherwise. Grrl Action
becomes in some ways both the home and the streets in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s
famous call for coalition (359). The home-street/street-home is a hybrid of sorts, a place
of both danger and comfort, in many ways analogous to Samantha’s definition of family,
a word she herself applies to Grrl Action: “I can identify with them and they can identify
with me, and I know that even if I were to fight with one of them, they would still like
me” (Hutchinson). Perhaps this is semantic hairsplitting, but Samantha notably does not
say we can identify with each other; instead, she gives each person, each identity, space
for its own exploration and existence. The young lesbian subject, or the young queer
subject, or the young straight subject examining her life through a queer, non-normative,
or bifocal lens—along with the collective combination of all these individuals—has the
potential to crack through Harris’s culture of containment and embody a moment of true
utopian performativity.
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Taken as whole, Grrl Action is a collective expression of embodied difference and
an assertion of the right to express this difference through individual identity
performance. More importantly, it is an exploration of the ways that difference can be a
site of conflict and collaboration, of disagreement and respect. As such, it is a space for
adolescent girls to rehearse and perform different identities, sexual and otherwise, for as
Kearney argues, “producing girls are helping to expand the experiences of contemporary
girlhood and thus the spectrum of identities and activities in which all females can invest”
(12). This production is one of art, one of identity, one of collectivity through and
because of difference.
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Chapter 2
Grrl Action as Definitional Ceremony:
Girls Performing “I” and “You”
Lequita’s story continues. Her contribution to girlhood and to queerness as a
doing extends beyond her collaboration with Samantha and the Grrl Action ensemble into
a complex relationship with the audience. When Lequita proclaims, “I’m a lesbian with a
dream to become someone” during the Grrl Action finale, her self-definition is important
because of more than its queer content; its structure as an I-statement (among other Istatements) is key in the collective (re)definition of girlhood as well.
The performance finale is aptly called the “outro” in Grrl Action culture—the
final ensemble piece that occurs annually as girls collectively “sign off” through anything
from playful poses to shouted names. No matter the content or tone of the outro, is it
always a moment of overt self-definition for girls. With their carefully crafted Istatements, girls privilege one or two identity markers over others to position themselves
in the closing moments of the show—a discursive strategy that situates girlhood as
perpetual becoming and allows girls to strategize about how they choose to frame
themselves in the eyes of the audience in the performative present.
While Lequita stresses the importance of not “faking who [she is]” onstage, she
and the audience also share a reciprocal anonymity that she desires on some level
(Bradshaw). In describing her emotions leading up to the performance, Lequita admits,
“At first, I was nervous, but then I thought about it. Most of these people don’t know me.
Most of these people don’t know the kind of person I am. So I just told ’em flat out. I
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just took a deep breath and said it” (Bradshaw). There is something freeing to Lequita in
the fact that these spectators (and even the girls of Grrl Action) are not members of her
everyday community. Anonymity assuages fears of judgment and false interpretation.
Spectators must take in what Lequita says, and she need not hear their responses. What is
most important is that they are there, that they must listen—that their presence allows
Lequita to create a utopian performative in which she practices for a better future in
which she need not feel nervous about such utterances. Thus, Lequita describes feeling
“liberated” in the moment of performance—the first time she has come out to a group of
people in a public space, as well as to her own father.27 Hence, when she comes out
onstage, she not only opens up new possibilities for performing girlhood queerly and
queerness girlishly; she also demonstrates a degree of volition in focusing the spectatorial
lens with the I-statement she recites alongside other girls. She makes a public ceremony
out of a performative utterance.28
I return to Lequita’s I-statement here because it situates two of my concerns in
this chapter: first, how girls use what Barbara Myerhoff calls “definitional ceremonies”
to perform key pieces of their identities onstage; and, relatedly, how girls extend the
notion of autobiographical collectivity into complex relationships with their audiences.
While I examined Grrl Action as a contemporary feminist collective in chapter two (and
27
While Lequita acknowledges that her father was first “confused” and then “not surprised” by her
statement, I have chosen not to explore their personal conversations further, as they fall outside of the
auspices of my research on identity performance and would require a different kind of ethnographic
methodology (Bradshaw).
28 I use the expression “performative utterance” here and throughout this chapter, not as J.L. Austin
conceives of the term, but in the way Sedgwick suggests that all speech acts (and even silences) are
performative, that all language does something (Epistemology of the Closet; Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity). Lequita’s and other girls’ I-statements (both those linked to being and doing
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that thread continues in a less pronounced way in this chapter as well), here I am more
interested in what it means to consider the final Grrl Action summer workshop
performance a negotiated definitional ceremony—negotiated in the sense that girls both
do and do not control the structure in which they perform their identities onstage.
In addition, while the performance of sexuality provides the backbone of chapter
two, here I focus—whenever possible, but especially in my final close readings—on
girls’ performances of race and class, inextricably linked as always to any number of
different identity markers and individual experiences. Rather than examining girls’
implicit performances of identity in the midst of storytelling, impersonation, lecture, and
parody, as I did in chapter two, here I parse out girls’ explicit I-statements to analyze the
complexity of identity performance in seemingly static, self-evident, and/or “authentic”
presentations of self. I am interested in not only which I-statements girls strategically
adopt when; but also how embodiment, vocalization, and spatiotemporal context add
complexity, contradiction, and nuance to their words—how collective autobiographical
theatre exposes the depth of even the most linguistically basic presentations of identity.
As Sidonie Smith argues, “skin is the literal and metaphorical borderland between the
materiality of the autobiographical ‘I’ and the contextual surround of the world” (266).
In other words, every “I” is situated, specific, and dependent on either an implied or
stated “you.”
Though they might seem to be solitary assertions, girls’ I-statements are actually
embodied experiments with collective autobiography in which “collectivity” occurs in
verbs) are what Sedgwick calls transformative performatives in the sense that they transform girlhood
itself, with girls’ individual and collective assertions of identity, feeling, belief, and desire.
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multiple ways: girls alternately link themselves to other girls, to audiences, and to
members of a culture, ethnicity, family, or community un- or underrepresented at the Off
Center. In other words, girls enact bell hooks’s assertion that “the self exist[s] in relation,
[is] dependent for its very being on the lives and experiences of everyone, the self not as
signifier of one ‘I’ but the coming together of many ‘I’s, the self as embodying collective
reality past and present, family and community” (31). hooks’s conception of collective
autobiography is especially pertinent to my own argument, as she links a poststructuralist
awareness of the “social construction of the self in relation” to the process of “selfrecovery,” in which “we work to reunite fragments of being, to recover our history” (31).
Autobiography is a performance of “I,” as well as “we,” “they,” and “you.” Girls
actively negotiate these positions in the Off Center for (imagined and actual) audiences
that (may) marginalize them outside of the theatre space.
Girls are, in fact, savvy identity performers, as they strategically emphasize
certain parts of their identities at times and consciously complicate and layer these
identities at others, all the while relying on the collective nature of their I-statements to
create definitional ceremonies of girlhood together. They illustrate Gilligan and Brown’s
understanding of girlhood as a “borderland, where their ‘I’ meets and for a short time
self-consciously holds the ‘eye’ of the culture” (167). In other words, girls’ I-statements
are self-conscious, shifting, and contextual performances of identity in light of a larger
culture, rather than essentialized and static unveilings of a singular, authentic self.
In the pages that follow, I first discuss the meaning and application of definitional
ceremonies, their dependence on audience, and the ways that the Grrl Action summer
workshop performance itself can be understood as a negotiated definitional ceremony.
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Drawing on personal interviews I conducted with several Grrl Action participants in
2008, I explore how girls consciously cast spectators into their definitional ceremonies,
suggesting that they are often aware of a multiple and shifting “you” as well as “I.” I
briefly explore the role of I-statements in autobiographical performances past and
present, before looking in depth at girls’ performative I-statements in the Grrl Action
intro and outro pieces from 2005 to 2008. I use these ensemble pieces to examine the
ways that Grrl Action’s dramaturgical structure provides both freedoms and limitations
for girls attempting to create definitional ceremonies, and exemplifies the range of ways
girls cast their audiences into the “you” role. I conclude this chapter with close readings
of Isaura’s “I am Someone” in 2005 and Sketch’s “Princess” in 2006 as definitional
ceremonies in their own right. While I am wary of reinscribing invisible whiteness and
middle-classness as the “norm” of girlhood by conducting extended analyses of only
these two girls, I am motivated in my methodology by the kinds of identity performances
that Isaura and Sketch themselves create. Their I- and you-statements are overtly linked
to ethnicity and class, and I hope to honor their emphases on these kinds of selfdefinition.
Definitional Ceremonies and the Role of the Audience
In her landmark ethnographic study of Holocaust survivors at Aliyah Senior
Citizens’ Center, Barbara Myerhoff observed that it “was the custom for Center members
to display and dramatize themselves in many forms, informal and formal, planned and
spontaneous: by storytelling, creating difficulties, making scenes; by positioning
themselves to be noticed, recorded, listened to, and photographed” (263). These
moments of dramatization, these performances of self, are what she calls “definitional
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ceremonies”: events orchestrated and enacted by people accustomed to generation-based
marginalization. Rather than remaining complacent about their invisibility, the Center
members created various definitional ceremonies as a means of “being seen and in one’s
own terms, garnering witnesses to one’s worth, vitality, and being” (Myerhoff 263). In
definitional ceremonies, everyday performers make audience members out of those who
might otherwise ignore their experiences; and they direct their self-productions with a
variety of performative tactics.
While Myerhoff does include “formal” dramatization as a type of definitional
ceremony, I am interested in what it means to apply her theories to live performance in a
theatre space—particularly a theatre space in which the actors don’t have total control
over the production process or dramaturgical structure of their ceremonies. Because a
major project of grassroots performance like Grrl Action is to stage the stories of
marginalized people, it is no surprise that scholars and practitioners of community-based
theatre often draw on Myerhoff (both directly and indirectly) to validate, complicate, and
frame their work.29 In terms of my own research, I ask what the concept of definitional
ceremonies—particularly ones in which the terms of self-presentation are negotiated—
can illuminate about the efficacy of girls’ identity performances. Conversely, I consider
29
While Sonja Kuftinec explores the possibilities and limitations of definitional ceremonies in communitybased work in her discussion of Cornerstone Theater’s faith-based cycle (Kuftinec), several other scholars
draw (at least peripherally) on Myerhoff’s work as well: Mady Schutzman references Myerhoff in her
discussion of the applicability of Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to contemporary North American
contexts in “Brechtian Shamanism: The Political Therapy of Augusto Boal” (148). Jan Cohen-Cruz looks
to Myerhoff’s discussion of ritual in her book Local Acts, as she introduces the discourse of communitybased theatre (5). Cohen-Cruz and Richard Owen Geer reference Myerhoff in separate articles on
Community Arts Network in their aims to explore the very definition of grassroots performance (CohenCruz, “The Ecology of Theatre-in-Community”; Geer, “Of the People”).
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how girls’ identity performances deepen the meaning of definitional ceremonies and
expose the dynamic power structures inherent in their execution.
Definitional ceremonies are an especially helpful tool for understanding the role
of the audience in girls’ identity performances. Such ceremonies are already implicit in
autobiographical performance’s emphasis on personal storytelling, which, as Lynn Miller
explains, “relies on the interaction of storyteller, story, and audience to acknowledge—in
some way make real or palpable—the teller’s emotional pain and experience and to
provide a space for healing and communal acceptance or redress” (320). I would take
Miller’s claim one step further to argue that such “communal acceptance or redress” is
dependent on performers’ conscious casting of audiences into complex roles of their own.
Sometimes, girls position their audiences as sympathetic allies, and sometimes as the
forces they’re fighting back against—from specific parents and peers to the larger
commercial culture. Their casting of audiences, much like their performances of
themselves, shifts both during the whole Grrl Action performance and within single
pieces. Often, girls give the audience a dual identity—as literal spectators to their work
and as the implicit or explicit “you”/”you”s in their pieces.
Even beyond merely casting spectators, many Grrl Action performers explicitly
acknowledge their desires to elicit specific responses from their audiences. “Being seen
and in one’s own terms” prompts girls not just to take up space and share their selfperformances, but also to carefully monitor audiences to make sure they exhibit desired
reactions in terms of facial expressions, body language, and audible responses like
laughter and applause. Bryanna and Christina, for example, describe the importance of
gauging specific spectators’ embodied responses:
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BRYANNA: I think that you do have power when you do go up ’cause,
for me anyways, I sort of have a sense of smugness that I know what I’m
saying they’re gonna have to listen to it, and you look at their reactions
like, “Yeah, I did that.” You got to do that, you got to actually put
emotion on someone else’s face—that was acting, maybe, hopefully. […]
It’s so interesting, it’s really weird, cause it’s as if I’m two separate
people, like I’m still saying these words with as much emotion as I’m
supposed to be, but then I get to see everybody else’s, and it’s like, “OK,
I’m actually doing this, and it’s actually going pretty well.” […] The day I
actually tried to rehearse my performance, I remember I was like, “OK,
are you going to be moved by what you’re saying? Are you actually going
to listen to it? So make sure that you do listen.”
CHRISTINA: I look directly at [the audience]. I see them actually
listening intently and that kind of gives me more incentive to continue
doing what I’m doing ’cause they’re not looking away in shame or
boredom. And so, as Bryanna said, that kind of tells you that, “Yes, you
are doing something right. Keep going with that as much as you can.”
And so looking at audience members’ faces while also doing your
performance is actually really helpful. (Estrada and Rice)
Both girls describe their active dependence on the audience in shaping their
performative self-definitions. Bryanna especially points to her potential commonalities
and collective connection with spectators in her assertion that what moves her will ideally
move an audience. If she is invested in her own material, she implies, then her audience
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will be as well. But she also points to the “smugness” she feels knowing spectators are
“gonna have to listen” to her—a nod to the reversal of everyday power dynamics a
definitional ceremony can enact. The power of the audience is still in play, however,
even as the girls take center stage: both Bryanna and Christina acknowledge the
audience’s role in telling them if they are “doing something right,” or if things are “going
pretty well.” While they express pleasure at eliciting positive reactions (engaged faces,
intent gazes, etc.), their words also belie a level of anxiety and/or surprise about
spectators’ enthusiasm.
Bryanna’s comments about feeling as if she is “two different people” demonstrate
her awareness of the audience’s role in her identity performance; she is both performing a
version of herself onstage and monitoring spectators simultaneously. I might even
dissect pieces of her self-avowed split further to argue that the part of her monitoring the
audience is both desirous of their support and dismissive of their potential derision.
When I ask the girls how they would react to perceived negative reactions from audience
members, Bryanna responds, “I’d think they were stupid,” and Christina follows up,
“Pretty much.” When I prod a bit and ask if these reactions might offend them, Bryanna
says, “Not at all,” and Christina takes on the role of detached observer: “It really is
interesting to see people’s reactions because they’re just so amazing and different
depending on each person, though sometimes there can be one group reaction” (Estrada
and Rice). While these responses might seem to contradict Bryanna and Christina’s
earlier investment in the audience, I would argue that they are part of the very nature of
negotiated definitional ceremonies; the girls recognize that they cannot control all
audience members’ reactions, but they can control whether they themselves invest (or
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perform investment) in these reactions. Their layered responses to audience receptivity
demonstrate the multifaceted power dynamics at stake in these ceremonies.
Bryanna and Christina empower themselves as performers by not allowing their
connection to their audiences to grow too deep, even as they simultaneously acknowledge
their dependence on them as well. In effect, they maintain a kind of emotional distance
built on their practice of audience-casting. This casting is not a situating of spectators as
the “you” in the context of their pieces, as much as it is a designating of audience
member “types.” Bryanna and Christina, both interested in biology, take what they call a
“scientific” approach in their conscious and meticulous observation of the audience:
BRYANNA: Before I start, like as the music is about to start or whatever
[during the intro], I look around the audience and I sort of sum up each
person and use that person as a target. […] I go for different audience
members. I’ll choose a really young kid, a middle-aged woman, maybe
someone from my family or a friend’s family, an old person, […] and then
I’ll do both sexes. […] I’ve been paying a lot of attention in science class
this year, so I want to be able to get the perfect mix and see if my results
will come out right, or to get a good estimate of my results.
CHRISTINA: I don’t look at their age or anything. I actually look to see
who’s paying attention, who’s actually paying attention, who’s not, who
looks like they sincerely want to be there, and then the people who,
they’re kind of wandering, like they’re confused, and as if they want to
know what’s happening, but they don’t—just the people who I actually try
to make eye contact with. (Estrada and Rice)
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By looking so intently at their audiences, Bryanna and Christina “sum up” spectators in a
way that both reverses/reciprocates the gaze, and also makes audiences prey to the
everyday essentialization and othering they experience as girls.
But while “summing” someone up based solely on physical characteristics is a
potentially problematic process, both girls seem to be stressing the fact that it is most
important to them to be understood by a wide range of people. Christina’s comments
imply that “who’s actually paying attention” does not necessarily correlate with one
ethnicity, gender, or age group. Her sense of artistic community is based on coalition
among those paying attention—a seeming endorsement of Herrup’s assertion that “there
are differences among those we think of as the same, and similarities among those we
think of as different” (250). Further, Christina doesn’t interpret confusion as
condemnation or dismissal. Rather, she consciously directs her gaze at those she sees
trying to understand, but, because of their differences from her or their distance from her
ideas, may find it harder to grasp her message. For her, definitional ceremonies seem
built on connection and communitas with those willing and eager to engage. Both
Christina and Bryanna imply that a heterogeneous audience is necessary to the efficacy of
their definitional ceremonies onstage—proof that they can (re)define themselves in the
eyes of a diverse bunch of spectators.
Girls often comment on the importance of performing for mixed-aged, culturally
diverse groups. Trey, in fact, claims that it is actually easier for her to communicate with
a large, multiethnic, multigenerational audience, rather than a more homogenous one.
Grrl Action audiences, she explains, draw from “different age ranges and different
cultures, so you’re not talking to a 75-year-old guy, and that’s it. […] When there’s
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different backgrounds, it’s easier, versus one background ’cause one background might
not interpret the same message as you” (Hendricks).30 Here, Trey suggests that
performing solely for an audience that she feels marginalized by outside of the theatre
space is not ideal, but also that the “75-year-old guy” might actually be persuaded to
understand the message of her performance more readily in the midst of a mixedgendered, multiethnic, multigenerational audience.
Trey doesn’t limit her fears of homogeneity to only those with seemingly obvious
generation- and gender-based differences. She feels that performing solely for other
teenage girls would not allow her to fully convey her ideas either: “Teenagers are
basically trying to get their message out, basically, and that’s good and they’ll spread it to
other teenagers and stuff, but [I don’t] want to just get it to one set of groups. Also, I want
to get it to the older people too, […] especially parents who bring their children, or bring
their own parents with them, or a friend” (Hendricks). Trey suggests here that teenagers
may be so intent on their own identity exploration that accepting and understanding
others’ might be a struggle for them. She crafts a compelling argument for the necessity
of cross-generational coalition-building to facilitate girls’ (re)definitions of self. But she
makes no assumptions about who will or won’t appreciate her performance—dismissing
short-sighted cultural feminist notions of automatic gender affinity. Instead, she leaves
the door open for unexpected advocates and empathizers.
30
Trey defines “background” in her interview as “just culture and different ethnic groups,” which seems to
apply to not only ethnicity, but age and gender as well.
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I-Statements, Intros, and Outros
Girls’ casting of their audiences is most evident in the I-statements they deliver at
different points during the Grrl Action performance, if only because every “I” implies a
“you.” Further, most girls’ I-statements are identity performances delivered in direct
address, positioning spectators as both literal theatergoers and the “you”s evoked by the
narrative structures of girls’ pieces. I-statements take the form of anything from girls’
assertions of their ethnic, sexual, and gender identities; to reclamations of their bodies; to
lists of their personal attributes, opinions, and desires. Altogether, they play a key role in
the Grrl Action performance’s role as definitional ceremony because they are, quite
literally, overt utterances of self- and group-definition.
These performative I-statements are in many ways an inheritance from earlier
feminist collectives. The introduction to WET’s first major work, The Daughters Cycle,
for example, was an incantation called “The Matrilineage,” in which each woman
grounded her own identity among multiple generations and in comparison/contrast to the
other women in the performance: “I am Sondra, daughter of Lille, daughter of Sarah
Rebecca, daughter of Tzivia, daughter of a woman from Austria whose name I don’t
know….I am Mary, daughter of Chew Kwong Ping, daughter of Nok Yip Lee, daughter
of a peasant woman from my ancestral village of Sun Wei in Guangdong, China…” (qtd.
in Malnig and Rosenthal 205). While all women came from a line of daughters that they
could only trace back so far, their lineages varied in terms of ethnicity, class, and
nationality—an illustration of both commonalities and differences.
Spiderwoman also took on the matrilineal “I am” in their Reverb-ber-ber-rations,
as Muriel Miguel ended the performance with the assertion,
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I am an Indian woman.
I am proud of the women that came before me.
I am a woman with two daughters.
I am a woman with a woman lover.
A woman that is claiming the wisdom of the women in my family.
I am here now.
I am saying this now because to deny these events about me and my life
would be denying my children. (qtd. in Schneider, “Big Show” 248)
Miguel’s I-statements add complexity to the concept of performative matrilineage found
in The Daughters Cycle, as she foregrounds ethnic and cultural identity and sexuality
while emphasizing not only the women who came before her, but her own daughters, the
fluidity of time, and the importance of the performative present. Girls’ self-enunciative
statements in Grrl Action mirror Miguel’s in many ways, as girls foreground and move
among multiple identities strategically throughout their performances; and, like The
Daughters Cycle, Grrl Action’s efficacy in redefining girlhood is contingent upon the
confluence and contradiction of many assertions of “I.”
Nowhere is this collective redefinition through multiple I-statements more evident
than the annual intros and outros performed by the whole ensemble. During these
opening and closing moments, Grrl Action performers ghost not only their own past
performances, but also other participants’ performances of girlhood over years, days, and
even single afternoons—an embodied gesture that demonstrates the multiplicity and
complexity of girlhood itself and illustrates bell hooks’ assertion that the self is a
collective creation, not the “signifier of one ‘I’ but the coming together of many ‘I’s”
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(31). Sometimes, girls foreground or return to important points they want to emphasize
or reiterate in these moments; and sometimes (as is the case with Lequita) they deliver
entirely new information. Because the intros and outros are delivered in overt selfdefining moments of direct address, girls often use them to prime audience expectations
and leave spectators with a lens through which to retroactively interpret their
performances. As a whole, they provide a frame for understanding whole Grrl Action
performances as negotiated definitional ceremonies.
Intro/Outro 2005
While girls’ individual pieces vary in tone and topic from year to year, the Grrl
Action intros and outros from 2005 to 2008 all have certain characteristics in common:
they are set to fast-tempo popular songs, often with girl-related lyrics; they include a
series of high-energy poses; they prompt girls to share their names aloud; they are
delivered in direct address; and, often, they involve both I-statements and either explicit
or implicit (re)definitions of the term “girl.” The juxtaposition of I-statements with girldefinitions both complicates and personalizes the performance of girlhood. The 2005
intro, for example, reflects girls’ diverse ideas about what being a girl means, from
Rosa’s “Being a girl is awesome,” to Jackie’s “Being a girl is better than being a boy,” to
Melissa’s “Being a girl sucks,” to Sarah’s “Being a girl is a responsibility of being a
warrior.”
While these opening statements operate collectively to provide a nuanced and
complex understanding of “girl,” they also resonate with girls’ individual identity
performances in the I-statements that come at the end of the production:
ISAURA: I’m a Mexican with a dream to become someone.
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MELISSA: I’m a Puerto Rican with a dream to become a singer.
DOMATILA: I’m a Mexican with a dream to become someone.
ROSA: I’m a girl with a dream to become someone.
ZOEY: I’m an actress with a dream to go to Hollywood.
SARAH: I’m a comicista with a dream to become someone.
BRONWYNN: I’m a swimmer with a dream to become an Olympian.
SAMANTHA: I’m a girl with a dream to become someone.
PAULLEE: I’m a girl who knows she is someone.
WINONA: I’m a multiethnic girl with a dream to become someone.
LEQUITA: I’m a lesbian with a dream to become someone.
JACKIE: I’m a girl with a dream to become a woman.
These final moments of self-definition illuminate a great deal about girls’ individual
identity performances and the collective performance of girlhood, especially in regards to
ethnicity and race. Not a single white girl highlights her race—an implicit nod to
invisible whiteness—but perhaps even more significant is the fact that three of the girls
who emphasize their ethnicity (Isaura, Melissa, and Tila) do not stress the fact that they
are girls at all. Isaura, a U.S. citizen by birth, in fact calls herself “Mexican,” and
Domatila, also a citizen, follows suit. Rather than dubbing herself Mexican American or
Chicana, Isaura allies herself with her ethnic heritage and the immigrants about whom
she has created so many pieces over the years; she performs what psychologists and
sociologists call “strong ethnic identification,” exercised by those who “align themselves
with their country of family origin and retain traditional values, norms, and behavior
patterns” (Rotheram-Borus, et al. 37). I emphasize the word performs here, as Isaura’s
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context-dependent identity presentation, which I explore in greater detail later in this
chapter, is strategic and fluid, underscoring her desire to align herself in the last minutes
of the show with a community oftentimes underrepresented in Off Center audiences.
Isaura’s I-statement is a performance, in fact, of what Gayatri Spivak calls
“strategic essentialism,” when, in the most basic terms, “you pick up the universal that
will give you the power to fight against the other side” (12).31 While Spivak
acknowledges that “theoretical purity” suffers and differences among members of a
group are often minimized in such a process, strategic essentialism still affords
marginalized people the opportunity to organize for political progress and representation.
In the moment when she says, “I am a Mexican with a dream to become someone,”
Isaura creates solidarity with family members and other unknown spectators who share
her ethnic identification. Her enactment of collectivity reaches beyond the fourth wall
into the audience itself. At the same time, she emphasizes differences among female
youth, strategic ethnic essentialism allows her to perform her fears about gender- and
generation-based essentialism in the term “girl.” Isaura also stresses her distance from
other members of the audience who don’t share her ethnic affiliation. The implied “you”
to her “I” is multiple and complex.
While the Grrl Action performance provides ample opportunities for girls to
engage in strategic essentialism, the structure and composition of the program works
against its potentially negative by-products. When Domatila adopts the same sentence as
Isaura, she demonstrates that there are multiple ways to perform “I’m a Mexican with a
31
While Spivak has distanced herself from this term, in part because if its overuse, I still find it critically
valuable in examining girls as a doubly (and, often, triply) marginalized group.
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dream to become someone,” while also exhibiting her solidarity with Isaura in this
moment. The repetition of this statement, made possible by the theatrical frame, eschews
outright ethnic essentializing, as the majority Anglo audience must witnesses two
embodied versions of the same sentence, weighing them against the backdrop of two very
different performances of girlhood throughout the afternoon.32 And yet Isaura and
Domatila are dependent on each other in the creation of their definitional ceremonies;
their dual performance of “Mexican” identity is collaboratively built. Domatila’s
decision about how to fill in the blanks of her I-statement has, in fact, been influenced by
Isaura’s earlier choice to highlight her own ethnicity, which also opens up room for girls
like Melissa and Winona to do the same. The strategic, unspoken coalition among these
girls of color allows them to collectively emphasize the importance of ethnicity in their
self-definitions and prompt their audiences to understand “girl” beyond the terrain of
gender and generation. Their individual “I”s, as hooks suggests, are collective creations.
Further, Rosa and Samantha, both white, middle-class girls who adopt the
sentence, “I’m a girl with a dream to become someone” demonstrate, with the absence of
emphasis on ethnicity, the ways that “whiteness functions as an unmarked neutral
category, a norm which is equivalent to being human” (Weedon 154). Other white girls
choose appellations like “actress,” “swimmer,” and even “comicista,” further indication
(along with Paullee’s “I’m a girl who knows she is someone”) that white Grrl Action
participants feel freer to perform their aspirations, passions, and self-confidence, while
32
While Trey, Bryanna, and Christina point to the ethnic and generational diversity of spectators in their
interviews, Grrl Action audiences are still largely white and middle-class, as they draw from Rude Mechs’
base of patrons, as well as students and professors from the University of Texas, St. Edward’s University,
and Southwestern University. While certain girls see and value spectators’ differences, I do not want to
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girls of color must choose among identities more carefully. Invisible whiteness affords
certain Grrl Action girls more freedom of self-definition.
I do not wish to take this line of argumentation so far as to suggest that girls of
color are limited to describing only their ethnicities, nor do I want to imply that ethnicitybased I-statements aren’t empowered identity performances. However, I do believe,
given the structure of some of the intros and outros, that girls of color must often make
choices that white girls assume they need not. And often these girls must choose between
multiple identity performances marginalized in mainstream culture. Lequita makes this
choice when she performs “lesbian,” and, to a certain extent, Jackie does the same when
she performs “girl” with a dream to become “woman.” At the risk of reading too much
into this moment, I might argue that Jackie’s “I’m a girl with a dream to become a
woman” is a performance not only of generation and gender, but of class as well; as a
ward of the state and resident at a local group home, Jackie aspires to a womanhood in
which she can achieve some degree of financial independence and control over her dayto-day life without constant adult supervision.33
Thus, while the structure of the 2005 outro allows girls to create strategic and
compelling identity performances, the fact that they have strict space limitations in terms
of how they frame themselves in the closing moments of the show is a pedagogical
dilemma with problematic racial and sexual politics—one that compromises the freedoms
of a collective definitional ceremony. Girls run the risk of unwillingly essentializing
underestimate the role that majority white audiences (no matter their progressive politics) play in informing
Isaura’s and Tila’s identity performances.
33 Many of the girls from the Settlement Home discuss their urgent desires to turn 18, as this birthday
marks the date they are legally able to move out on their own. One young woman even kept a running
countdown of days until her 18th birthday in her head that she could recite at any given moment.
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themselves in the eyes of the audience through, in this case at least, the overdetermined
sentence structure provided by Grrl Action staff. Further, though this outro structure
productively emphasizes the liminality of girlhood and the fluidity of identity
performance, it also runs the risk of diminishing the importance of girlhood in the here
and now, depending on how girls choose to fill in their blanks. The “dream to become”
implies dissatisfaction with the present and desire for a presumably fuller future. If the
Grrl Action performance is to serve as an effective definitional ceremony for redefining
girlhood as progressively, expansively, and innovatively as possibly, the present tense
needs to be of utmost importance, or else girls’ self-definitions could be compromised.
Intro/Outro 2006
The intro and outro in 2006 mark several advancements in allowing girls more
flexibility in structuring their definitional ceremony and staging their identity
performances with nuance, contradiction, and multiplicity. The intro actually
incorporates part of the Grrl Action process, as girls recite quotations pulled from a
postering exercise in which they responded to a range of prompts written on large pieces
of butcher paper scattered around the space. For the final performance, girls have
chosen, with Madge’s guidance, which sentences to share aloud with their audiences.
Sometimes, these sentences have been originally written by the girls who utter them; at
other times, the original writer and the final performer do not match up—a gesture that
brings into question audience assumptions about which girls’ bodies belong to which
girls’ identity performances and emphasizes the collective creation of girlhood onstage.
As the performance begins, half of the girls enter from the downstage left door,
and the other half from the upstage right door. They parade in to pop music with folding
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chairs in hand, and form a line along the lip of the stage before snapping these chairs
open. After they sit, they strike a variety of poses, both as individuals and in small
groups: sometimes they smile for a photograph; at other times they talk on the telephone;
but all of the poses are active and engaged embodiments of girlhood. Once the posing
comes to an end, the girls’ lines are quick and energetic, a rush of words and ideas:
CHRISTINA: I believe a girl is…
SARAH: Confident.
BRONWYNN: Glamorous.
SKETCH: Empowering
ZOEY: A ball of emotions covered in chocolate.
MEGAN: A person with a vagina and boobies.
NIKKI: My biggest fear about Grrl Action…
ISAURA: Fitting in.
TREY: People not wanting to know me.
PAULLEE: Not getting my point across.
MEG: Not being loved.
VANESSA: Falling into a dark abyss of confusion.
VERONICA: An issue I feel strongly about…
SKETCH: Racism.
PAULLEE: Religion.
ISAURA: Immigration.
MEGAN: Gay Marriage.
SARAH: Women’s rights.
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MEG: Abortion.
BRONWYNN: If I could do anything on stage, I would…
VERONICA: Shave my head.
VANESSA: Strip.
ZOEY: Dance.
NIKKI: Be silly.
TREY: Be me.
CHRISTINA: Scream!
ZOEY: Show different sizes of tampons.
MEG: One question I have about Grrl Action is…
TREY: Will I have to sing?
CHRISTINA: Are we going to be acting?
MEGAN: Can freak-outs occur?
SKETCH: Can I have a soda?
PAULLEE: I feel hurt when…
BRONWYNN: People break their promises.
SARAH: Nobody feels the way I do.
VANESSA: When I run into run into doors and fall.
ISAURA: I feel confident when…I’m with my friends.
NIKKI: When I’m painting.
TREY: When I know what I’m talking about.
At the end of this sequence, girls stand and strike individual poses, from hands on hips to
peace signs, defining themselves physically and verbally as they shout their own names
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one at a time. This opening ends much as the intro often does, as all the performers
throw their arms into the air and shout, “Girls!” before running offstage.
The I-statements in this intro are active and affective in structure; rather than
relying solely on “I am” or “A girl is,” girls assert versions of “I feel,” “I fear,” and “I
do.” The meanings of “girl” are implicit in the performers’ diverse feelings, beliefs, and
fears. Girls’ constantly shifting poses mimic the variety of their statements in terms of
tone and diction, from the audacity of “Shave my head!” to the quirky comedy of “Show
different kinds of tampons,” to the complex anxiety in “People not wanting to know me.”
Girls also demonstrate that the range of political and social issues that concern them are
not just related to age and gender, and their assertions about racism and immigration, for
example, posit girlhood as a site not just of introspective or solitary identity exploration,
but also of solidarity with other marginalized groups.
The activity of this intro is mirrored by an outro filled with several sets of
complex I-statements in which girls assert unique elements of their individual identities.
In their self-performances, girls pay close attention not only to their words (as was the
case in 2005), but also to the gestures, body language, and vocal pitch, emphasis, and
volume that complement them.34 They frame themselves in the eyes of the audience with
attention to the multiple languages theatre has to offer. From their positions in a line that
stretches stage right to stage left, the girls step forward one at a time to deliver their final
I-statements:
34
While every Grrl Action outro is filled with embodied identity performances, even when the staging is
fairly static, 2006 marks a year in which girls fully exploit theatrical tools to perform themselves (and
girlhood) in multiple languages at once. Thus, I’ve attempted to transcribe the 2006 outro almost as a
stage manager recording blocking and line interpretation might. While traditional scholarship cannot
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SARAH (slow and drawn out with thumbs to her chest): I’m Sarah. I’m
the opiate of the masses. (builds into a yell, swings head back and flings
arms out to her sides) And I’m not sorry, I’m magnificent!
PAULLEE (loud and energetic): I’m Paullee. I’m a wannabe
exhibitionist. (crouches down slightly and pumps her arms at her sides up
and down; speaks in a faux low pitch) And I am supa-pumped right now!
ISAURA (simply and resonantly, with thumbs hooked into her back
pockets): I’m Isaura. I’m a girl. I’m small in stature, but big in heart.
BRONWYNN (twirling her hair in a circle with the fingers of her left
hand): I’m Bronwynn. (hops slightly onto her toes and down again) I’m
the nervous hair-twirler. (with intensity, trembling chin, and a hint of the
tears from an earlier performance) And I’m fucking fabulous!
ZOEY (speaks quickly with hands on hips): I’m Zoey. I’m a unicorn, and
I’m a (melodically, as she twists to the left and smacks herself on the butt
with her right hand) stud muffin.
MEGAN (loud and confident, while standing firm with her weight on her
right hip): I’m Megan. I’m a lesbian. (primps her hair coyly with her left
hand, then in a sing-song similar to Zoey’s) And I’m gorgeous.
NIKKI (delivered through a big smile with index fingers pointing into the
dimples in her cheeks): I’m Nikki. I’m a dork. But I’m awesome.
completely capture the “liveness” of theatre, my description here is designed to evoke the
multidimensionality of the outro in a cursory, though evocative, way.
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VERONICA (in a soft clear tone with hands on hips): I’m Veronica.
(hands out towards the audience with spread fingers) I’m a volleyball
player. (still in a soft tone, but with hands thrown up in the air) And I’m
crraaazzy as hell.
MEG (in an almost inaudible voice with left arm wrapped across her
ribcage, and right elbow at her side with right hand held up in the air):
I’m Meg. I’m a photographer. (making a pinching gesture with her right
index finger and thumb) And I’m just a tiny bit crazy.
CHRISTINA (resonant and strong): I’m Christina. (raises right arm in
the air, Rosie Riveter style) I’m strong. (points all the fingers on her right
hand at chest, before flicking them out to the audience) And I’m my own
utopia.
VANESSA (in a high pitch with a relaxed pose, as hands move up and
down to illustrate points): I’m Vanessa. I’m a UChicon freak. (so high it’s
almost inaudible) And I’m kooky crazy.
TREY (relaxed, clear, and direct, with right palm on the small of her
back): I’m Trey. I’m a drawing freak. And I’m lazy.
SKETCH (quick, deadpan delivery with thumbs hooked casually into the
front pockets of her jeans): I’m Sketch. I’m crazy, I’m funny, I bite. (puts
a right arm around Vanessa’s shoulders, as Vanessa leans into her on one
foot; delivers this line warmly, but still without a smile) But I’m friendly.
Certainly, all of the Grrl Action intros and outros are embodied and vocalized identity
performances, but the 2006 outro provides an especially evocative illustration of the ways
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that girls use the tools of theatrical performance to create a complex, multidimensional
definitional ceremony.
While girls have again been asked to “fill in the blanks” in the basic structure of
“I’m [name]. I’m ____, and I’m ____,” they use this more open structure to their
individual and collective advantage. Sarah, Paullee, Bronwynn, and Isaura all stage their
goodbyes to Grrl Action, as this outro marks their last summer workshop performance as
16 year-olds on the verge of “graduating” from the program. Sarah’s and Paullee’s last
exclamatory statements—in addition to staging their confidence, enthusiasm, and
physical energy—are celebrations of all that they’ve accomplished in the four years
they’ve been involved in Grrl Action, a fact that is obvious to an audience that has just
witnessed a preceding piece in which all four of the girls offer their Grrl goodbyes.
The I-statements of these four also demonstrate their growth from 12-year-olds to
16-year-olds in several different ways at once. In an expression like “opiate of the
masses,” for example, Sarah performs her savvy and intellect in her knowledge of Marx,
her sharp humor in her play on his quotation, and her irreverent attitude towards religion
and perhaps even Marx himself, or at least the irony in her adaptation of a potentially
inflammatory statement. Further, even as Sarah fully endorses her own magnificence,
she also pokes playful fun at herself (and perhaps even the empowerment rhetoric of Grrl
Action that has influenced her over the past four years) in the extravagance of her selfaggrandizing claim. The significant build in volume and sheer physical space Sarah takes
up underscore this multifaceted identity performance.
Sarah’s vocal and physical energy are matched by Paullee’s own explosive
“supa-pumped” gesture, as she takes on a deep, body-builder-inspired tone. She
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performs traditional masculinity and claims and connects it to her personal enactment of
girlhood—stretching gender boundaries in a matter of mere words. Paullee’s “wannabe
exhibitionist,” with the vocal stress on the “wannabe,” simultaneously stages her audacity
and reserve, and explicitly acknowledges that her younger desire to be a “badass” (as she
calls herself in the preceding performance) was never fully realized. Yet Paullee’s skinny
dipping performance and her gold lamé bathing suit modeling from 2005 ghost this
moment in a way that makes Paullee’s I-statement all the more complex, and prompts
repeat audiences to wonder what an exhibitionist might be in Paullee’s mind, if not
someone who skinny dips with friends and wears a gold lamé bathing suit onstage.
Isaura and Bronwynn stage their unique goodbyes as well with an implied
audience in mind—one that has witnessed their past performances and can layer them
onto this moment. Isaura, whose I-statement in 2005 eschewed the term girl, comes to
adopt this appellation after all—a choice at least partially dependent on the reputation she
has already built for herself performing pieces about her ethnic identity and arguing
onstage for immigration reform for two years. She need not foreground her “Mexican”
identity because she has already done so on numerous occasions. Instead, her identity
performance at this point seems to be an acknowledgement of her coalition with the other
girls first and foremost. Further, her simple, clear delivery is also a performance of the
confidence she has developed by becoming a seasoned actor over the years. Vocal
intonation is a performance in itself in these I-statements, as is the case with Bronwynn,
whose forceful “fucking fabulous” delivered through tears demonstrates both the defiance
she’s adopted in her four years onstage and the sorrow she feels in her official goodbye to
her audience, whom she situates as part of the collective Grrl Action community. While
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certain devoted spectators (myself included) may read Bronwynn’s multi-year selfghosting as a complex exploration of girlhood over time, the fact that she herself recalls
her layers of past performances is what’s most important in this moment.
Other girls create equally complex definitional ceremonies in their I-statements.
Christina, Zoey, and Megan all play with the performance of gender much in the way
Paullee does. When Christina makes a fist, a muscle, and a gesture of physical and
emotional independence, she imbues girlhood with levels of strength traditionally
associated with masculinity. Zoey calls herself a “stud-muffin,” an appellation
commonly associated with an attractive man or boy, while slapping herself in a sexually
provocative way. In this gesture, she performs gender ambiguity, sexual agency and
passivity, and claims the self-evaluative gaze for herself. By juxtaposing “unicorn,” an
emblem not just of uniqueness, but of a kind of youthful femininity, with “stud-muffin,”
she further illustrates how girlhood can encompass a multiplicity of gender identities.
When Megan calls herself a lesbian, it is a reiteration of an I-statement earlier in the
afternoon, when she told her audience in a firm yell, “I’m a lesbian, OK?!?! Get over it!”
This initial version of “lesbian” ghosts her final I-statement, delivered with a hyperfeminine hair-twirl and high, melodic intonation, and allows her to present a range of
gendered gestures and vocalizations linked to her performance of sexuality and girlhood.
Sometimes, girls use I-statements to test boundaries and play with contradiction.
Veronica, one of the youngest members of the ensemble in 2006, speaks in a soft voice,
but calls herself a drawn-out “crraaazzy,” throwing in “hell” as a means of exercising a
freedom that the no-censorship policy of Grrl Action affords: cursing. In her earlier solo
performance about her role on her school’s volleyball team, she has also inserted a few
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expletives that were not part of the piece in rehearsal and add very little to an audience’s
overall grasp of the plot or theme of the piece itself. Veronica’s I-statement is a means of
defining herself as someone desirous of (politely) breaking rules as she comes of age.
Meg, too, who calls herself “a tiny bit crazy” does so with a barely inaudible voice and a
closed off collapsed, protective posture—a performance in which voice and body
converge to demonstrate her multiple desires and identities. Sketch, in her juxtaposition
of casual and even affectionate gestures with a nearly affectless vocalization, performs
both her warmth and her seriousness; similarly, her vocal-physical contradiction,
illustrates her humor.
The playful transgression of girls’ intro/outro self-definitions in 2006 results, in
large part, from the tones of returning girls like Sarah, Paullee, Isaura, and Bronwynn.
Older girls’ provocative I-statements can be both edifying and freeing for younger girls
figuring out how to perform themselves onstage, but they also hold the potential to curtail
younger girls’ unique explorations of girlhood. Further, once the majority of these
returners graduate, as was the case in 2007, new girls’ collective I-statements can
sometimes suffer from lack of direction or cohesion.
Intro/Outro 2007
The intro and outro in 2007 mark a departure from past versions in two primary
ways: girls do not actually share any collective I-statements with their audience, and
performances begin to incorporate a large screen with rear projector that doubles as a
scrim. 2007 is also an unusual year because, with so many “graduating” girls, the only
returning participant is Trey. Further, many of the new recruits are closer to 13 than 16,
and the group itself is smaller than usual because of the transition. Thus, the intro this
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year poses a number of representational dilemmas for girls attempting to create a
collective definitional ceremony. Rather than the traditional intro, the 2007 performance
opens with a video filmed and edited by Natalie, one of the new and most enthusiastic
Grrl Action participants. This video includes a series of short segments set to the Beastie
Boys’ “Girls”: footage from rehearsals, clips of girls’ journals and the collectively
created group guidelines, close-ups of girls’ silly expressions and smiling faces, and
staged sequences of deliberately awkward dancing and secret trading, as well as shots of
clapping, a faux tattoo on someone’s back, a tube of lipstick, and a pile of tampons and
maxi-pads.
Once the video is complete, the intro to the pop song “Drama Queen (That Girl)”
by Lindsay Lohan plays through the speakers, and the screen is backlit as girls spin and
cartwheel their ways onstage behind it. As the lyrics begin, they strike a series of poses:
hands up in the air, a Charlie’s Angels tableau, arms at different angles, then fists above
their heads. As the music begins to fade, the girls move out from behind the screen and
form a line across the lip of the stage. They shout their first names one at a time while
striking strong poses (hands firmly on hips, palms in the air, an acrobatic squat, a point
out to the audience, etc.) before yelling “Action!” The outro mirrors the intro almost
exactly, with the screen tableau and all, except that girls shout their last names and many
of them strike different poses this time; a twist turns into flexing muscles, pointing
becomes a peace sign. They complete the performance by shouting, “Grrls!”
These beginning and ending moments in 2007 focus more on movement than past
years’ intros and outros, and girls’ identity performances here are almost solely nonverbal
enactments—live, in silhouette, and on video. This movement-based approach is in
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keeping with the fact that many girls identify as dancers, and it honors girls’ desires to
define themselves nonverbally. However, the absence of I-statements and overt
(re)definitions of “girl” altogether leaves the Beastie Boys and Lindsey Lohan as the only
ones with verbal descriptions of girlhood—a representational dilemma for a program
invested in girls’ original “voices,” especially in a year that introduces so many new
participants onstage.
While girls certainly perform their identities verbally during the bulk of the
performance, the song lyrics undermine their agency in the opening moments of the
show. Though the Lohan lines heard aloud during the Grrl Action opening tell the story
of a girl “who always wanted to be the one to stand out from the crowd” and who goes on
to “live her dreams,” despite the “doubters” who surround her, the lyrics later in the song
(which, admittedly, the audience never hears) describe a “teenage drama queen” and
“wild child dreamer” who transforms from a “everyday wannabe” into a “somebody.”
The implication in these lyrics seems to be that the “wildness” and intense desires of
girlhood are somehow faults to be overcome—that aging brings maturity, success, and
even authenticity.
Further, the Beastie Boys’ rendition of “Girls,” though it is certainly ironic at
times, contains lines like “I seen her just the other day/Jockin’ Mike D. to my dismay”
and “girls to do the dishes/girls to clean up my room/girls to do the laundry”—portrayals
of young women as alternately domestic and sexually promiscuous. Also problematic is
the fact that, while Natalie’s video incorporates the entire ensemble, it is a project shot
and edited solely by her. Hence, the middle-class privilege necessary in owning a video
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camera and editing software potentially gives one girl more volition than others in
(re)defining girlhood.
But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the lack of I-statements is that it leaves
the audience without a good idea about the identities that girls consciously want to
privilege and without concrete cues to understand their own roles in the performance as
girls conceive of them. Certainly, audience members can begin to grasp girls’ individual
identity performances through context cues in pieces like Trey’s “What I Look Like in
the Morning,” a diatribe against fashion models and rap artists in which the “you” is both
all females and commercial culture, and Bryanna’s “Forced to Lie, Forced to Betray,” in
which the audience takes on the role of Bryanna’s mother and brother, the two unnamed
“you”s in her piece. However, a collective, I-statement-based intro would facilitate not
only the audience’s fictionalized role, but their actual role as spectators to a definitional
ceremony. If the organizing principle or purpose of a ceremony isn’t evident, the
ceremony itself cannot be entirely coherent and efficacious. It is no coincidence then that
audience members not privy to the production process read Gabby’s dance that I describe
in chapter one, for example, as heteronormative. Without any I-statements from her (the
only sound of her voice is in a voiceover that interrupts her movement to explain what
dancing means to her) and without multiple examples of how she performs different
(non-normative) identities, the audience can and does read her body as a more open (and,
in effect, heterosexualized) signifier.
Despite these problematic representational issues, however, 2007 marks a year in
which Grrl Action begins to consider new modes through which girls might perform their
identities onstage, modes that were often dismissed in past years as not “personal”
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enough: dance, song, shadow puppetry, and even more overtly fictionalized writing. In
2007, girls demonstrate more facility with and desire for bridging music, movement, film,
photography, PowerPoint, and live performance—a product of their increasingly
mediatized, multidisciplinary worlds and an interest that plays out fruitfully in future Grrl
Action performances as well.
Intro/Outro 2008
The 2008 intros and outros incorporate both the power of girls’ unique Istatements and the performative possibilities of dance, movement, and other forms of
creative self-representation. Unlike earlier I-statement intros that were sometimes pieced
together in the final days of the Grrl Action workshop in the chaos leading up to
production, these pieces grew out of a writing exercise that Carrie led in which she asked
girls to free-write responses to ten questions. Before she posed the actual questions, she
told girls that every time they heard a new question, they had to start answering it
immediately and stop writing their answers to the last one. She then went on to ask,
“Who are you?” ten times in a row.
The writing that resulted was surprisingly multifaceted; having to start fresh upon
each new inquiry prompted girls to consider different aspects of themselves and various
approaches to answering the same question. Carrie, in other words, drew actively on
girls’ extant impulses to perform multiple identities, and she helped them through a
writing process that nursed these impulses. Leading up to the performance itself, girls
chose sections of these writings that they wanted to share with the audience, resulting in a
montage of images and ideas underscored by a wide range of physical and vocal energies,
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and Madge too drew on girls’ physical impulses and desires to incorporate far more
creative movement than in any other Grrl Action intro or outro.
As the intro begins and the opening beats of K.T. Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See”
play in a rhythmic loop, girls enter one by one with their own distinct walks, runs, skips,
twirls, dances, and other forms of movement. Christina skates across the stage on
rollerblades. Nancy perches on a stool. Leela does a cartwheel behind the scrim. Later
in the intro, girls pop out from under tables, burst through butcher paper, and tango
together. The stage is bustling with activity from the very beginning, even as individual
girls deliver their personal I-statements. As each girl speaks, her name appears on the
screen behind her, eliminating her need to state it aloud.
While all of the girls’ introductory I-statements in 2008 are nuanced and complex
identity performances that contribute to the larger definitional ceremony of Grrl Action, I
would like to examine two pieces in closer detail as examples of how girls situate the “I”
and “you” in performance. Since Christina and Bryanna provide so many insights on the
audience in their interviews, their I-statements make especially interesting objects of
study. Christina is the first to speak during the 2008 intro, as she returns to center stage
on her rollerblades. Her physical movement mirrors her first performative utterance, “I
am a Bugatti Byron with a B-12 engine, all revved up and ready to go.” The wheels on
Christina’s feet are her metaphoric sports car, but she also holds cans of silly string that
she shakes vigorously on the word “revved.” The juxtaposition of her lively words and
energetic physicality allows her not only to perform her excitement about being onstage,
but also to illustrate the fact that she is catalyzing the entire Grrl Action production.
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As she shakes the silly string cans and says, “I am not a fish, nor am I
Spiderman,” she sprays the silly string into the audience—a gesture that literally breaks
the fourth wall and cues spectators into the fact that they should stay on their toes during
the performance to follow. The “I am not” statements are reminders that self-definition is
based on the designation of any number of (usually implicit) “others”—the same process
that allows Christina to cast her audience as “you.” The words Christina chooses in this
moment illustrate the quirkiness and expansiveness of her thinking, as well as the fact
that, though she isn’t Spiderman, she does spray her own web into the audience. The
playful tools of theatre allow her to be her own version of a superhero onstage.
Christina goes on to explicitly evoke a complex “you” in her next I-statement: “I
am that warm fuzzy feeling you get on the back of your throat after you drink a warm
soda on a hot day. Take it however you want.” This statement is designed to trigger a
visceral reaction from audience members, as they struggle to remember their own
versions of this sensation or determine whether they have a reference point for it at all.
Further, the “Take it however you want” is a recognition that this metaphor is not one
with a sole interpretation. For me, there is a surprise, a tickle, an itch in Christina’s
metaphor, drawing attention to her being a surprising person herself, but someone else
might find a warm soda on a hot day not nearly as pleasurable, and interpret Christina in
a negative light. The warm soda/hot day sentence might even cause the kinds of
confused expressions Christina evokes in her interview, as certain audience members
attempt to figure out what she means. Hence, Christina performs a version of herself that
is intellectually and creatively savvy—that wants to challenge her spectators to think and
feel in order to forge a bond with her.
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She concludes her performance with the sentence, “I am simply me, nothing
else,” before spraying the audience with silly string again and skating off. As girls’
complex identity performances throughout Grrl Action prove, there is no such thing as a
“simply me,” yet Christina seems to suggest in this sentence that there is some element of
herself that cannot be expressed in words—that her me-ness is both unique and ineffable.
The fact that she is able to incorporate so much physical movement into her intro piece
contributes to an audience’s understanding of the parts of Christina that can’t be
rationally or verbally explained, the parts that rev onomatopoetically.
Interestingly, Bryanna too enters the Off Center on wheels, but hers are on the
bottom of a skateboard that she kicks off to the side once she reaches center stage.
Bryanna is far more emphatic than Christina in her vocal emphasis on every “I” that she
utters; her identity performance seems to shift with every change in pitch and volume.
Her first “I am” begins with a loud, high “I,” and she cuts herself off mid-sentence to
point both index fingers out to the audience and ask “Why do you care?” The “you” is
identical in intonation to her original “I,” underscoring the power differential between the
spectators and her. This direct question and gesture, a performance of defensiveness or
suspicion, is designed to put spectators on their toes, to position them as potential
adversaries, as much as it is a legitimate question. Why, indeed, does the audience care
who Bryanna is? Or who she says she is? Her performance technique is alienating in the
Brechtian sense, as she poses a question to guide the audience through the rest of the Grrl
Action performance with keen awareness of their motives.
Bryanna, in fact, seems acutely aware of the potential for meta-theatricality to
help her create an incredibly complex set of I-statements, as is evident in the three quick,
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paradoxical I-statements that follow: “I am a walking contradiction. I am thoughtfully
reckless. I am the biggest and most honest kind of fake that you will ever know.” Here,
Bryanna performs herself as a contradiction even by telling us that she is a contradiction.
There is a rebelliousness in the spirit of this sentence, and yet underlying it is the desire to
be understood as sincere. Certainly, one is rarely “thoughtfully reckless”—an indication
that Bryanna is not only a walking contradiction, but also a performer of recklessness.
As she declares herself the “most honest kind of fake,” there is both honesty and falsity in
this very statement—different levels of performative “truth.” Further, Bryanna fully
exploits physicality to underscore her paradoxical words. On the first I-statement, she
spreads her left hand across her chest; on the second, she pulls on her left earlobe coyly
with her left hand; on the third, she moves both hands emphatically to her chest before
swinging them down in front of her and grasping them together in the style of a shy child.
There is both audacity and timidity in Bryanna’s embodiment—a performance of her
competing identities.
Bryanna goes on to call out the “you” once again that she has drawn attention to
twice already, underscoring the importance to her of positing herself against a perceived
other with a somewhat antagonistic tone: “You ask me who I am, and I must honestly
reply that I am an honest-to-god, deceivingly trustworthy kid in need of an attitude
adjustment.” After this last statement, Bryanna flashes a finger sign that at first looks
like “peace,” but might just as well signify anarchy. Implicit in Bryanna’s overt
performance of trust and deceit, peace and anarchy, is a more complex performance of
confusion and a desire for direction (i.e., “attitude adjustment”). The audience seems to
be the “you” that could potentially bring her solace.
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But Bryanna also uses the confines of the Off Center to present a much more
rebellious side of herself than she does in everyday life. Her understanding of herself as
“two separate people” is evident in her treatment of the audience as two separate entities
as well. She casts them as the performative “you” whom she feels resentment towards,
the “you” that pries, the “you” that tries to make logical sense of the contradictions she
herself cannot, the “you” of societal expectations, and the “you” that might adjust her
attitude. This “you” is related to any number of other “you”s that Bryanna feels
ambivalent about—the “you” that Carrie embodies when she leads the girls in the “Who
are you?” writing exercise, the “you” that Bryanna’s mother plays when she engages her
in conversations she wants to avoid, the “you” that even I enact while interviewing her
for this chapter. But the audience is also, Bryanna well knows, composed of literal
spectators whom she feels both “smug” about and seeks approval from. She feels secure
enough in their investment in her performance, in their receptive role in the definitional
ceremony of Grrl Action, that she exercises her anger without fear of rejection.
Both Bryanna and Christina contribute through their intro-based I-statements (as
do all the girls) to a collective definitional ceremony with fewer points of negotiation
than past years’ performances. Girls can use movement, props, costumes, and open and
multiple I-statement structures to define themselves—and redefine girlhood—from the
very beginning of the performance. The transformation from 2007 to 2008 is due, in
large part, to the ways that the girls’ desires and changing identity performances
(re)create Grrl Action as a whole both instrumentally and incrementally. It is also due to
Carrie’s and Madge’s more conscious salvaging and re-envisioning of performance
techniques from 2006 and before. The increasing emphasis girls place on multiple
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performative languages combines with the best qualities of theatrical I-statements to give
girls ample opportunities for defining themselves.
The structure of the 2008 intro even allows certain girls to sidestep self-definition
altogether, as the final moments of the intro demonstrate: With all of the girls in various
poses and positions onstage, Lola enters and stands center. She sways awkwardly and
speaks quickly, often looking down at her bare feet. A voiceover begins that has been
prerecorded by Carrie, and the music fades out:
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: I’m not totally sure.
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: I don’t know.
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: I have no idea.
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: I don’t know anymore.
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: I don’t know.
V.O. (a little softer this time): Who are you?
LOLA: Not myself. Not who I want to be.
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: It’s a mistake to give my real identity so people will like me more.
V.O.: Who are you?
LOLA: Not the person I want to be.
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V.O. (more vehement): Who. Are. You.
LOLA: I’m not sure anymore.
V.O. (louder and higher pitched): Who are you?
LOLA: All I know right now is that I’m Lola.
“Suddenly I see…this is what I wanna be” blasts through the speakers. The ensemble
dances with arms in the air as the verse comes to a close with another “Suddenly I see…”
that ends in “…why the hell it means so much to me.”
This Q&A cap to the 2007 intro is not only an illustration of the pedagogical
process of Grrl Action; it is an enactment of the mental and even physical labor that goes
into identity performance. Carrie’s recorded voice does not mimic her tone during the
actual workshop; in fact, a few of her line deliveries are more in the mode of an impatient
inquisitor than a Grrl Action instructor. This voice represents the external and societal
forces that push and pull Lola; it stands in for the voices inside of her head; and it
represents the potentially voyeuristic gaze of the audience over what would otherwise be
girls’ introspective struggles. Lola’s responses signify the potential hesitance and
conflict all girls face as they create and perform I-statements onstage.
And yet these responses are specifically rooted in Lola’s own experience as well.
Interestingly, her “I’m not sure” and “I don’t know” answers are sometimes followed by
an “anymore” that implies she did, at one point, know who she was. While this
admission might seem like evidence for Mary Pipher’s claim that girls lose their “true
selves” in adolescence, I would argue instead that not knowing is an indication that Lola
is recognizing the absence of one static version of herself—that her epistemological
wandering and wondering might, in fact, free her up to consider her identity as
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performance. In the intro, she performs her identity by not performing her identity. “It’s
a mistake to give my real identity so people will like me more,” in fact, reveals Lola’s
conscious performance of herself for those she fears will dismiss or judge her “real” self.
Further, “Not myself. Not who I want to be” suggests both dissociation with her “self”
and dissatisfaction with who she is at present.
While I do not want to undermine Lola’s belief in the existence of a “real
identity,” nor her fears in not being “herself,” I find Julie Bettie’s explanation of the
mutuality of performance discourse and authenticity narratives especially useful in
unpacking these sentences:
On the one hand, we are all always performing our cultural identities, and
the performance is the self. […] But, on the other hand, those constructed
subjectivities are institutionalized, made into structures that have an
autonomy apart from the interactional performance. So there is a fixity to
those identities, which is what makes it possible for people to have a
provisional, temporal “real” self that, in turn, is what makes it possible for
them to feel like they are passing, in drag, momentarily acting like
someone other than who they “really” are. (52)
Part of Lola’s struggle lies in figuring out what it means to perform oneself in pleasurable
and not destructive or false-feeling ways, and another part lies in finding the language to
communicate what that actually means. Lola would benefit from understanding that she
has not failed in a grand sense by failing to locate one authentic self, as there is no one
self to find.
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Lola seems to be already embarking on this process, as she settles on defining
herself in the performative present with her final statement, “All I know right now is that
I’m Lola,” a sentence that has the potential to incorporate any number of different
identities. Lola’s I-statements are, in fact, instrumental in framing the girls’ collective
definitional ceremony in the summer of 2008. In this year, more than any other, girls
openly express their conflict and confusion about who they are, about how verbal
language doesn’t entirely capture their identities. Even if they cannot know with
confidence how best to phrase their I-statements, girls perform this not knowing with
tremendous confidence.
Further, because of the complexity of the intro, when the outro occurs and girls
choose only a single sentence to define themselves after an assertion of their names (e.g.,
I’m Anna-Alizette, and I’m your certified fairy princess), the audience understands that
these self-definitions are partial, as they are ghosted by the more complex I-statements
from the intro. Further, props (like silly string) and movements (like two girls tangoing)
reappear, as girls revise and recycle what has come before. The outro even adds a new
element to the performance: a series in which girls each get a moment to dance alone to
the track of “Suddenly I See” before joining the ever-expanding, rhythmically-moving
community of girls that collects onstage.
The flexibility and freedom of girls’ intro/outro I-statements in 2008 also affect
their performative decisions from one day of production to the next. Interestingly, while
a handful of girls vary their lines between Saturday and Sunday every year in Grrl
Action, in 2008 a large number of participants improvisationally changed their final Istatements on Sunday, as well as their costumes—even further indication that their
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identities are in flux, and even a day can make a difference in terms of how girls choose
to perform themselves. Lola herself is probably the most obvious indicator of this shift.
While on Saturday she breaks with her earlier pattern of “I don’t knows” by saying, “I’m
Lola Banana. Kissin’ like there’s no tomorrow,” on Sunday she does a comic recap of
her intro performance with the line, “My name is Lola, and—I don’t know!” This
particular “I don’t know” is a carefree, silly, and self-aware joke, and Lola’s hipswinging dance and confident spin show not an ounce of the discomfort she performed
earlier in the show.
While the girls’ I-statements in their intros and outros contribute to the realization
of the Grrl Action summer performance as one large (sometimes negotiated) definitional
ceremony, their longer individual pieces also operate as unique definitional ceremonies in
their own right. In my analysis of the two identity performances that follow, I examine
the ways that girls use a range of I-statements to explicitly and implicitly perform
ethnicity and class, respectively, in very different ways.
Isaura – “I Am Someone” (2005)
A candle embossed with La Guadalupana flickers on a television screen in a quiet
shrine. Isaura stands several feet away, wearing a white t-shirt emblazoned with the same
image, her long hair pulled back in a heavy ponytail. She sits calmly on the top of a step
stool with her marbled composition book in hand. She opens the notebook and reads in a
clear, firm voice: “I don’t eat or sleep knowing that I’m so fed up with the world.”
Isaura’s impassioned I-statements catalyze a piece that evokes the depth of her passion
and ambivalence about her ethnic and cultural identity.
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“I Am Someone” is a lengthy monologue that explores Isaura’s individual cultural
identity and the history of her “people” simultaneously. As Isaura progresses through the
piece, she moves from questioning what or who she is, into a history of the oppression of
the indigenous people of Mexico, into an exploration of the role Catholicism plays in
Mexican culture, into an evocation of revolutionaries like Miguel Hidalgo and Emiliano
Zapata, into a lament about the violence of war, migration, and diaspora in harming her
people, into an exploration of the ironies and paradoxes of acculturation and assimilation,
back into a final round of self-questioning.
While this piece incorporates a great deal of historical and ideological material, its
overriding purpose as a definitional ceremony for Isaura is clear in its earliest lines. “I
Am Someone” begins with Isaura’s expressions of frustration at “the way the U.S. treats
us, the Mexicans.” In the “us”ses and “we”s scattered throughout the piece, she aligns
and allies herself with the country of her parents’ birth rather than her own—a
performative and activist strategy that allows her to use the label “Mexican” as a means
of linking the struggles of those on both sides of the border and emphasizing a shared
history of oppression and protest.
However, this performance of Isaura’s allows her to do far more than essentialize.
Here, she in fact questions the very nature of the word “Mexican” and the practice of
self-labeling in general. This questioning begins almost immediately, as she frames her
cultural and linguistic bilingualism in terms of her individuality. When she says, “Yo soy
Isaura, unica pero differente de ti. I am Isaura, unique but different from you,” near the
start of the piece, she creates an I-statement that positions herself as “unique but
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different” from both native Spanish-speakers and native English-speakers in the
audience. The “you” interpellates different spectators from one language to the next.
The bulk of Isaura’s piece is in English, however—an indicator that she creates
her definitional ceremony in which the primary “you” is her Anglo audience members,
who, while certainly culpable in her marginalization, also stand in for a larger
mainstream culture of oppression. Hence, the but in Isaura’s unusual phrasing seems to
imply that she is both different from her Anglo audiences, and unique within the Mexican
culture with which she identifies. Isaura’s overt casting of “I,” “we,” and “you” reverses
the representational power dynamic so that Mexican and Mexican American culture take
center stage. Isaura combats the spectatorial gaze by gazing right back—by making her
audience visible by casting them as the oppressive “you.” She in fact stresses the (quite
literal) upper hand she has in her admission of dual cultural fluency: “You know not my
language or my culture, but I know yours like the back of my hand.”
Isaura’s epistemological range allows her to both embrace and elide essentialism
in the matter of a single monologue. “I Am Someone” was, in fact, inspired by a social
studies class offered by Breakthrough Austin, a college preparatory program for future
first-generation college students that has become one of Grrl Action’s community
partners. Isaura explains that this class was taught by a woman named Marisol Sanchez,
who “was kind of like, bang! bang!, you know, what a real teacher needs to be like”
(Martinez). As Isaura recounts, Sanchez left a profound effect on her:
She told me “Hispanic” is a word that the government gave Mexicans, you
know, and she’s like, “You can choose to be whatever you want. You can
be Mexican, or you can be Hispanic, or you can be anything that you want
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to be,” and I was like, OK, then. I was Hispanic, but the government
chose that for me, and Mexican’s good, but what about my parents, like,
what about Chicanos and everybody else? I want to be a little bit of
everybody, you know? (Martinez)
Here, Isaura enact hooks’ notion of the “collective I” by translating Sanchez’s pedagogy
to the stage, while also puzzling through the role that her parents, as well as “Chicanos
and everybody else,” play in defining her. She uses the theatrical frame to ask complex
questions about her identity and to define herself in the liminal space of the theatre where
she can ghost and be ghosted by “a little bit of everybody.”
Nowhere is Isaura’s desire to be this “little bit of everybody” clearer than in her
reversal of I-statements into questions near the end of her piece. Slowly and clearly, she
says, “I stand here in the dark and I ask myself, ‘What am I? Am I…Aztec, Indígena,
Mestiza, Guadalupana, Chicana, Latina, Americana, as well as Mexican?’ I tell myself
that I am Aztec, Indígena, Mestiza, Guadalupana, Chicana, Latina, Americana, y
Mexicana.” Here, Isaura performs the desire to take on multiple labels simultaneously as
a means of explaining the complexity of her cultural affiliations. Interestingly, she
transforms the “as well as Mexican” from her question into “y Mexicana” in her
statement. Not only does English turn into Spanish here, “as well as” in one language
becomes “and” in another—an indication that, in Spanish, no single identity need trump
another.
Further, Isaura’s identity search, like those of many girls, is “embedded within a
framework of interpersonal relationships. Rather than asking themselves, ‘Who Am I?’
girls focus on ‘Who am I in relation to others?’” (Rotheram-Borus, Dopkins, Sabate, and
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Lightfoot 49). The fact that she both questions her connection to and asserts these
identities with authority allows Isaura to express both confusion (at why she is so often
prompted to pick just one) and confidence (at how she chooses to define herself onstage
with multiplicity) nearly simultaneously. Isaura’s I-statements/questions embody what
Gloria Anzaldùa calls the “la conciencia de la mestiza”:
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a
tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to
be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures.
She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is
thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing
abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the
ambivalence into something else. (79)
The “something else” in Isaura’s case is an embodied identity performance that stages her
own plurality and challenges audiences to consider their own roles both as “I”s and
“you”s. The theatrical frame allows, even calls for, multiplicity, and the narrative
structure of performance discursively contradicts the still static, inadequate ways girls are
asked to name themselves—on forms, tests, and (most recently for Isaura) college
applications. As she describes standing in the dark to question her identity, Isaura selfreferentially evokes both the sacred space of her own mind and the ceremonial space of
the theatre.
Part of “the good, the bad and the ugly” in Isaura’s particular performance of
mestiza consciousness is the admittedly unavoidable distance she feels from her “people”
as well. The “you” of her performance transmutes for a moment near the end of her
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monologue, as she acknowledges, “I am what I am, and I’m proud of it, even though I
know little about my people”—a telling admission given the fact that she has spent
several minutes asserting her connection to them. What Isaura seems to imply in this
phrase is the fact that her ancestors’ lives, their individual oppressions, and even the
geography of their everyday existences are things she can never know firsthand, and yet
they are part of her “collective reality.”
While the audience fills the role of the “you” that oppresses and marginalizes
Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Isaura is also well aware that the Off Center is filled
with individuals who support her political and personal convictions. The actual “you”
and the fictional “you” do not necessarily coincide here. Isaura, in fact, describes her
reactions to the overwhelming support she received after this very performance in 2005:
“I remember there was this lady, she came up to me and she was like, ‘I’m so glad you
wrote this,’ and I was like, ‘Thanks!’ It was kind of weird ’cause that was the first time I
actually got a compliment. […] And every year people come up to me and they’re just
like, ‘I’m glad you wrote this,’ you know?” (Martinez). Isaura is fully aware that Grrl
Action audiences—both familiar and strange—value her work, and yet she still chooses
to cast them into the oppositional “you” in her direct address. The context of Grrl Action
allows her to create a collective community in which pronouns shift and exist on multiple
valences, in which the audience is willing to accept their casting as the oppressive “you,”
and even acknowledge their culpability in this role, to facilitate Isaura’s definitional
ceremony. The theatre is an ideal site for her to perform both her wariness and trust in a
majority Anglo audience and her connection to and distance from a larger Latina/o
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transnational imaginary, while she draws attention to the role of ethnicity in the
(re)definition of girlhood onstage.
Sketch – “Princess” (2006)
A white wedding gown sits in a wash of light center stage. A white girl in a black
t-shirt and worn jeans approaches with assurance, hugs the bodice to her torso, kicks the
train out of her way, and smiles out at the audience. “It’s pretty, right?” she nearly
whispers, slipping her hands through the shoulder straps and transforming her arms into a
hanger of sorts, with the dress draped in front of, but not on, her body. The first lines she
shares in full voice are spoken through a wide smile, evoking any number of fairytale
heroines: “I want to be a princess. I want to live in a wonderland.”
So begins Sketch’s three-minute monologue called “Princess,” a piece that stages
class (as well as race and gender) through a series of I-statements that pose different and
sometimes competing subjectivities. While the staging and even vocal delivery take
backseat to the complexity of Isaura’s words in her performance (underscored by the fact
that she reads, rather than recites, her piece), Sketch adopts several strategies both vocally
and physically in her comedic and strategic definitional ceremony. The ambivalence and
multiplicity in Sketch’s diction, the tone of her vocal performance, and the physical
relationship she establishes with a prop wedding dress that operates both as metonym and
metaphor all illustrate the complexity of her performance of “I.”
“Princess” is a comic critique of fairytale culture in which Sketch performs her
ambivalence to the discourses of femininity and class ascension that permeate these
socializing stories. In a short, lively monologue filled with humorous one-liners and
well-timed undercuts, Sketch exposes the illogic and absurdity of the fairytale frame
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while also acknowledging a desire to garner the material advantages of a princess herself.
Further, Sketch’s “I” in this piece is a heightened version of her everyday identity
performance—a comedic representation that highlights how genre and narrative frame an
audience’s understanding of the “I,” even in autobiography.
The prose of the piece contains a number of stylistic and ideological levels,
evident even as early as its first few lines. After Sketch acknowledges her desire to be a
princess and live in a wonderland, she asserts, “I want to flippity-flop and drop my
droopy dress. I want to be better than all the rest,” adopting a playful alliteration and
simple rhyme scheme that situate her wishes in the world of fairytales and children’s
stories. “Flippity-flop” is uncannily reminiscent of the “bippity-boppity-boo” uttered by
Disney’s incarnation of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, but it also walks the line of parody,
made up, as it is, of word fragments that evoke frivolity and failure. Further, an adjective
like “droopy” rarely (if ever) modifies the word “dress” in any traditional stories of
ballrooms and would-be brides. Sketch sets her “I” up as a sardonic, desirous identity
performance, and the slightly satiric undercurrent of the piece soon surfaces fully, as she
reveals that “all the rest,” whom she wants to be better than, are “the princesses that got
what they got by accident,” or, in many cases, by what Sketch points to as their sexual
exploits and even manipulation. Snow White, for example, “slept with seven men,” and
Ariel “showed up on a beach naked, so of course she’s going to get the guy she wants.”
In these revisions of Disney-fied fairytale purity, Sketch performs her savvy in detecting
sexual undercurrents, at the same time that she enacts her ambivalence about women
sexualizing themselves for material gain.
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While Sketch begins her piece by toying with the diction of the fairytale and
nursery rhyme genres, her tone quickly changes to a more casual, conversational, and
even confessional one in regards to the topic of sex. By the time she nears the conclusion
of “Princess,” she has integrated this confessional tone into her fairytale-inspired diction,
simultaneously (and not coincidentally) acknowledging that the greatest injustice she
suffers is that she cannot escape the social stigma attached to female sexuality: “I want to
sleep with seven dwarfs and not get eyes staring at me like I’m a whorf.” Here, the word
“whorf” bridges genres and comically evokes multiple connotations, as it points to the
pattern of quirkily-named fairytale creatures and laughs at current societal expectations
for teenage sexuality. But gravity does lurk in this sentence, as is evident by Sketch’s
description of disembodied, staring eyes, a synecdochic convention highlighting the
anonymity of a gaze that exposes and judges.
By applying fairytale logic to daily life, Sketch suggests a potential for danger in
this transference, even while her comedic tone is closer to stand-up than cautionary tale.
Though no one (live or fictional) seems to question Cinderella’s conversations with
“rats,” Sketch claims, “If I did that, all I would get is a white jacket with really long
sleeves.” As a ward of the state and member of a group home, Sketch is well-acquainted
with institutional bureaucracy, constant surveillance, and unjust strictures; her complaints
about Cinderella also expose, through comedy, of any number of class-based double
standards regarding acceptable social behavior. Here, Sketch performs class as what
Carolyn Steedman calls a “learned position,” in which class-consciousness is “a structure
of feeling that can be learned in childhood, with one of its components a proper envy, the
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desire of people for the things of the earth” (7).35 Sketch is well aware that her class
status marks her behavior in different ways from fairytale princesses, and her reference to
a straitjacket is a material reality of her living situation.36
Sketch further critiques fairytale heroines with a class consciousness that points to
the ways these imaginary young women are rewarded for avoiding labor: All the “stupid,
lazy Sleeping Beauty […] ever does is sleep.” As Sketch informs her audience, “She
could get up, you know, walk around, do some chores,” and though the narrative
framework of this traditional tale precludes Sleeping Beauty “walking around,” it is this
very framework that Sketch critiques. To her dismay, in fact, Sleeping Beauty is
“rewarded” for her laziness with a kiss. Here, kisses are romantic capital and happilyever-after isn’t a labor-intensive endeavor. As Sketch argues, “I could do that. I could
sleep all day. Why can’t I get a kiss?” exposing both the fairytale’s lack of a reward
35
Other Girls’ Studies scholars build on Steedman, referring to girls’ relationships with class as materially
situated performatives. In Growing Up Girl, Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody, for
instance, refer to class, much as Butler refers to gender, as “both a phatasmatic category and yet one that
has considerable power to explain the social, cultural, and material differences between […] young
women” (15). And in Women Without Class, Julie Bettie argues that “class identity comes to be known
equally by markers that exist outside of discovering one’s position in paid labor, as an identity lived out in
private life and personal relations—in short, class culture” (42).
36 While an exploration of Settlement Home culture would be an ethnographic study in itself, Sketch’s
housemate Trey perhaps sums up their living arrangement and campus culture best in the prose of her 2007
performance piece, “CPS”: “It’s not what it seems. Kids there are not in it because they’re bad. It’s
because their family can’t support them, drugs, or being raped. I live on a campus with 50+ girls, and it’s
not pretty. You think arguing with your little brother or mom is bad? Just try living where I do.
Sometimes, kids get restrained everyday. Cops come and arrest kids young as eleven, or they send them to
a lock-down facility, or a mental hospital. Try living there. You forget about your life and worry about
others, until you get caught up in something that you don’t want to be caught up in. Part of the campus I
live on, the girls’ rooms have no doors. They have cameras in their rooms, their closets have to be locked,
and so does their bathroom. Sometimes, when they get restrained, they sometimes punch the staff or bite
them. Some of the girls that I live with have children, and they’re only 15 or 16 years old. Our allowance
is low. We get three dollars a week, or should I say 12 dollars a month. Our hygiene money is $12 to buy
soap, toothbrush….What can you buy with that? Sometimes, girls have to put things back or get a smaller
size. Sometimes, you have people living your life for you—people telling you where you’re gonna go to
school or what group home or cottage you’re gonna move in. I don’t want y’all feeling sorry for me
because that’s not gonna change anything, but be proud of where you live and who you live with because
some girls don’t…have anything.”
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system based on hard work and the ways that labor in a capitalist society doesn’t translate
to adequate compensation.
Sketch’s status as a ward of the state underscores the fact that hard work does not
even translate to basic autonomy for minors who often have little control over the
material circumstances of their own lives. Hence, there is more than a hint of anger
behind the comedy in one of Sketch’s last lines: “I want to get all the things that I worked
my ass off for, but never, ever got.” Here, Sketch illustrates what Valerie Walkerdine
argues is a discursive strategy in girls’ comics (and what is even more prevalent in
cartoon adaptations of classic fairytales): They “prepare for and proffer a ‘happy ever
after’ situation in which the finding of the prince (the knight in shining armour, ‘Mr.
Right’) comes to seem like a solution to a set of overwhelming desires and problems”
(“Some Day My Prince Will Come” 163). Here, the prince seems to offer not only
romance, but “things” outside of Sketch’s grasp. If “happy ever after” involves some
degree of material security and even extravagance, Sketch clearly argues that such a
fairytale ending is not equally accessible to all girls.
Sketch’s vocal tone and embodiment in performance further complicate her
definitional ceremony and highlight her ambivalence towards the princesses she
castigates. When she first places her arms in the wedding dress, she speaks in the softest
of tones, not a projected stage whisper, but a barely audible conversation with a few
audience members who sit close by: “It’s pretty, right? Really pretty. I like it. Well, I’m
not that skinny, but…it’s pretty.” When these lines emerge with so little volume, they
seem at first the product of an untrained actor, but it soon becomes clear that this hushed
tone is one that Sketch will return to throughout the piece, often to provide a separate
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multifaceted identity performance that demonstrates self-deprecation, reveals romantic
desire, and disparages traditional fairytale princesses.
If these asides tell us anything, it is that Sketch, while wary of being interpellated
by traditional tales of heteronormative romance, also wants to experience the kinds of
love and luxury characters like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty flippity-flop into in
their imaginary worlds. Not coincidentally, the ball gown and wedding dress become one
in the same, as traditional marriage ceremonies are, in their own right, the stuff of
fairytales. Hence, Sketch’s ambivalence is about more than her learned class position; it
is also about body image and compulsory heterosexuality.
Sketch’s whispered commentaries position her as jealous competitor, wistful
romantic, social critic, and even, at times, reinscriber of social norms. After she reminds
her audience that Snow White, for example, slept with seven men, she widens her eyes
and turns her palms down at the wrists, fingers spread in mock horror, and says, “Slut,”
mimicking the tone of either an envious contender for the dwarfs’ attention or that of a
puritanical populace stunned by the excess of Snow White’s supposed sexual feats. Her
whispers filter in again a few lines later, as she critiques Cinderella for wearing glass
slippers without awareness of her physical frame; a fully-voiced “She can’t think she’s
that skinny,” is followed by an under-the-breath “’cause I know I don’t.” This line takes
on a double-meaning, as Sketch could either be saying, “I know I don’t think she’s that
skinny,” or “I know I don’t think I’m that skinny.” While context cues point to the
former interpretation, Sketch, who has already playfully disparaged herself at the
beginning of the piece for not being “skinny” enough to wear the wedding dress, reveals
the paradoxical nature of her insult in the sheer excess of her behind-the-back tone, as
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well as the destructiveness of appearance-oriented commercial culture for all female
youth.
Sketch’s whole performance, in fact, is filled with self-parody, as well as social
satire—a strategy that opens up a variety of identity positions for her to try out. This
range of positions is represented visually in her ambivalent physical relationship with the
dress she holds up and refers to throughout “Princess.” Often, the gown is close enough
to her body to look as though she is actually wearing it, and many times during her
performance, she hugs it to her chest with arduous affection. At other times, especially
when she gestures (which she does frequently and emphatically) or tries to move around
the stage, the sheer size of the dress inhibits her physical movement; Sketch responds
with even larger gestures and determined kicks to move the big, bell skirt out of her path.
In these moments, the dress seems to represent both an extension of her body and the
proximity of another’s frame, perhaps one of the competing “princesses” who interfere
with her desires for a happily-ever-after ending. The “I” and the implied “you” or even
“they” overlap, contradict, and combine. Using the dress, Sketch situates herself within
the fairytale framework as an actual character, extending her proclaimed desire to
become a princess to the performative reality that—for at least the three minutes when
she stands on stage and holds this dress before her—she too is a kind of royalty.
This ambivalent positioning—as princess, princess-want-to-be, and princess
critic—is complicated by the attire Sketch wears on her own body; besides the black tshirt and jeans, her left wrist is wound with stacks of jelly bracelets, and her fingers are
topped with dark purple nail polish. Hand-drawn “tattoos” mark her torso: pink and
silver roses on her arms, and the word “Princess” looped in flowery script across her
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collarbone. These images, depicted in excessively feminine color and design,
demonstrate a kind of rebellious spirit not ordinarily associated classic heroines. Hence,
the tattoo drawings, like the multivalent dress, serve as illustrations for the pleasure and
resistance Sketch performs in regards to fairytales. Traditional femininity and a more
gender-neutral style combine in Sketch’s identity performance to show the ways her “I”
is one of gender experimentation, as well as class performativity. Further, the DIY,
working-class nature of her attire counters the passivity manifest in wedding dresses and
ball gowns worn by princesses. Sketch’s definitional ceremony, unlike an actual
traditional wedding ceremony, is marked by activity and the (re)definition of female
adolescence.
When girls engage in definitional ceremonies inside of a theatre space, they use
the tools live performance provides to assert their identities in ways both implicit and
explicit, verbalized and embodied. Every I-statement—from a single sentence in an
intro, to a three-minute monologue about princesses—adds to the collective (re)definition
of girlhood, as girls depend on audiences to assert and negotiate their identities. Yet the
mere fact that girls sometimes need to negotiate their definitional ceremonies onstage
exposes the ways that generational hegemony plays out in the collective construction of
girlhood—an issue I explore in greater depth in the next chapter.
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Chapter 3
Grrl Action as Site of Transference:
Girls Performing Trauma
Isaura perches on the edge of a tall stool; her feet dangle a foot above the ground;
her hands rest in her lap. A photograph of her at eight years old, hair cascading around
her shoulders, fills the wall-sized screen behind her. “Johanna, please come to the stage,”
she says, barely audible, and Johanna, answering her call, stands from the front row of
the audience and approaches Isaura with a collection of tools—a brush, a comb, a mirror,
rubber bands, a plastic bag, and, finally, a pair of scissors.
With Johanna by her side, Isaura recounts the history of her hair, the trauma built
into it, the ultimatums placed onto it, the ways in which its knee-length weight “became
part of [her] and [her] daily life.” During Isaura’s direct address, Johanna—a hair stylist
and, today, a Grrl Action audience member and performer as well—is busy binding the
voluminous hair into pigtails. Sighs issue in waves from the audience, as they realize
what is about to take place. “This is the day I leave and let go of those memories of the
past,” Isaura says, before her voice breaks. She reaches both hands up to her face, cups
her eyes with the heels of her palms, and laces the tips of her fingers into her hairline.
She sobs silently, her whole body heaving. Finally, she finds the words: “…alleviating
me from the pain, the hurtful memories, the alcoholic father, and the overworked
mother.” Alleviating me from the pain. I am struck by this (mis)construction, its beauty
and insight. The pain will exist, but I will not be connected to it as closely, she seems to
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say. Soon, two feet of Isaura’s hair will rest in a plastic bag upon her lap, severed, but
still in her hands.
This haircut marks the first of three acts in Isaura’s piece, “Lucha Diversa” (or, in
her own translation, “Diverse Struggle”), during the April 2008 “Grrl Wrap”
performance.37 While my previous chapters have explored Grrl Action participants’
resistance to and reconstruction of commercial representations of female adolescence
both individually and collectively, in this chapter, I consider the ways that collective
autobiography can coalesce around narratives of trauma in both progressive and
problematic ways. Specifically, I am interested in the roles that adult, female audience
and staff members play in the (re)definition of girlhood. Here, I shift the focus from the
girls’ perspectives on their audience to the audience’s perspective on the girls.
While shared trauma does not preclude mutual empowerment between actor and
audience, I want to consider how the theatrical frame itself and the intergenerational
reception process may place a burden of representation on the storytellers, enacting a
form of cultural violence—a voyeuristic, sadistic, or passive pleasure in the Other’s
revelation of self. My objective in this chapter is not to dismiss the transgressive
potential of girls’ performances, but rather to examine the ways that generational power
dynamics influence the collective construction of girlhood. I do not believe that the
power dynamics at play in Grrl Action are unique to, or more pronounced in, this
37
While I have focused almost exclusively on the summer workshop in my research, “Lucha Diversa” is
actually part of girls’ project-sharing during the culmination of the year-round Grrl Action mentorship
program. I use it here as an illustration of the main focus of this chapter: the performance of trauma.
While Isaura had officially “graduated” from the summer workshop by 2008, the year-round mentorship
program is designed for girls up through their senior years of high school. Because of the one-time-only
nature of haircutting, this act fit nicely with the one day of artistic sharing dedicated to the year-round
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program than any other adult-run, girl-focused organization; rather, Grrl Action, as
theatricalized collective autobiography, exposes age-based hegemony in an embodied,
often more visible manner.
Tears, Trauma, and Transference
I hope to build on my situating of Grrl Action as feminist collective and
definitional ceremony to understand it in this chapter as a site of traumatic transference.
As Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody explain, “In the clinical setting
transference is generally defined as unconscious archaic images, usually from the
patient’s childhood, that the patient imposes on the analyst. Counter-transference can
refer to an analyst’s unconscious response to the patient or to significant people in the
patient’s life, or to the patient’s transferences” (90). The concepts of transference and
counter-transference were, of course, Freud’s invention—his explanation for the
displacement of preexisting emotions and relationships onto the therapist by the patient in
a psychoanalytic relationship and vice versa. Though I am loathe to adopt and adapt a
Freudian concept, I am swayed by two main influences: first, the frequency with which
girls and audiences discuss Grrl Action in therapeutic terms, and even as a form of
“therapy” itself; and, second, the ways that Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody have used
the ideas of transference and counter-transference to analyze the exchange between the
interviewers and interviewees in their sociological fieldwork with girls. The idea of
transference helps them expose researchers’ habits of reading their own emotions onto
girls’.
projects, as opposed to the two-day summer workshop performances—even though it was not exactly part
of the film that comprised her year(s)-long project.
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The concept of transference is especially pertinent to the exchanges that take
place in Grrl Action, as it involves the resurrection of a difficult relationship or conflict
from one’s childhood or adolescence and the re-experiencing of that relationship/conflict
in the present. In other words, the object of transference is a catalyst of sorts for dealing
with everything from discomfort to trauma. Also pertinent to my study is the fact that
transference can be a psychologically productive and trust-building experience, as those
who do the transferring tap into emotions that would be inaccessible to them otherwise.
And counter-transference is an interesting concept to fold in, as it potentially interferes
with a therapist’s attempts to help a client if left unchecked—a metaphor for how
audience members’ over-identification with girls can leave the uniqueness of girls’
experiences un- or undervalued.38
My application of transference and counter-transference differs from Walkerdine,
Lucey, and Melody (not to mention Freud) in two major ways however. First, I make no
claims that my analysis is a truly psychological one. I am more interested in the idea of
transference as a form of reception practice in theatre. Second, and relatedly, while
Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody generally refer to the (adult) interviewers as transferring
38
I owe my understanding of transference and counter-transference to my sister, Laura Myers, who has a
Master’s degree in Community Counseling, as well as Gerald Corey’s Theory and Practice of Counseling
and Psychotherapy. While I debated whether to adapt these terms or the psychological concept of
projection to my argument, Laura suggested that projection would not translate as easily because 1) it is an
unconscious process, and 2) it involves the disavowal of what someone believes to be unacceptable
impulses and desires, and their displacement onto someone else. In other words, Person A could hate her
friend, Person B, but A’s unconscious mind, which understands hatred to be a socially unacceptable
emotion, might translate this feeling into the conscious thought, “Person B really hates me deep down!”
Projection is linked to self-deception and denial, while transference is a redirection of feelings that can lead
to greater trust between two people. Transference is a common practice; only in rare cases is it
pathological. However, the primary way that transference does not apply to my study is that adult audience
members do not cast Grrl Action performers as the ones who caused their girlhood suffering. Their
identification with the girls is what brings about their experiences of transference. In true transference, they
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their emotions onto their (girl) interviewees, and the interviewees potentially engaging in
counter-transference in exchange, I would like to suggest that, in Grrl Action, it is far
more difficult to tell who is initiating the transference process. In fact, transference and
counter-transference occur in both directions nearly simultaneously, an illustration and a
result of the collective creation of girlhood(s).
In other words, as I explored in chapter two, girls cast their audiences in multiple
roles: they transfer their feelings, impressions, and ideas about a person, group of people,
or themselves onto spectators who have agreed to act as their “you.” Perhaps less
obvious is the fact that spectators place their own feelings, impressions, and ideas about a
person, group of people, or themselves onto girls. They cast girls in ways that they (both
spectators and girls) may not be fully aware of at first through their unique lenses of
reception. And, in both situations, the group being transferred upon may also engage in a
counter-transference of sorts. Girls can interpret audiences’ laughter through the lens of
past spectators’ reactions; and audiences can interpret girls’ humor in relation to the
comedy of their own youths. Because reception is such a multifaceted process, the
initiator of the transference is not always entirely clear. Thus, in this chapter, I simply
employ the term “transference” without the “counter” so as to highlight the fact that both
audiences and actors are engaging in both of these processes simultaneously to
collectively (re)define girlhood.
Certainly, transference results in and is caused by many different affective
displays in Grrl Action—from laughter and goose bumps to a range of facial expressions
might see these girls as, say, the playground bullies who made their adolescent lives difficult. Despite this
inconsistency, I still find transference a helpful concept to adapt to my own research.
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and bodily postures. I have chosen to focus here on tears as an organizing principle
because they often connote affective excess; they literally seep through the seams of the
body and metaphorically bridge the traditionally public and private spheres. They are a
sign of “failure” at maintaining what Harris calls the third kind of “responsibility and
containment” of female adolescence, which is “related to emotional responsibility,
expressed by being concerned for others and managing emotional relationships, and
containing ‘inappropriate’ emotions, especially anger and selfishness” (“Everything a
Teenage Girl Should Know” 114). While Harris points to anger and selfishness as
especially perilous emotions in the production of femininity, I would argue that girls’
tears—though traditionally associated with the “feminine” (i.e., weak) emotions of
sorrow, grief, fear, and frustration—when framed onstage in Grrl Action, exemplify an
equally strong disregard for traditional notions of containment.
Further, though tears are certainly not the only form of exchange between
performer and audience in Grrl Action, they provide an evocative and tangible inroad for
deconstructing the complexity of empowerment rhetoric in youth performance. Tears
result from and encompass a range of emotions from fury (tears of rage) to happiness
(tears of joy). Though most often associated with sadness, tears are an unstable signifier,
dependent on culture and connotation and any number of other affective displays to make
meaning. In performance, they demand an improvisation of sorts, their presence
unplanned, their emergence interrupting an extant narrative. In moments of crying, girls
go silent, their bodies collapse, their faces transform; and audiences lean forward, call
out, and, often, experience tears of their own. The mutuality of this bodily excess,
catalyzed by one girl’s autobiographical narrative, illuminates the exchange of power
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between actor and audience, the simultaneity of transference and counter-transference,
and the collective (re)construction of girlhood narratives.
By focusing on the material reality and metaphoric significance of tears on both
sides of the fourth wall, and the improvisational moments surrounding them, I look
specifically at ways that girls perform trauma as a part of their embodied collective
autobiography. Here, I define trauma in the broadest sense possible, as Nancy K. Miller
and Jason Tougaw do in their introduction to Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and
Community, as “the experience of both victims—those who have suffered directly—and
those who suffer with them, or through them, or for them, if only by reading about
trauma” (2). Though “both victims” is a questionable phrase, as there are certainly more
than two people affected by trauma and because “victim” is a problematic, often
disempowering appellation, Miller and Tougaw’s overall sense of trauma as a shared
experience between speaker and listener, writer and reader, actor and audience provides a
helpful lens for understanding how trauma operates both collectively and in regards to
identity performance:
The memoir and all forms of personal testimony not only expand the
boundaries of identity construction and the contours of the self but also lay
claim to potential territories of community. In complex and often
unexpected ways, the singular “me” evolves into a plural “us” and writing
that bears witness to the extreme experiences of solitary individuals can
sometimes begin to repair the tears in the collective social fabric. (2-3)
Further, the performance of “writing that bears witness to the extreme experiences of
solitary individuals” has the potential to enact collectivity—communitas—in the very
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moment of (re)iteration. The “plural ‘us’” of trauma sheds light on the collective “I” of
autobiography and vice versa. And, like definitional ceremonies, the performances of
trauma both respect the integrity of listener and teller, and create a bridge between them.
Girls themselves are tuned into this simultaneity of affective connection and
respectful separation. In another of her intriguing (re)phrasings, Isaura, calls this feeling
in performance “an over sense of whelming”:
Like if you were living the actual piece again, you know, and that’s the
thing, when you read something, and you’re actually telling it to
everybody else, you’re performing, and it’s like you don’t expect the
audience to understand, but a part of you expects the audience, you know,
to just sort of acknowledge in saying, “I may not understand fully, but I
kind of know what you’re feeling,” you know? (Martinez)
What Isaura voices are two major premises of traumatic testimony. First, she points to
the fact that, as Dori Laub suggests, “The emergence of narrative which is being listened
to—and heard—is […] the process and place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of
the event is given birth to” (57). Isaura’s phrasing is telling, as she expresses the feeling
of “living the actual piece again” onstage. In actuality, she never lived the “piece” before
the moment she performs it; she lived the event the piece is about, but, as Laub suggests,
the piece itself enables her to “know” this event anew.
Isaura also draws attention to another key aspect of the testimonial process: the
role of the listener to facilitate the transmission of trauma. While Laub argues that the
listener comes to be “a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event” through the
process of witnessing and “comes to feel the bewilderment, confusion, injury, dread, and
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conflicts that the trauma victim carries,” she also points out that the listener “will
experience hazards and struggles of his [sic] own, while carrying out his [sic] function of
a witness to the trauma witness” (57-58). In the context of performed traumatic
testimony, not only does the listener/witness/audience member experience the
performer’s trauma vicariously on some level; the performer’s trauma will potentially
provoke traumatic memories of her own—risking the likelihood of overidentification
with the performer, or elision of the differences between them. Thus, the witness must
remain vigilant if she is to prevent such transference from occurring in ways that do not
honor the integrity and individuality of the performer’s narrative.
As Isaura herself notes, the witness’s role is one of acknowledgment—
acknowledgment of the performer’s trauma, the emotional impact of the trauma, and the
limitations to completely understanding this trauma. Such acknowledgement requires an
active, aware, critical listening, which is, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s estimation, a
feminist act. Chun, in fact, stresses the importance of distance between listener and
speaker: “The listener must remember that as she feels the victim’s victories, defeats,
and silences, she is also reexperiencing her own and involuntarily relating them to her
own life. She must constantly ask, ‘What is being elided in my identifications with the
speaker?’” (162). While Chun stresses the importance of deep empathy, she also speaks
to the dangers of transference in traumatic testimony.
Such transference is especially tricky in a context like Grrl Action, in which agebased (over)identification operates through memory and hindsight without regards to
differences in generation. In other words, just because I was a girl once, does not mean
that I know what it means to be a girl today, let alone any of the individual girls who
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share their narratives in Grrl Action. Further, my memory of my girlhood is not
synonymous with my actual girlhood, and yet the lens of memory is all I have to process
girlhood through. And perhaps most importantly, overidentifying with the traumatic
aspects of either my own girlhood or the girlhoods of those I watch onstage minimizes
the impact non-traumatic events play in girls’ lives and positions female adolescence as
defined by trauma. In light of the dangers of such overidentification, I am struck by how
often the more tear-filled performances are the ones audience members mention most—
and even I often remember with the greatest clarity. Thus, I use an examination of the
performance of trauma to ultimately consider how Grrl Action must stay vigilant of its
complicated role in producing both lived and constructed girlhoods without either overor understating the importance of trauma to girls’ lives. In this examination, I pay close
attention to which girls carry the burden of traumatic representation in Grrl Action, and I
discuss how Grrl Action prompts girls of color and working-class girls especially to
perform trauma in ways both transgressive and potentially exploitative.
As my discussion of lived and remembered girlhoods implies, the subjects of my
study in this chapter are the affective exchanges between girls as performers and women
as audience members. While it may be short-sighted to limit my analysis and research in
this way, especially as girls like Trey, Bryanna, and Christina have voiced the importance
of performing for a wider demographic, I am motivated in part by a phenomenon
illustrated in an excerpt from an email passed on to me by Carrie from a male friend of
hers who attended the 2008 Grrl Action summer performance with his wife (designated
here as M.):
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The show was very moving and raw in spots, hilarious in others, and there
were great examples of bravery all the way through. M. was particularly
moved; she said it really brought back her own experience of adolescence,
and made her strongly feel that 12-year-old self still inside her. I think
that even for relatively non-gender-biased people like M. and myself, Grrl
Action is a very different show for women than it is for men to see.
(Fruchter)
M. is not alone in her experience. Many female audience members report
associations with their own girlhoods as they watch the Grrl Action performance.
Admittedly, Carrie and I often had the “Which girl were you most like?” conversation
when we taught together, which usually involved a comparison between who we thought
we were most like and who we wished we had been most like. Further, M’s (translated)
assertion that Grrl Action made her “strongly feel that 12-year-old self still inside her,”
makes me question when the experience of girlhood ends and the memory of girlhood
begins, and how this impossible border relates to the transference that occurs during
performances. How, in fact, does memory make Grrl Action “a very different show for
women than it is for men”? While there is certainly the risk of gender essentializing in
this assertion, I too believe that Grrl Action is a different show for women than men, and
I hope to use an examination of shared trauma to explore why certain women react to Grrl
Action in the ways they do. This is not to claim that women’s reception practices are
homogenous, or even mostly similar, or that male spectators are not capable of deep
empathy. But there is something that goes on in the moment of shared trauma that opens
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up lifelines of intergenerational possibility for continuing to frame feminist collectivity in
performance in a contemporary context.
In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze the meaning of tears and the
transmission of trauma though a close reading of Isaura’s “Lucha Diversa,” which I
supplement with excerpts from personal interviews I conducted with female audience
members (and some girls themselves) that speak to the process of transference.39 I go on
to conduct two additional, though slightly shorter, close readings of Megan’s “Where I’m
From” and Trey’s “Just Like You” with attention to the burden of representation in
crying onstage and to the material context and consequences of girls’ more traumatic
definitional ceremonies. This chapter appropriately includes more autoethnographic
material than the others, in that I draw on my own emotional and affective responses to
girls’ performances to examine my role in both the reception and production process of
Grrl Action. Thus, I move beyond a discussion of the role of the audience into an
exploration of the part that Grrl Action instructors and staff members play as well in
(re)defining girlhood through the performance of trauma onstage.40
39
While I have included interview excerpts throughout the dissertation, I draw from these sources more
liberally in this chapter. My interviews with female audience members in particular provide the backbone
for an informal reception study of sorts based in the discourse of trauma.
40 Throughout this discussion, I attempt to implicate myself in both the power structure of Grrl Action and
the process of transference whenever appropriate. While the performances by Isaura, Megan, and Trey are
evocative illustrations of shared trauma and pieces that audiences and staff point to as particularly
powerful, I have also chosen to focus on these girls because they represent the range of my emotional and
material “closeness” to Grrl Action participants. While I continue to talk to Isaura on the phone regularly, I
have lost track of Megan entirely, and my connection to Trey, though significant during Grrl Action itself,
did/does not extend beyond the bounds of the program. I share this information here as a reminder that my
analysis is part of a co-performance marked by subjectivity and individual relationships with girls.
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Isaura – “Lucha Diversa” (2008)
“Lucha Diversa” is a multipart and, in Isaura’s words, “diverse” performance that
allows her to bridge her personal testimony with her political investments. The term,
“diverse struggle,” is filled with multivalent meaning, as Isaura first describes the
complexity of her internal struggle with her hair, then the various conflicts she faces in
regards to her family, and finally the range of difficulties confronted by immigrants in the
U.S. today. While her haircutting ritual is the first and most theatrical part of the piece,
once this act is complete, Isaura crosses to a microphone upstage left and reads a poem
she has written (originally for a high school English class) inspired by “There was a
Child went Forth” from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. In this poem, Isaura places
herself in the position of Whitman’s child who takes in, and in effect becomes everything
around him (from “the mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table” to
“the village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset”). She rewrites the piece from her
own perspective, focusing on her father’s betrayal and her mother’s abandonment and
rejection, and refuting Whitman’s idyllic scene with her lived experience.
Here, Isaura performs the trauma of a child’s “becoming” and the difficulty of
identity exploration. She complicates girlhood and childhood in a revision that
emphasizes the “stain,” in her words, that others can leave on one’s life. Her poem is
mostly in English, but she inserts several Spanish words and phrases, sometimes
translated, sometimes not, the most significant of which is “¿Dónde? Where, Mother?
You were never there, except in discouragement, your sparked eyes with glares of hateanger. And I was always waiting till the day that you became proud.” With this
sentiment, Isaura’s voice breaks for the first time since her haircut, and she speaks slowly
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through her tears in a small, high-pitched voice. As her words sound through the
microphone, her sniffles are amplified. She is aurally closer than she was during the
haircut, as we can hear every vocal idiosyncrasy; yet farther away as well, as the mic
mediates her voice. In many ways, this simultaneity of distance and proximity illustrates
both the communal empathy and the uncomfortable voyeurism tears invoke onstage.
Isaura’s poem serves as a transition between the haircutting and the screening of a
trailer for a documentary she has been working on for over a year called Somos
Inmigrantes (We are All Immigrants). Before the trailer begins, Isaura introduces it
briefly as a piece “created with extreme passion and a drive to show the truths of
immigrants, along with their daily lives and the struggles they consistently face.” She
clearly states her objective for her audience in viewing this trailer: “Today, I speak
primarily to you hoping to reach you as the individual inside and stating that you are
more than a label. You are me—an immigrant with a variety of history. But you are an
immigrant, and this is our immigrant culture.” While the “but” seems confusing at first, I
believe it is connected to the “more than a label” conviction, rather than the “you are me”
sentiment. Isaura seems to be saying, You are an individual with your own history; you
(like me) cannot be reduced to a label, and yet we are all bonded through our shared
status as people descended from immigrants (and, I would add, forced migrants or nonnatives of this country), both recent and many generations ago.
While all of “Lucha Diversa” is a definitional ceremony for Isaura, in which she
performs her ongoing interest in the intersections of community and individual identity,
this introduction is a reversal of the kind of strategic essentialism she has used in the past
(and earlier in this piece) to connect herself to other people of Mexican descent. Here,
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the “you” and the “me” are bound. Now, Isaura’s essentialism is designed to connect
Anglo members of her audience, the implied “you,” to their ethnic roots and, hence, to
their own family histories of immigration. While she problematically leaves (most)
African Americans out of her immigration equation, I would argue that this oversight (or
decision) occurs, in part, because she is conscious of the need to cast—and persuade—
white audience members as her implied “you,” as she sees us as more closely linked to
the marginalization and mistreatment of immigrants today. And, as im/migration is often
a site of trauma—of difficult journeys, deaths, danger, and then the violence of culture
shock and assimilation—Isaura uses this trauma to bond her audience to each other, to
the people highlighted in her documentary, and to herself.
“You are me” is a more complex version of both the collective “I” of
autobiography and the “singular ‘me’ [that] evolves into a plural ‘us’” in traumatic
testimony. Isaura uses the tools of performance to essentialize her own body to the point
that it can encompass multiplicity—that it stands in for a range of spectators listening to
her words. Embedded in her statement are questions for each audience member: How
can I be Isaura? What does it mean that I am Isaura? This statement is a kind of
Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt in the sense that it requires a moment of productive
distancing to puzzle through. Isaura has given her audience a task—to find themselves in
her and in the immigrants of the documentary trailer. Even as she claims “you are me,”
she implicitly evokes a kind of performative distancing.
To underscore the trauma of im/migration, Isaura has asked other Grrl Action
members to carry wooden crosses and stand on either side of the screen “as a
representation and a reminder,” she tells her audience, “that not all of those grasping
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toward the American dream are able to achieve it. We must remember there are people
dying to reach a better life.” At the end of her introduction, the Somos Inmigrantes trailer
begins with the Elie Weisel quotation, “No human being is illegal,” and the video shifts
between footage from an immigrants’ rights rally Isaura attended and interviews she
conducted with a range of Spanish-speaking immigrants (the trailer is subtitled) who
discuss their experiences in and reasons for coming to the U.S. As this trailer comes to a
close, Isaura’s multipart performance concludes as well.
The Haircut
While Isaura’s entire piece might be considered a performance of trauma in one
form or another, I would like to backtrack for a moment to focus more closely on the
haircut itself, which sets in motion the entire range of “diverse struggles.” This is the
moment audience members have mentioned again and again in interviews—both for its
vulnerability and its “real time” affect and effect. Ray Matthews, Grrl Action mentor and
audience member, points out the novelty and poignancy in Isaura’s act of “doing
something that’s really happening on stage in the moment”: “There was no ‘this is just
showing what could happen or what did happen’—like, this is happening. […] And I
think that it isn’t that common, especially among young performers” (Matthews). This
“really happening” quality of Isaura’s performance is underscored by the surprise and/or
shock many audience members feel at the audacity of the act. As Kathy Fitzgibbons,
Grrl Action spectator and Impact Austin member describes, “When [Isaura] cut her
hair—oh my God—that was the most risky, personal thing I think I’ve ever seen done
onstage, across the board, adult, children…And I don’t think anyone in the audience
could really see it coming because you couldn’t see the person she was giving signals to”
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(Fitzgibbons). And, as Abbie Navarrete, Bryanna’s mother, explains, Isaura’s haircut is
even more affecting because it is accompanied by “her talking to you about personal life
feelings that she has, and sharing them, and allowing you to be part of those things”
(Navarrete). In other words, not only has Isaura invited the audience to be present—to
act as witnesses—for the traumatic gesture of her haircut; she also prompts us to channel
the traumatic history of her hair through her performed testimony.
I write “prompts us” because I very much consider myself a witness to Isaura’s
identity making in this moment along with the audience, even as I play a bigger role than
most adults in its realization. Thus, I have decided to transcribe and translate Isaura’s
piece in detail with my own set of subjective “stage directions” as a means of illustrating
how the moments of affect and embodiment are so intertwined with Isaura’s words, and
in an attempt to record my reception process as both co-performer in and audience to
Isaura’s testimony. Once Johanna is up on stage, brush in hand, Isaura begins to speak:
I remember when I was eight and in second grade, and my father cutting
my hair into a boy’s cut. And just years later, my mom took my sisters
and me to cut our hair almost every month up until third grade. After third
grade, the scissors never again touched my hair. And thus the story of
Rapunzel growing her hair began. (Johanna has now loosened Isaura’s
bun, undone her ponytail, and is beginning to let out all the hair behind
Isaura’s back.) My mother just told me I could never cut my hair unless I
turned 18. (Johanna lets Isaura’s hair fall around her shoulders. There
are soft mmms from the audience—a realization of just how impossibly
long Isaura’s hair actually is.) Or got married, or moved out of the house.
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(Johanna starts brushing. Someone in the audience says, “Wow,” in a
soft, Southern accent. Isaura pauses. She rocks a bit from side to side as
Johanna rubberbands the first pigtail on the right side of her head.
Because of the weight of Isaura’s hair and the force of Johanna’s grip,
Isaura’s head tilts to the side when Johanna binds the pigtail. More
mmms sound from the audience—the first realization of what is about to
occur?) My hair became a part of me and my daily life, the story of
telling how long it had been since I had cut it and the reasons behind it.
And today I realize the decision of not cutting my hair has taken its toll.
(Johanna rubberbands the second pigtail on Isaura’s left side. Her hair
now mimics the style of a little girl.) Now, finally 18 and no longer living
with my mom since the beginning of the 2008 year… (Isaura goes silent.
What is about to happen has begun to fully dawn on her. She purses her
lips. Her voice in this next sequence is cracked and small.) This is the
day I leave and let go of those memories of the past— (Isaura reaches
both of her hands up to cup her face. She covers her eyes with the heels of
her palms and sobs. Johanna pulls out her scissors and a plastic bag.
She focuses on Isaura’s face, running the length of the right ponytail
through her hand in a few long strokes. Waiting. Isaura puts one hand
down. A small, nasal uhhh issues from her mouth, the sound of a
newborn’s cry. She puts the other hand down. ) —alleviating me from
the pain, the tearful memories, and the alcoholic father and the
overworked mother. (Isaura nods quickly in Johanna’s direction. This is
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the sign of consent—the definitive gesture that’s almost invisible.
Johanna hands Isaura the plastic bag and cuts the right pigtail in three
quick snips. The gesture happens so fast it’s difficult to process. It is as
though Johanna is pulling off a Band-Aid—the quicker the better so the
pain doesn’t linger. A couple of camera flashes come from the audience.
Johanna hands the first pigtail to Isaura, who holds it in her hand for a
moment with no detectable affect—the hair is now a thing apart from her.
I wonder what this must feel like for her. She places the pigtail in the bag
without much ceremony. Johanna crosses to Isaura’s other side, as the
audience begins to murmur more audibly. She cuts the left pigtail with a
bit more facility and authority, but the one long stream of a cut, rather
than the three snips, leaves the hair on Isaura’s left at least two inches
shorter than the right. The asymmetry is jarring to me. I feel guilty that I
somehow caused the unevenness, guilty that I didn’t protect Isaura from a
cut that appears to be about two to four inches shorter than we had
planned overall, guilty that I have played a part in her tears. Johanna
hands Isaura the other half of her cut hair, and she takes it with the same
lack of ceremony, feeds it down into the bag. Johanna reaches for a
mirror that she has placed behind Isaura’s stool. She brushes Isaura’s
hair back over her left shoulder with a caring but confident hand and
hands Isaura the mirror. Isaura looks into it blankly, as though she
doesn’t actually see herself there, and hands it back to Johanna, who takes
her seat again in the house. Isaura is left with two feet of hair in a bag on
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her lap, but no discernible expression on her face. The audience erupts
into applause—some of the most enthusiastic response I have ever
witnessed in the Off Center. Claps and whistles and yells. Spectators turn
to each other, sigh, rustle around to relieve the physical tension that has
built up over the past five minutes. Isaura sits patiently, taking it all in. A
slight smile plays across her face. I try to imagine what it would feel like
to have that much weight removed suddenly from my head—how it would
throw off my balance, force me to recalibrate the angle of my face to keep
it level. I think about how proud I am of Isaura. I cry. This is one of the
only moments I have ever cried during Grrl Action. The applause has
finally died down, and Isaura shares her closing words.) No, I’m not
forgetting about my past. I have decided to begin again. Today, this is the
day of remembering and growing into a young, independent woman. And
nothing holding me back. Ever.
I had originally intended to translate the nonverbal parts of Isaura’s performance
as “neutrally” as possible, but as, my increasingly personal stage directions reveal, my
role as co-performer in Grrl Action and as witness to Isaura’s trauma prevent me from
inventing any kind of false distance from the events at hand. My physical proximity to
the piece reflects my emotional closeness. I watch Isaura from my reserved seat in the
front row next to Johanna. Madge has asked that I sit there, script in hand, in case any
girls completely blank on lines and they need to look to me for guidance. I am not
entirely comfortable with this (maternal) role, and yet I am glad to be as close as possible
to Isaura during her haircut. Unlike Madge, who has had, by necessity, to insert herself
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onstage in a couple of instances over the years (once when the backdoor inadvertently
locked girls outside during an intro, and once when one of the girls completely froze in
fearful silence onstage), I have never had the impulse to break the fourth wall. And yet,
with Isaura, I am closer to moving than I have ever been. I have to remind myself to stay
seated. I try to communicate with Johanna through mental telepathy: Slow down! Hug
her! Keep the ponytails even! Hug her!
My desire to reach Isaura through Johanna is evident in more than just my
attempts at thought transference; Johanna has been my hair stylist for nearly seven years.
When she started cutting my hair, she was Isaura’s age. And Johanna is no stranger to
the theatre. Though I was one of her first clients, now, at least two-thirds of the graduate
students in the University of Texas Performance as Public Practice program see her as
well. My colleague Claire Canavan, in fact, performed her as one of the “characters” in
her documentary theatre MFA thesis performance. When Isaura told the Grrl Action girls
at our overnight retreat in January 2008 that she wanted to cut her hair onstage, when we
all joined hands in a circle and pledged that we would help her do this, help her resist the
temptation to back out, I started thinking about Johanna even then—Johanna, who is the
child of Latino/a immigrants herself; Johanna, who loves theatre; Johanna, who is so
good at what she does that I’ve followed her to five salons; Johanna, who I hoped would
take good care of Isaura onstage when I couldn’t.
My psychic investment and material involvement in Isaura’s haircut, as well as
the transference onto Johanna of my own fears about abandoning or betraying Isaura, are
painfully evident. And yet Johanna comes to represent more than just my attachment to
Isaura. She is synecdoche for the audience’s role in Isaura’s performance of trauma as a
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whole. Her presence necessitates and ceremonializes the cutting of Isaura’s hair, which
Isaura herself sanctions and desires; but at the end of the cutting, Johanna returns to her
role as spectator while Isaura is left in tears onstage alone. While Johanna has her own
tear-filled response in the audience (she later told me she began crying herself), there is
an experiential and spatiotemporal distance between Isaura and Johanna that Johanna
cannot bridge—and, hence, the audience cannot either.
Affect and Audience
There is no denying, however, the affective bond that develops between Isaura
and her audience; I am certainly not the only one with the desire to reach out to her
literally and figuratively. Many spectators’ reactions to her performative testimony
exemplify the ways a witness can become, in Laub’s words, “a participant and a coowner of the traumatic event,” one who feels the “bewilderment, confusion, injury, dread,
and conflicts that the trauma victim carries.” Every audience member I interviewed
reported crying or “almost crying” as Isaura’s hair was cut.41 Abbie, for example,
emphatically describes Isaura’s performance in the following terms: “Oh my God, it was
so emotional. I mean everybody in the audience was like, was holding their breath, and
you could feel everybody was like, everybody wanted to collectively hug her, and go and
tell her, ‘You’re so amazing’” (Navarrete). As Abbie illustrates, while Isaura’s
performance is rooted in trauma, it also produces compassionate collectivity.
41
Interviewees not only described the tears, chills, and gasps they experienced in the moment of traumatic
performance; they also re-experienced these affective moments during the actual interviews—an
application of the performative “re-” to reception outside of the theatre space and an example of the
boundlessness of trauma’s influence. Much as Isaura feels she is “living the actual piece again” when she
performs, audience members’ memories of her performance elicit similar psychic and somatic reactions in
the retelling.
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In fact, Isaura activates her audience around a unique utopian performative. My
interviewees commonly describe how she made them feel—not just (their own) hope and
generosity and compassion and suffering—but hers, and other audience members’ as
well. Nancy Sutherland, another member of Impact Austin, calls the collective crying in
Grrl Action “an almost spiritual experience”—a moment of release fueled by faith and
joy, as well as shared trauma (Sutherland). She unwittingly borrows from the discourse
of the utopian performative, as she posits Grrl Action as a model of “how you want the
world to be”: individuals (in this case, girls) from different socioeconomic, ethnic, and
cultural backgrounds uniting around a common goal (Sutherland). This goal is for girls
to individually and collectively (re)envision and (re)embody girlhood—to, in Abbie’s
words, “push back,” or, in Kathy’s, “stick it out there,” as they voice their opposition to
the commercial culture that oppresses and constrains them.
The utopian performatives that transpire during Grrl Action are linked, as Kathy
explains, to both girls’ ages and their level of risk:
Nothing is more powerful than an actor or anybody taking a risk and being
vulnerable…You see it in a movie, you see it in a play, especially on a
stage because you really feel it. Anywhere in life, I just think there’s that
human thing of—oh my God—there’s nothing more beautiful and
vulnerable and human, but we’re still never willing to do it. And for
somebody to do it, and to be that age, which is a very protected—oh, I got
the right clothes, I got the right hair, I think I’m somebody I’m not—for
her to do that, to tell that story, and then her weeping, and—oh my
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Looorrrrd—people around me were, you know, you could just, it was a
weep fest because it was just this…sticking it out there. (Fitzgibbons)
Kathy argues for the rarity with which teenagers in general allow themselves to be
vulnerable, and, hence, sees girls’ identity performances as especially transgressive and,
thus, tear-producing. Here, she underscores Harris’s emphasis on the taboo of girls
defying cultural expectations for emotional and bodily responsibility—both in their
crying onstage and in their implicit dismissal/sidelining of the appearance-driven
discourse of hair and clothes.
The “weep fest” Kathy describes is related to Isaura’s age, the irreversibility and
riskiness of her haircut, and, as Ray explains, the novelty of this performance—that fact
that Isaura is doing something for the first time that she has not been allowed to do
previously because of parental oversight: “I think it had to do with Isaura saying, she
was 18, right? So this was in a way the first time she had that choice—it sounded like,
that was the way she set it up. It was like, ‘I wasn’t allowed to do this.’ So it was sort of
like seeing that choice for the first time. [I]t felt like an emergence, or it felt like a
transition” (Matthews). Isaura’s haircut is a self-defined coming-of-age ceremony. She
is the one who told the ensemble of girls in January that she wanted to cut her hair
onstage. And she herself asserts at the haircut’s completion, “Today, this is the day of
remembering and growing into a young, independent woman”—evoking a second
puberty of sorts and iterating a new kind of connection with those in the audience who
call themselves women as well.
It is this performance of female adolescence as the liminal (and often traumatic)
time between childhood and adulthood that, I believe, prompts so many women in the
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audience to draw parallels to their own lives, past and present. Further, when women
witness this generational liminality embodied and ritualized in the liminal and communal
space of the theatre, they are able to make associations not only with their own girlhoods,
but with each other’s. Seeing teenage girlhood as a threshold, as a nebulously bordered
link between more purportedly “concrete” stages of life, allows women to remember and
(re)imagine their own identity performances—to layer their girlhood experiences, desires,
and expectations into and onto the performers’. As Trish, Gabby’s mother, explains,
You can tell how timid they are and how, almost, you can see this ton of
bricks coming off their shoulders. It’s almost like they’re growing up in
front of your eyes. […] That’s almost what it feels like to me. You know,
it’s like watching them shed this baggage…because you know that you
had it when you were growing up, and you had no one to help you
creatively express that. And I had all kinds of things happen when I was
growing up. […] You didn’t have as much, or a creative way to express it,
so you suppressed it, you know. Maybe you talked to your friends about
it, but it wasn’t the same thing. (Anglin)
Trish speaks to the ways that girls use Grrl Action as a vehicle for their identity
performances, as well as their ceremonialized “baggage-shedding,” but she also draws
attention to the kind of retroactive reparative power Grrl Action seems to have for many
women. While Trish certainly looks forward to a better future for these girls, she also
looks back through the lens of an “if-only” that allows her to re-imagine where she might
have been if Grrl Action had been an option when she was growing up.
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Thus, the girls’ performances stand in for the adolescences some women wish
they could have had, but didn’t—either because of the availability of a program like Grrl
Action or because their girlhood selves would not have been as interested in or ready for
Grrl Action as their adult selves. In contrast to Trish, Abbie voices anxieties about her
younger self performing trauma onstage and, thus, admires the girls’ pieces all the more:
“I remember being that age, and I remember carrying a lot of horrible things within me,
and I can’t imagine having those experiences and getting up on stage and sharing them
with everyone. I just can’t imagine myself doing that, and for them to do that, it takes a
tremendous amount of will and strength, […] and I feel very honored every time I see a
performance” (Navarrete).42 In different ways, both Trish and Abbie evoke a true
utopia—a no place where their personal might-have-beens are embodied in their present
hopes for these performing girls.
Thus, while teenage girls have moved into the threshold beyond childhood, they
still carry the weight of a more gendered version of the tabula rasa. They embody, in
many female audience members’ eyes, hopes for a better future for all females because
they play the part of the not-yet-fully-formed woman—both an empowering and onerous
role in its flexibility, and one that tends to take on the burden of intergenerational
transference. The danger here is, as Anita Harris explains, that “[i]n holding [girls] up as
the exemplars of new possibility, we also actively construct them to perform this role” in
42
Trish, Kathy, and Meg Sullivan (current Grrl Action Co-Director, two-time mentor, and audience
member) report having wanted a program like Grrl Action when they were girls. In Meg’s words, “I mean,
I was such a little feminist, I didn’t know where to go” (Sullivan). And Abbie, Ray, and I discuss not
desiring (or being too afraid to desire) a Grrl Action of our own. While Ray acknowledges that she would
not have sought Grrl Action out as an adolescent, she discusses the fact that, “as time went on, [she] really
started to see the value of all-female spaces,” which prompted her to suggest her teenage sister, Rosa,
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ways that are not “just celebratory, but […] regulatory as well” (Future Girl 1). Several
interviewees maintained that female adolescence lays the groundwork for a kind of lifelong emotional and psychological health for women. Trish, Abbie, Meg, and Kathy all
discuss the fact that, if girls perform their trauma now, there is less of a cumulative effect
later—both because girls are learning to voice their emotions rather than bottle them up
and this habit will follow them throughout their lives, and because then they can tackle
one issue at a time, rather than taking on all of them at once after they’ve reached
adulthood. As Abbie explains, once girls perform their struggles, “once, they’re out
there, and you’ve said them out loud, you can’t hide them anymore. They’re no longer
secrets, and they don’t have power” (Navarrete). While the trauma will still exist, Abbie
argues, it will not plague a girl in her adulthood in the same way that repressed testimony
might.
Trish personalizes this issue in her claim that a program like Grrl Action is
important during the teenage years, especially “because it shapes who you are as an
adult”:
I think that if I had been able to let go of all of that then, then maybe I
wouldn’t have some of the medical problems that I have. I think that it’s
very important as a teenager not to hold that kind of stuff in, and, if you
don’t hold that stuff in, then maybe as a adult you might be a little more
successful, more sure of yourself, more confident. […] And I think that
that creativity is a form of healing. I think that they saw that as their
should join, which she did in 2005 (Matthews). Two of my adult interviewees, Nancy and Heather
Courtney (Isaura’s film mentor), do not speak explicitly about this kind of transference.
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healing, I really do. I think that that’s a form of therapy. I mean who
doesn’t find therapy in things like what they, you know, that form of
expression? (Anglin)
While I do not want (and am not qualified) to venture too deeply into the depths of what
“therapy” means, I do want to draw attention to Trish’s emphasis on the therapeutic
nature of creativity. It is in this statement that I see the greatest degree of transference
taking place, as the performance is not just “therapy” for girls, but it is an opportunity for
women to process their own girlhood troubles and traumas as well—and to process them
together. In other words, girls’ performances are “therapy” for many women as well.
Both Nancy and Kathy discuss the fact that the women from Impact Austin have
used Grrl Action as an opportunity to discuss their own girlhoods. Nancy mentions that
the diversity among the girls allows for multiple points of entry for women to make
connections—an observation that reminds me of the comparison “game” Carrie and I
play each year. The women do not necessarily read their girlhoods onto the performing
girls, and yet these girls do give them an opportunity to reflect and discuss their own
struggles. Both Kathy and Nancy acknowledge differences of class, race, ethnicity,
sexuality, ability, and life experience—both among Impact Austin women and between
these women and the Grrl Action girls—but, even as female spectators (both from Impact
Austin and otherwise) define their differences, it is the difficulty of girlhood that bonds
them. As Kathy explains,
Most of those girls came from harder circumstances than me. Some of
their stories were not at all my story, but all of us [in Impact Austin]
talked about how we wished there would’ve been this program when we
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were that age. […] Obviously, Impact Austin is some pretty powerful
women, and there are also some women who are married to some
powerful men, but those women still have a lot of power, you can feel it,
and it’s a highly educated group, and all ages, so they came to us in many
different stages. […] And yet they were all saying, “We went through
those years feeling like I wasn’t worthy, my body was ugly, or I was too
fat, or too whatever,” you know, all of that stuff, which I think, on a
certain level, is part of adolescence—boys and girls because the boys are
also hating their pimples or their body hair or whatever—but it’s much,
much, it has a deeper impact on girls, and so many of them stay with it the
rest of their lives, make really bad choices in relationships and everything
else because of feeling so crummy. (Fitzgibbons)
Kathy makes at least two important assertions here: 1) the different women of
Impact Austin come together around not just girlhood, but girlhood insecurity; and 2)
girls’ insecurities translate more destructively into adult behavior than boys’. While it
would take a great deal more research to prove the second assertion with any degree of
conclusiveness, what is important here is that women bond around girlhood suffering and
the aftermath of this suffering. Hence, the Grrl Action performances that demonstrate
vulnerability, difficulty, and even profound trauma become vehicles for adult women’s
individual and collective self-discoveries and, I would argue, their own identity
performances. During actual interviews, in fact, many women engaged in definitional
ceremonies (around issues of sexuality, ethnicity, ability, and religion, as well as gender
and generation) and even highly personal testimony with me as audience. In many ways,
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my interviews became unintentional sites of shared processing about the difficulties of
girlhood.43 And, no matter whether women expressed deep trauma or everyday troubles,
it was always the traumatic performances that catalyzed the most memories.
The Trouble with Tears
To examine the issues at stake in intergenerational identification with girlhood
trauma, I would like to turn briefly again to the work of Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel
Brown. In the early 1990s, Kristin Linklater not only influenced Gilligan and Brown in
theory; she also led workshops and exercises alongside theatre artist Normi Noel that
informed their understanding of girls’ and women’s voices.44 One such exercise, part of
the Women and Race retreats that grew out of their (and other researchers’) ongoing
work with girls and concern for racial, cultural, and socio-economic difference,
illuminates Linklater’s approach:
Moving backward through developmental time, Kristin took us through
different ages, and we experienced being in the time before the physical,
psychological, and sociocultural changes of adolescence. As we felt these
shifts in our bodies, we heard the differences in our voices. Returning
then to the voices of younger girls from our research, Lyn, Janie, and
Joyce posed three questions: What in the girls’ voices and experiences do
you connect with? What resonates in you as you listen to these girls?
43 To protect the privacy of my interviewees, I choose not to go into great detail here, except to say that
women disclosed everything from failing grades to sexual abuse during their own girlhoods.
44 See Meeting at the Crossroads (viii), Brown’s Raising Their Voices (110), and Taylor, Gilligan, and
Sullivan’s Between Voice and Silence (91-92).
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What do these girls know that they could bring to our conversation today?
(Taylor, Gilligan, and Sullivan 91-92)
Linklater’s work implicitly endorses the creation of character based on memory of
oneself—a kind of autobiographical performance in which women peel back layers of
age and socialization to recover their girlhood selves and then, as Brown and other
researchers suggest, put these unearthed (and, to a certain degree, fictionalized) girls in
conversation with their current research subjects in a kind of heterotopia. In order for this
conversation to take place, the adult researchers must imagine a conversation with no
temporal reality except in the drama of their minds. They must reside in a liminal state.
It is girlhood and performance that allow them to do so. And it is these researchers’ work
with girls that prompts them to ask bigger questions about trust, anger, and cultural
differences among women.
Linklater’s activity is analogous in many ways to my own work with Grrl Action;
in effect, it underscores several questions I have about the program: Do other female
audience members, administrators, and I—who vicariously re-experience our girlhoods
as Grrl Action spectators—make discoveries about ourselves built on the ideas and labor
of girls? Or, more explicitly, do women overdetermine or overvalue the traumatic
content of girls’ performances because, crudely, girls’ crying catalyzes our own
catharses? Does Grrl Action, though filled with utopian performatives and exciting
possibilities for intergenerational exchange, also leave girls with the representative
burden of fulfilling women’s expectations and desires? Does it ever keep girls from
being seen on their own terms—and hence, (re)embodying girlhood on these terms?
Conversely, are we ever titillated by girls’ trauma? And do their tears ever breed
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Othering instead of collectivity? My questions perhaps imply a cynical stance on what I
do believe to be a truly moving exchange in Grrl Action, but they are also necessary in
figuring through the generational power dynamics that influence girls’ identity
performances. If girlhood is collectively (re)constructed, I am interested in exploring the
responsibilities women especially have to girls as a dominant force in the production
process of Grrl Action. To address some of my questions, I’d like to first take another
look at Isaura’s opinions about her own tears in “Lucha Diversa.”
“Lucha Diversa” – A Closer Look
In my post-performance interviews with her, Isaura discusses both her
nervousness about her haircut and her sadness about the absence of her mother from this
particular performance: “I remember that day, I was like nervous, I was all shaky and
stuff, and I just was like, ‘I don’t want to cut it.’ And I remember my mom wasn’t even
there, you know? And, by then, I had moved away from my mom, and I was just like, I
don’t know, I kind of wanted her there, and I wanted a whole lot of other people there
that just weren’t there” (Martinez). Cameras flash during “Lucha Diversa,” audience
members lean forward in their seats, sigh, cry, applaud with conviction; Isaura senses
their support, but these people are not her mother, her father, her sisters—the ones about
whom and, in part, to whom she speaks.
This audience is a surrogate “you” in her definitional ceremony, the best
alternative Isaura has to a mother who, in her own words, made a “mockery” of her first
performance in 2006 and failed to attend any future production, though Isaura issued
invitations each time. Her actual family’s absence is both empowering, in that she need
not censor or temper her words, and disempowering, in that the people she wishes most
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to assert herself to are notably absent. Further, though her mother has hurt her
tremendously, Isaura very clearly expresses her love and admiration for her, as well as
her sadness at her absence from a transformative moment in her life. It is no coincidence
that she breaks into tears on her line, “Now, finally 18 and no longer living with my mom
since the beginning of the 2008 year…” The circumstances in which she has left home,
still a high school junior, are not the ones she anticipated. Her “coming of age”
ceremony is one she has (re)designed based on the circumstances she has found herself
in, but they are not the ones she ultimately desires. The Grrl Action staff and participants
become a surrogate or replacement “family” for Isaura (a term she herself adopts), and, in
many ways, the audience is an extension of this family, as spectators shower her with
post-show compliments and congratulatory hugs (Martinez).45
Isaura touchingly points to the fact that family need not be defined by blood, but
the Grrl Action audience—politically progressive and ethnically and socio-economically
diverse, though still disproportionately white and middle-class—plays an especially
problematic role as part of the surrogate or replacement “family.” It is the anonymity of
the audience, in fact, that seems to produce the most ambivalence and anxiety in Isaura
regarding her own tears:
45
As Isaura explains, “Well like, partially, in the beginning, like when I first arrived, and we had our
performance, my mom, she came to our performance, right? […] Aaannd at the end of it, she just, she kind
of made a mockery out of it, and I just, I wasn’t, I was like, “Why can’t you just be like everybody else and
just tell me you’re so proud, you know?” And then my sisters were like, “That was boring!” you know?
And then the next year that I was in Grrl Action, I told them about it, and they were like, “We’ll see.” And
so then they didn’t wind up going, and I was like, “Will everybody else have their parents except me?” But
then I was like, “It’s OK! I have my family, right?” And so that included Grrl Action. And it’s just ’cause
it’s strange ’cause it’s not that, you know, like I guess in a way you could say that the facilitators, which is
you and Carrie and Madge, y’all were kind of like the parents in a way, right? And everybody else were
just like brothers and sisters, you know?” (Martinez).
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It’s like all the times that I cried on stage I feel so bad, I’m like, “Why are
you crying onstage? You shouldn’t be crying onstage! This is not the time
to cry.” I’m always telling myself, “You’re not going to cry, you’re not
going to cry,” you know? And then I start crying and I’m like, “No, I told
you, you’re not supposed to cry,” and I’m like “Hold it back!” It’s just so
hard you know it just all comes out and what do you do? I remember
when they were cutting my hair, I was fixing to get up from the chair […]
and not bother to come back ’cause I was like, “I can’t do this.” And it
was hard, you know? […] I just was like, “Everybody’s coming to see a
performance, and you’re crying onstage!” And it was just like kind of
strange because you never expect yourself to cry, you know, in front of an
audience, especially ’cause you don’t know most of the audience, so it’s
like, “Why are you crying?” (Martinez)
Isaura’s meditation on tears evokes an anxiety over what Elizabeth Grosz calls the
“permeability of the body”: “body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a
matter of vigilance, never guaranteed” (193-4). But all body fluids are not alike.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas sees tears, as opposed to blood, vomit, saliva, phlegm,
menstrual blood, and seminal fluids, as the “stuff of romantic poetry. [They] are like
rivers of moving water. They purify, cleanse, bathe the eyes, so how can they pollute?
But more significantly tears are not related to the bodily functions of digestion and
procreation. Therefore, their scope for symbolizing social relations and social processes
is narrower” (155). Tears, Douglas seems to imply, are both purer and more purifying
than other bodily excretions. Further, since “social relations and social processes” are
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messy, dirty, polluted, tears cannot signify broadly. While Douglas raises interesting
questions about the ways that different body fluids signify culturally, Isaura’s description
of tears reveals the ahistoricism of Douglas’s interpretation and the fact that tears do not
carry a universal connotation of purification. (When do bodies exist outside of their
historical contexts and historicized meanings after all?) Sometimes, as is the case for
Isaura, they make social relations more complicated and disempowering. She sees tears
not as wholly cleansing during her haircut, but as a source of shame, confusion, and even
embarrassment because, in part, it seems they cannot be consciously controlled.
Douglas’s “rivers of moving water” are torrents in Isaura’s eyes, flows neither her lids,
nor her mind can control.
Other girls are, in fact, often conflicted about these onstage tears on behalf of each
other. Paullee and Sarah, for example, share the anxiety they felt in witnessing Isaura’s
haircut:
PAULLEE: It’s really tough for me to see someone alone, crying on stage.
SARAH: Because they’re so vulnerable.
PAULLEE: Soooo vulnerable. Just think of like crying in front of a
friend, which is almost impossible for me to do, um, I have real hang-ups
about being too sad around people, so seeing someone like that—I mean, I
immediately went up and held her.
SARAH: I think there’s a difference between like being really vulnerable
and crying in front of people, like, on accident, and then crying and being
okay with that…because the majority of the time, I’m like not okay being
in front of other people crying, and that is like just an accident…I would
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want people to come over for me, and maybe that’s not true for other
people. But I guess that’s why I always want to help out. But there’s like
a different body language too—your head goes down, and you might
cover your mouth.
PAULLEE: Recently I like was at a coffeeshop. Basically, someone was
breaking up with me. And I like put my book over my face the whole
time. Just like the physicality of crying is embarrassing—you’re not able
to control your face. I turn really red really easily. (Crowe and WheatleyRutner)
Besides discussing their own habits of traumatic transference here, Sarah and Paullee also
underscore Grosz’s and Isaura’s ideas about the overwhelming and even embarrassing
nature of tears—further proof of Harris’s claim that girls are taught to contain emotional
“excess.” But Sarah and Paullee also point to unanticipated tears as potentially more
traumatic than planned ones. While girls go into their more traumatic performances
knowing the weight of their subject matter, they rarely plan, or even necessarily
anticipate, that they are going to break down in tears, as Isaura’s “you never expect
yourself to cry” illustrates.
Madge even describes trying to prepare girls for moments in which they might cry
onstage, often an impossible task because the audience actually facilitates the tears: “It’s
just really tapping into the feelings, and being raw, and suddenly just being exposed and
naked in a way that you didn’t expect. I was trying to talk to Isaura about, ‘When your
hair gets cut, that’s going to be an emotional moment, you know?’ […] We were trying to
prepare her in a way, but until she went through it in front of those people, I don’t think
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she knew what a big deal it would be” (Darlington, 15 Sep. 2008). Tears require
improvisation on Isaura’s part, a departure from the script that she’s written. There is
certainly a degree of power in this improvisation, this owning of and moving through the
moment, but the inability to plan for tears (and often the foiling of plans to prevent them
from surfacing) can be troubling to girls as well.
As Madge suggests, the audience is often instrumental in catalyzing girls’ tears,
making their performances of trauma complete, for better or worse. As Laub suggests,
“the emergence of narrative which is being listened to—and heard—is […] the process
and place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to” (57).
Hence, the audience facilitates the knowing of trauma in a way that rehearsals of
testimony never could. Meg, in fact, articulates this knowing process in relation to her
work with her 2008 mentee Tiffany:
I felt a lot of the times at rehearsal, she was saying the words, you know,
really heavy words, her poems are really very difficult. But she was able
to get through them in rehearsal, like she was reading a menu off of a—
you know what I mean, completely calmly getting through them, but in a
very rhythmic way, like almost like she wasn’t thinking about what she
was saying. And that was something that I often would talk to her about,
was, “Really think about the words you’re saying. I know it’s hard, but
stop, slow down a little bit, and kind of get out of this rhythm of speech.”
I think it was probably a protection just to deliver it in that way. But when
she got in front of an audience, something really changed, I felt like she
was hearing herself say what she was saying. And that’s happened to me
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before—like you realize people are listening, and you hear yourself in a
different way. And I think she got really—it got to her a little bit. […]
And she got emotional, and I’d never seen her emotional. (Sullivan)
The process of “hearing yourself” once “you realize people are listening” is one that even
plays out consciously for girls. Isaura describes “thinking about how other people were
feeling” about her piece while she was performing it, which ultimately prompted her to
cry (Martinez). Seeing and feeling the audience’s affect intensifies her own tears; thus,
actor and audience enter into a loop of traumatic transference. Here, the audience
actually serves Isaura, Tiffany, and any number of other girls by allowing them to fully
process their own traumatic testimony.
But it is essential to consider which bodies are on the line, whose fluids seep and
flow in the spotlight of this healing process. Participants in Grrl Action come from a
range of socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and while middle-class girls
have been known to cry through their accounts of anorexia, suicide attempts, and
personal betrayals (which are significant and meaningful in their own right), it is the
more marginalized girls whose tears come readily and consistently—those who are
Othered by the audience based on not only age, but also class, race, and sexuality. While
such diversity in (and within) identity positions often serves as an eye-opening and
bridge-building opportunity for participants in Grrl Action, too often the burden of
representation falls on the Latina, African American, and white working-class girls of the
group to not only represent their ethnic and class-based identity positions, but also to
demonstrate a level of traumatic affect that leaves them potentially more vulnerable than
other girls in the program.
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Treyneicia – “Just Like You” (2008)
Trey sheds further light on this particular imbalance in the tears that
spontaneously surface in her 2008 performance, “Just Like You.” Trey, a Grrl Action
performer since 2006, has planned her piece out many months in advance. Having
created a couple of different performances arguing for animal rights, a piece dedicated to
her brother in the military, one about living under the custody of CPS, and a comedic
monologue speaking out against the unreasonable beauty standards and sexism of the
fashion industry, Trey is invested in theatre with an activist message. Thus, when I
interviewed her a few weeks before the 2008 summer workshop, she already knew that
she wanted to turn her attention to racism as a topic. She explained, “I think this time I’m
going to talk about race—how it’s a really important issue and how people, to me, are
dumb to even discriminate and stuff. I might put together a little packet” (Hendricks).
Trey’s impulse towards the packet is one that she realized during a previous year when
she distributed an “Animal Declaration of Independence” rolled up in individual scrolls
to spectators. In her role as activist, Trey uses her definitional ceremonies as
opportunities to edify a captive audience: “When I first started, I was kind of timid and
stuff. But as the years passed, and I got used to it, and it’s like, it’s my performance, so
people’re just gonna have to deal with it. I mean they’re here already, so they’re gonna
have to hear me out and what I have to say—whether they like it or not” (Hendricks).
Trey’s thoughts here are similar to Bryanna’s ideas about “smugness” towards the
audience, and yet Trey is more conscious of what it means to have a platform like Grrl
Action to argue for the rights of African Americans and other people of color, women,
soldiers, and animals.
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When I ask her what has prompted her to want to write and perform a piece
“about race” in 2008, she says, “When Jena Six came around, and that happened and
there was like a noose on a tree, like it hit me ’cause I’m like black and stuff, and I’m in
Texas. And it’s like it’s over a tree. That’s just really stupid. It’s over a plant”
(Hendricks). Trey goes on to connect Jena Six to other acts of virulent racism, past and
present, from Emmett Till’s violent murder in 1955 to James Byrd Jr.’s in 1998. And she
explains that she is most concerned with exploring the ways that racism is passed down
from one generation to the next: “How it affects people, especially little kids mostly.
Because they have to grow up with it, grow up with their parents talking about it and
stuff, and when they hear their parents talking about it, it develops in their brains so they
grow up thinking that that’s true and stuff, and then when they get older, it’s like it’ll
repeat itself” (Hendricks). Hence, as a young person herself, Trey is moved to reach
others even younger than she to keep racism from continuing to recycle itself in different
forms. Interestingly, Trey is moved to create this piece with more urgency in the summer
of 2008 than any other year, “especially if we might have an African American president
’cause I was like, ‘What if…?’ You know, it’ll be joy, but it’ll be scary because he’ll be
the first African American president. You don’t know if he’s gonna get assassinated and
stuff, and I was like, ‘You know, he’s taking a big risk’” (Hendricks). In Trey’s
tempered enthusiasm here is a sense of fear informed by the kinds of traumatic events
that make up the backbone of “Just Like You.”
While Trey never shares her thoughts about President Obama with anyone else in
Grrl Action outside of this interview, Madge, of her own volition, has a sense that Trey’s
writing sounds presidential, and she directs the piece as a political speech of sorts. As the
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performance begins, the screen onstage is lit a bright red, and Trey walks slowly to her
spot center stage, script in hand. She wears a fitted off-white jacket over a black
turtleneck top, a gray pleated calf-length skirt, black heels, and a small white butterfly
barrette holding back the ringlets on her forehead. She has changed her clothes for this
piece to signify its formality and weight. Another girl performer, Nancy, runs out to
place a music stand in front of her, and Trey stands still and quiet at her makeshift
podium for several seconds before she begins. When she does start to read, it is in a
steady, resonant tone with far more investment than I have seen her exhibit during
rehearsal. Like Isaura and Tiffany, Trey fully connects to the meaning of her words once
in front of an audience who helps her fully recognize the weight of what she is saying.
Throughout the performance, she stands very still and grips the sides of the music stand:
There is only one race (a beat) and that is the human race. Just one.
Different colors and styles of a group. Why hatred in the so-called land of
the free? To me, African Americans risking their lives for equality and
freedom, even in 2008. Let’s start from the beginning. Slaves. Our
ancestors. Imagine your ancestors being kidnapped from their homeland
by people that they never thought to harm, breaking their back in the hot
sun, picking cotton and weeds while sweat is pouring down their backs. If
they don’t do anything right, then they get whipped. Wet skin against a
hot, dry strap. Blood is dripping when all your family can do is watch
while your master is laughing, laughing because he thinks it’s a comic and
it’s not hurting you. That’s bullshit. Imagine you working hard for your
family, and then out of nowhere the master hits you with an iron belt.
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Imagine that. Just take a moment. (five second pause) Civil War. You
fight, you die, all for nothing. You don’t get to vote, you don’t get to be
free, and all people do is laugh and spit on you. In the 50s and 60s
African Americans getting hung with sick people just pointing and
laughing with a huge grin across their face. MLK fighting for our rights
gets jail and death threats, but that doesn’t stop him. He didn’t deliver “I
Have a Dream” speech for nothing. America just didn’t want to open up
their eyes. Then, he gets killed. What the hell? But he died in dignity.
JFK and Robert Kennedy, white brothers agreeing to change America, get
killed over Dr. King’s dream. (flips a page) Nowadays, people think
black girls are supposed to wear short shorts and give up their virginity
and be “ghetto,” while black men are supposed to only want sex and be
pimps and druggies. (more emphatic) Well, let me tell you something,
America. My dad is not one of those guys, my damn brother isn’t, and I
know for sure I am not one. It’s the way you label us. We are not all bad
people. (voice starts to break, reaches up with her left hand to brush back
her hair, or tears; speaks through the trembling) We just want a normal
life. Like you. (hand back up to wipe off face, voice even more cracked in
the following) If your daughter wants to date a black man, then let her.
And vice versa. You’re not the one getting married. (hand back up to
wipe off face) People make a dumb deal over skin color. We are all the
same. We all have hair, eyes, teeth, organs, but no one wants to realize
that. The only thing people see is skin—skin that is only a tan darker.
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Just a tan. (wipes another tear from face) And if you’re religious and
dislike or hate African Americans, then you must hate God because he put
us here on this earth too—to learn and bring people together. We are all
just going to have to deal with it. I’m not just speaking for African
Americans because I am one. I am speaking for all ethnic groups. (really
starts to break here into even more tears) Human beings that need
someone to stand up for them. (wipes away tears with her other (right)
hand this time) Human beings with no say-so. It’s not our fault that we
are the color that we are. We were just created that way. (a swallow) If
you have a problem with that, then the one person you need to talk to and
check in with is yourself. For you are what makes this world a good or
bad place to live. Thank you.
A power point “Treyneicia” pops up on the white screen behind Trey—red, white,
and blue letters bordered on top and bottom with rows of stars. “President” appears
below in smaller letters, and at the very bottom, in the largest type, “20??.” Trey gathers
the pages of her speech, and crosses down left, in a slow and labored walk. The audience
applauds and hoots. “Hail to the Chief” plays. Trey shakes the hands of several people
in the front row, from stage left towards right. She stops center, as people are still
applauding, and walks off up right. She is going through the motions, barely looking at
people, moving fast. This is not what she wants to do. There are still tears on her cheeks.
Her body is rigid. She seems to be following her blocking (to shake hands with audience
members like she’s running for office) because this is what she has rehearsed, what she
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has been directed to do. Her walk off stage is definitive, quicker, as though she is trying
to escape the audience’s gaze.
Trey’s performance of trauma is different from Isaura’s in several senses. First,
she enacts what Marianne Hirsch calls the phenomenon of traumatic “postmemory”—“a
very powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its
object or source is mediated not through recollection, but through an imaginative
investment and creation” (22). As Hirsch explains, “Postmemory characterizes the
experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,
whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped
by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (22). Postmemory is an
emotionally charged, highly personal form of collective trauma—an inheritance of sorts
that shapes one’s notion of the everyday. Trey’s “imaginative investment and creation”
is her performance itself, and she is well aware that she cannot fully access (nor does she
want to access) the kind of everyday racialized trauma that she associates with her
parents’ generation. As Trey asserts in her interview, “Sometimes, I’m like, ‘Thank
goodness I was born in this generation because I would not have survived when my
parents were growing up’” (Hendricks).
Trey’s performances of both African American identity and “humanness” are both
forms of strategic essentialism designed to convey her ideas as convincingly as possible.
In my interview with her, however, she expresses her dislike of generalizations about
anyone based on “race”:
Grownups, like my parents, always think, “Oh, that white person,” or
something, and then not realizing that everyone’s mixed and stuff, but
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we’re still the same. It kind of got to me, or “White people are always
trying to take over,” and it’s like, “So are blacks. So are Chinese.
Everybody’s trying to control the world.” […] It’s like, they’re the same,
just lighter skin tone. I think we’re all mixed and really we’re
discriminating against ourselves. (Hendricks)
Of course, Trey’s emphasis on white people being “the same” may very well be for my
benefit. At any rate, she is clear both here and in her performance that she speaks for “all
ethnic groups.” But Trey’s “they’re the same, just lighter skin tone” is not the
universalizing statement it might seem to be. She is expressing (as she does in her
performance of the sentiment, “We are all the same. We all have hair, eyes, teeth, organs,
but no one wants to realize that…”) a mature understanding of race as a construct. And
yet Trey is also aware of the very real traumas that African American (and other
marginalized) people face and have faced because of this construct.
Rhetorically, Trey makes a number of strategic moves in this speech. First, she
connects a history of racial oppression to the kinds of degrading labels she sees placed on
African Americans today—illuminating the ways that postmemory lives on in
contemporary representations of black men and women. Her performance calls to mind
Robbie McCauley’s understanding of slavery’s legacy as “a tangle of denial and
outbursts” (Tillman). “It’s also part of the mythology, the happiness mythology,” she
argues. “If we don’t talk about it, it didn’t happen. We don’t think about it and it didn’t
happen, and that’s true for black and white people. Yet it makes us unable to progress, to
be progressive, and move towards equality for people. It is the suppressed rage in both
black and white Americans” (Tillman). When Trey, the sole African American girl in
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Grrl Action in 2008, breaks down the barriers of Harris’s emotional containment and
responsibility with her tears and anger, she defies gender- and generation-based
expectations, and she bears the burden of performing the suppressed rage that McCauley
identifies. While this is Trey’s choice, I worry about the ways that her body is on the
line, while other (non-African American) girls’ and spectators’ are not.
Trey is certainly aware of the complex power dynamic between these other bodies
and her own, as she creates a piece in which the “you” to her “I” transforms quickly and
continually. At first, she binds the “you” and “I” in the phrase “our ancestors” to
describe African slaves, implying a common bond with her audience. But then she
quickly shifts into a suggestion that audience members should “imagine” their ancestors
being kidnapped and enslaved, implying that they do not share a common heritage. Her
next pronoun shift occurs as she moves from describing her ancestors as “they” to telling
spectators, once again, to “imagine” themselves as the “you” suffering under the brutality
of slavery. Here, she attempts to pass on the “imaginative investment and creation” of
postmemory to audience members quite directly; but, unlike like Trey, many of them can
decide whether to accept or deny their connections to slavery, segregation, and other
forms of cultural violence. Once Trey moves into the contemporary section of her
monologue, the “you” transforms into America itself—or, more specifically, white, racist
America. As Trey begins, “Well, let me tell you something, America,” her tears begin to
fall more swiftly. She strategically binds herself to other African Americans and then,
quite specifically, to her own family in defiance of the “you” who affixes the destructive
labels of “ghetto” and “pimp.” Soon the “we” becomes “all ethnic groups, human beings
that need someone to stand up for them, human beings with no say-so.” Here, “we” and
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“they” are synonymous, while “you” is the presumably white oppressor. This
rollercoaster of pronouns is a shifting and transtemporal identity performance at the same
time that it is an enactment of traumatic collective identity within and across ethnic lines.
As her identity performance transforms, Trey also begins to cry at a moment
when her piece becomes most directly connected to her own lived experience: “We just
want a normal life. Like you,” and her tears fall readily once she reaches, “I’m not just
speaking for African Americans because I am one. I am speaking for all ethnic groups.
Human beings that need someone to stand up for them. Human beings with no say-so.”
In fact, it seems that Trey is speaking for not just marginalized ethnic groups here, but
marginalized people and even, as her past performances have conveyed, animals. I am
reminded, in fact, of the opening of Trey’s CPS piece called “CPS” in 2007: “It’s not
what it seems. Kids there are not in it because they’re bad. It’s because their family can’t
support them, drugs, or being raped.” Trey is not just performing the trauma of African
American history and the pain of commercial representations. She is performing her own
marginalization based on race, class, age, and gender. Certainly, Trey is most obviously
performing the trauma of racism, but racism operates in her own life in specific and
material ways.
I worry about the trauma of this performance, about sentences like, “We are not
all bad people” and “It’s not our fault that we are the color that we are.” Why does Trey
imply that more African American people than not are bad people? Where has she
learned that being black is a “fault”? How do I, as a white instructor, act as an ally to
Trey to understand better what she needs and where she is coming from? And then how
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do I, as a white instructor, help her address the internalized racism and self-victimization
of her own discourse? Why haven’t I done this already? Or am I misreading her words?
I worked with Trey on her piece in rehearsal. We talked about pausing, emphasis,
Barbara Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer, not-yet-President Obama, Dr. King, Malcolm X.
She read the speech without any affect nearly every time. I did not worry that she would
start to cry onstage because she seemed to be entirely disconnected from her text. But I
should have known better. I should have paid more attention to her words, to her
resistance. To her uncustomary affectless identity performance in our interactions. She
was protecting herself. But with an audience in front of her, she could no longer do so.
While I do believe that many of the girls who cry onstage do so to some transformative
end, I do not feel that I prepared Trey for her tears. I do not think I did everything I could
to help her create the performance she wanted to given what she told me weeks prior to
the summer workshop. And I definitely did not prepare her, as I should have, to
improvise her way offstage if she was in tears, rather than fight through forced
handshakes.
Generally, Carrie and I gladly concede decision-making to Madge during the final
week of the summer workshop, yet I felt all along that the “Treyneicia for President”
slide wasn’t right somehow—that it created a tone and frame that might unintentionally
mock or undercut what was not a politician’s stump speech, but a heartfelt and personal
evocation of racial marginalization and trauma. And yet I didn’t say anything. I
concentrated instead on Trey and doing what little I could for her in the tiny amount of
time we had. I didn’t do what I should have done in a true collective. I would imagine
that most other audience members did not consider Trey’s performance anything but
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moving and successful in its mission, but they were able to, once again, engage in
communitas, as a working-class girl of color took on the burden of bringing them
together. As an instructor, however, I have a greater responsibility to Trey.
My role as an audience member can and should influence my co-performance as a
staff member and challenge my own pedagogical assumptions and evasions. I am
reminded of part of my interview with Kathy. While she was recounting her
interpretation of the process of (traumatic) testimony in Grrl Action performances, she
and I shared a small and (for me) uncomfortable laugh:
KATHY: Some of those girls have stories that make them different than
everyone, and the fact that I have this story, and I’m not going to try to
suppress it and be OK and act like everything’s OK, and I’m just like
everybody else in the room, and I’m going to tell you my truth is—just to
even do that—and now Sarah and Carrie kicking you out onstage to do it.
SARAH: Oh, right. That’s what we do: we kick them. (shared laughter)
KATHY: You kick them! It’s like vulnerability amplified if you think
about who’s the person giving the performance. (Fitzgibbons)
Kathy was joking in this summary of the roles Carrie and I play as instructors, of course,
but she unwittingly touched a nerve. My comment belies a level of sensitivity—a fear
that, at times, we do “kick” girls onstage and add to their trauma.
Megan – “Where I’m From” (2006)
Megan Dove’s 2006 “Where I’m From” explores this “kicking” as it manifests
itself in the power dynamics of the program, both between girls and spectators and
among girls themselves. “Where I’m From” is inspired by a poem of the same name by
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George Ella Lyons, whose meditations, “I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbontetrachloride, I am from the dirt under the black porch,” prompted girls to write creative
responses of their own. Carrie introduced all of the girls to this poem in a whole group
writing exercise, and five girls opted to share their pieces with the audience. Bronwyn,
Veronica, Isaura, and Zoey all join Megan onstage. During the summer workshop, if
multiple girls want to share similarly structured pieces they’ve written in response to a
single prompt, Madge often stages all of them as one multifaceted performance. In this
case, the girls stand in a line facing the audience and begin their performance with a short
Q&A in which they poll spectators about their own places of origin (“Austin,”
“Houston,” “New York,” come the replies), after which time each girl delivers her own
“I’m From” in a kind of definitional ceremony—several lines strung together about the
influences, past and present, that make up who she is.
Nowhere else in the performance are socioeconomic and ethnic differences more
apparent. Sentences range from Bronwyn’s “I’m from a glass bottle of L’Air du Temps
halfway used,” to Veronica’s “I’m from Angel Jeans and Jordan shoes,” to Isaura’s “I’m
from that dirt that you step on day after day,” to Zoey’s “I’m from brightly colored
houses, from stinky dogs to screaming babies.” Megan’s piece is the last in this thread.
She launches into her list with confidence, starting with “I’m from walls painted pink
upon the arrival of his baby girl, clueless to the fact that she has always hated him” and
moving into “I’m from the belief that He (pointing up) does not exist and that we make
things happen for ourselves. I’m from self-expression is OK. To a certain extent.”
Audience members laugh in recognition; Megan returns their smiles.
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But when she reaches “I’m from a world where bathtubs are used as meth labs;
I’m from a stab wound in the back because my dad made a mistake in his math,” she
starts to slow down. “I’m from a family of abusers and a grandmother with paranoid
schizophrenia,” she says, looking up left, as though she is searching her own mind, or
retreating into its confines. She sighs, closes her eyes, and holds a fist up to her face.
“I’m from hospitalizations…” she manages to get out before stopping herself short,
holding the other hand up to her forehead now and tilting her head into it, as though she
is holding fast to a wound, or stanching a leak. Tears start to fall, but she speaks through
them, her voice wavering in a much higher register than we are accustomed to hearing
from her.
She picks up where she left off: “…for suicide attempts because it was the only
way to escape him. I’m from abandonment after he fought for so long to have me. I’m
from caseworkers who don’t answer phones and family members who won’t take me in.”
Megan pauses again, and a lone audience member, Lisa Byrd, the Executive Director of
ProArts Collective, who is otherwise a stranger to Megan, shouts out, “We love you!”46
Megan pinches back tears with the fingers of her left hand. It’s hard to tell if she’s
surprised by these words—if, in fact, she even hears them fully. Another voice from the
audience sounds: “I’ll always be your Nana.” This is not Megan’s actual grandmother; it
is her girlfriend’s nana, who has driven several hours to see the performance today.
Megan holds both hands up to her face now, palms together in the gesture of prayer; she
46 ProArts is an Austin-based theatre company, whose mission is to serve as “an incubator of artistic
expression representing the African Diaspora and is dedicated to the production of transformational and
accessible works for the enrichment of the community” (Pro Arts Collective).
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cries fully, a breath in, a sob. And then we hear from Megan’s girlfriend herself in a soft,
gentle tone: “I love you, Megan.”
Megan wipes the bottom lids of her eyes, lowers her hands in a circular,
theatricalized gesture, then finishes her piece through gritted teeth. It’s hard to tell anger
from sadness, as the two merge in her final words: “I’m from ripped jeans and clothes
that don’t fit anymore in desperate need of a voucher. I’m from supervised phone calls
where people listen to every word you have to say. I’m from the system that was
designed to make me fail.” These very words, the fact that she shares them so candidly
and unapologetically are performative evidence against Megan’s failure. She forces her
audience to take note of her own story as a legitimate narrative of girlhood, working
against normative understandings of female adolescence and complicating other girls’
less fraught where-I’m-froms. Further, the vocalization from her girlfriend queers both
the theatre space and girlhood itself (for those of us who know who is calling out),
complicating Megan’s more overt white, working-class critique.
No matter the level of insider knowledge an individual spectator has about who is
calling out, Megan’s silent tears preceding these loving utterances prompt audiences to
listen deeply with the level of attention that Laub deems necessary in traumatic
testimony. As she recounts the moments leading up to Lisa Byrd’s “We love you,”
Madge describes her own thought process about Megan’s crying:
I’m sure that in real time it only lasted just a few seconds, but there was a
moment when everything just stopped, and I’m in the hallway, and I’m
thinking, “What’s best to do right now?” What I was imagining was just
some kind of show of support, where I would just go stand up beside her
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and maybe put my hand on her shoulder or something like that, where she
could maybe continue to talk, just so she knows she has somebody on her
side. It didn’t ever occur to me to shout out. (Darlington, 11 Jul. 2008)
What Madge expresses is the kind of deep empathy generated in generous listeners of
traumatic testimony—a level of attention to the meaning of silences, as well as the words
themselves. In her indecision about the best method of support she can offer Megan, she
implicitly understands that, as Wendy Chun argues, “distance must be maintained
between listener and speaker” so that the speaker feels empowered in her testimony
(162).
Further, Megan’s crying and the performative utterances that follow create an
affective bond in the audience—a kind of communitas that, at least in Madge’s case,
transforms what it means to be an audience member:
I was a mess. I was a goner. I was totally crying. [T]heir shouting was a
release because they were expressing what we all wanted to say, and it
was simple. But I just, I think my idea of what it means to be an audience
member is very reserved and quiet and, you know…I don’t know, it was
funny, it was such a simple act, and yet it was so effective, and there was
something about how [Lisa] was expressing what we were all thinking—
yeah, that’s when my waterworks totally started. (Darlington, 11 Jul.
2008)
Here, Madge elucidates the fact that audience members for Grrl Action performances are,
by necessity, affectively collaborative with girl performers and with each other—very
different from the “reserved and quiet” so many of us are used to. In fact, in many ways,
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they provide a model of spectatorial generosity (utopian performativity?) for how one
might hope all audiences would behave. As Kathy explains, “Going to [Grrl Action], I
walk in the door, they haven’t even said anything yet, and I love every minute of it. I’m
there to be supportive because I want these girls to feel so damn good. And I’ll give
them props for walking out there on the stage” (Fitzgibbons).
Despite the support of this spontaneous affective community, Megan’s physicality
by the end of her piece is important to note: she appears exhausted, chest heaving, breath
labored. She puts her hands on her hips almost as a runner might, leaning over for air
after a sprint. While Megan has moved through her tears and completed an evocative
definitional ceremony, this performance has taken its toll on her body. Resounding
applause issues from the audience, followed by vocalizations of “Woooo!” The energy
from the house stands in direct opposition to Megan’s exhaustion. It is as though she has
sacrificed herself for our purposes, enabled us to experience the utopian performative
with her during her actual piece, but, while we can stay in this space of hope, she is now
caught in the aftermath of traumatic performance. As Harris explains, “Young people are
encouraged to speak up and be heard, but this process often fails to result in enduring
political change” (Future Girl 11). We can choose to see transcendence when, at the end
of the day, Megan is left with the complicated pieces of her life to sort through.
The voices in the audience read as solidarity with and support of Megan, but they
signify in potentially problematic ways as well. The words of her nana may give false
hope, reassurance even, to an audience member who wants to believe that Megan has a
rosy future ahead of her, as we hear a coda of “Not anymore, Megan!” once the applause
fades. But Megan’s girlfriend’s grandmother can neither undo Megan’s traumatic past,
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nor provide a great degree of practical help in the present, as she is a ward of the state
until she turns 18. Further, these improvisational interjections, though intended as
support, are offered from the protective darkness of the house, while Megan’s well-lit,
trembling body is the focus of our gaze, highlighting the vulnerability of her position.
Crying and/or crying out from a comfortable seat in the audience is a different
proposition indeed from doing so onstage, and yet, as Madge herself voices, moving to
the stage with Megan has its own potential for undercutting her independence. How
valuable are our cries (or impulses to move) to Megan once she has left the stage and
must answer again to “the system that was designed to make [her] fail”? While she has
performed her identity in a way that transforms spectators’ ideas about what girlhood can
be onstage, she isn’t able to (re)embody girlhood in the material and immediate ways she
wants in her larger life.
In fact, I worry that the conviction and virtuosity of girls’ identity performances,
as well as the moments of communitas and shared affect, may lead spectators to construct
narratives of girlhood that promote a kind of passive she’s-clearly-going-to-be-alright
stance and/or a belief that the community that supports Megan is more stable and
substantial than she herself feels. Megan’s final solo piece in the 2006 summer
workshop, a straightforward monologue called “What Happens Next,” illustrates this
very point. In this piece, Megan performs a future that contrasts the past of her “Where
I’m From.” She starts out with a slow finger waggle at the audience—a self-aware
gesture that assumes and confronts any voyeuristic curiosity about her life:
I bet you’re wondering what happens next. After all of the abuse and after
all of the trauma I’ve been through—and overcome—I’ll bet you’re
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wondering what happens next. Well, lucky for you, I’ve had it planned
out for months. Literally. Months. I’ve been counting down the days until
my 18th birthday. I have 474 left, to be exact. Yes, I’ve been counting
down. On November 16, 2007, (arms up in the air) I turn 18 years old—
the big one-eight. And I’m no longer in the custody of (in a high,
performative register) oh-look-at-me!-only-Alaska’s-bigger! Texas. A
week before my 18th birthday, I will get one of my family members to
come and put a storage building in their name, since I have more crap than
anyone I know. See, I’m what they like to call a packrat. (in a playful
tone while taking random items out of her pockets—a pen, a strand of
pearls, note cards, Kleenex, a compact) Yes, I am the packrat of the
family. I own more crap than anyone. I carry anything and everything
around everywhere. (takes a pen out of her hair) I even have a pen in my
hair, OK? I’m a packrat. (shift into more serious tone) On the day of my
birthday, I will go and get a Greyhound bus ticket to see my girlfriend. (on
a crescendo) Yes, I said girlfriend. I am a LESBIAN, OK? (waves arms
up and down twice and stomps left foot) WHO CARES? (audience
applauds and hoots) Anyways (in a more subdued tone), after I graduate
high school in May, I’m going to go to Southwestern to study psychology
and the-a-ter. (a couple of audience hoots) After I get my B.A., I’m going
to transfer to UT to get my Master’s. (a “yeah!” from the audience) I’m
gonna be somebody, even if nobody helps me because I’ve got motivation
(left arm up), I’ve got determination (right arm up), I’ve got the
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drrriiivvee (punches right arm slowly out at the audience). I can do it
because I’m me. (a short bow and resounding applause)
Megan creates a “you” in relation to her “I” with a strong sense of a theatrical arc
in mind. Her “Well, lucky for you, I’ve had it planned out for months,” implies that the
audience is in need of answers, of an ending to her difficult beginning—of a sometimeslighthearted, always-empowered happily-ever-after. She teases spectators by guessing at
their desires, adds in a comic bit with her “packrat” routine, performs her sexuality with
confidence and clarity, and wraps up her piece with an assertion of her determination.
The audience’s affective applause, hoots, and shouts contrast their earlier expressions of
comfort. In this new definitional ceremony, Megan performs another identity—one that
is confident and clear-headed and fully capable of taking care of herself. Certainly, such
a performance is central to her self-definition, but it also makes things admittedly easier
on her audience.
If I were to hear this monologue without knowing anything more of Megan’s life,
I would believe that her performance of her future would indeed mirror her actual future
in many ways. I would not worry about her. I would marvel at her tenacity and admire
her enthusiasm. Her performance is that engaged, that convincing. It is in nearly every
way a utopian performative. Yet I know that Megan did not live out a single one of her
plans as intended. Very much the opposite, in fact.47 Megan rehearsed onstage for a
future that never came, or at least has not yet come, and for a series of identities that are
out of her reach. Certainly, future plans shift and change all of the time, yet I worry that
47
Out of respect for and promises of confidentiality to Megan, I cannot go into detail about her life. I will
say, however, that my communication with her ended in late 2007, and I currently don’t know where she is.
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the future Megan performed allowed her audience to see a kind of happily-ever-after
closure to her girlhood, her life even. While “What Happens Next” is certainly a
definitional ceremony for Megan—one that was important to her to share with her
audience as a resilient counter to her earlier “Where I’m From”—it is also a denouement
for spectators from their earlier catharsis in conjunction with the crying/crying out.
“What Happens Next” is a story that delimits our consideration of what we might do to
help Megan make her dream more than a performance—and help her (re)embody
girlhood in more material ways outside of the theatre space. Certainly, it is not the role
of theatre, or even necessarily a program like Grrl Action, to paternalistically (or
maternalistically) “save” anyone, nor should it be. And clearly I am not saying that
Megan shouldn’t be permitted to perform “What Happens Next.” In the style of
Madison’s critical ethnographer, I am arguing that girls like Megan deserve a someplace
where their material and emotional needs are met and their identity performances are
realized in the present tense, in addition to the elusive noplace of the utopian
performative.
I am deliberately underplaying the material differences the staff of Grrl Action
has made in the lives of actual girls. We have taken girls to doctors, set girls up with
internships, helped girls apply to college, written letters of recommendation; we keep up
with them whenever and however we can—over the phone, through email, and in person.
Madge, in fact, paid for the gas that allowed Megan’s girlfriend and grandmother to make
the trip to Austin from Dallas to see her performance. Plus, we actively encourage girls
to return to Grrl Action year after year, as we see the most profound shifts in confidence,
collaboration, and tenacity with our multiple-year participants. And, of course, giving
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girls the tools and supplies and support to create their own autobiographical performances
is a material intervention all its own. But the degree to which different girls benefit from
and take full advantage of the resources we offer is highly variable. There must be a way
then to systematize professional, educational, and interpersonal support for all girls. It is
not always enough to give them the resources to perform their identities, (re)embody
girlhood, rehearse for a better tomorrow, if—because of their age and material
circumstances—they cannot realize their performances, embodiments, and tomorrows
outside of the theatre space.
In a more basic and immediately manageable sense, I am also interested in the
ways that adult staff members for programs like Grrl Action can adjust their pedagogical
approaches to ensure that girls are able to construct their identities in ways that both give
them volition and provide them with the structure they want and need. Writing exercises
and staging choices can be either freeing or constricting, and sometimes staff members’
best efforts don’t produce the best results for girls. As Madge explains in regards to
Megan’s piece, “She was answering the question, ‘Where I’m From,’ and so she’s in a
line—she’s one of five girls in a line, and girls from different backgrounds. Here you’ve
got Zoey, and where she’s from just sounds like a lovely portrait of the ideal childhood,
and then you get to Megan, and where she was from was a father who tried to stab her
during a drug deal gone wrong” (Darlington, 11 Jul. 2008). While “Where I’m From”
does provide an evocative catalyst for girls to perform themselves verbally in unique
ways, it produces more substance for discussion than I fear we generally engage in. Girls
used “Where I’m From” to perform class, race, region, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, age,
and personal quirks, as well as trauma, and yet we did not incorporate in-depth discussion
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of these different topics, or of differences within these topics, into the lesson plans for the
workshop itself. While part of me believes that the fact that girls are performing their
identities both onstage and off is enough to expose them to each other, another part of me
feels like this isn’t a pedagogically rigorous enough approach.
Perhaps more importantly, we did not discuss with Megan—or Bronwynn, Isaura,
Veronica, and Zoey, for that matter—how she felt about performing her piece in
conjunction with other girls. While we as adult artists can see the merit in collectivizing
the work of these girls to illuminate the range of ways they (re)define girlhood in their
evocations of “where,” it would be productive to engage girls themselves in such a
discussion. In terms of the girls with the “ideal childhood[s],” I worry too that, without a
more in-depth discussion of difference and identity performance, they are left feeling
either a degree of pity for girls with more overtly traumatic testimony, or, as Sarah
voices, that the traumatic performances are “braver.” Sarah, for example, explains
fearing for awhile that she was a “one-dimensional person” because she never cried
onstage—that she was, in fact, “jealous because [she didn’t] have any real stories”
(Crowe and Wheatley-Rutner). Thus, instructors can do a better job of deconstructing the
translation of tears as “real” performances of identity and less traumatically affective
performances as “one-dimensional.” Further, we can prepare girls who opt to share
traumatic testimony to protect themselves if they do cry onstage and are not comfortable
doing so in front of an audience. As Sarah asserts, “I think there’s a difference between
like being really vulnerable and crying in front of people, like, on accident, and then
crying and being okay with that” (Crowe and Wheatley-Rutner). In other words, we can
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do more to understand girls’ tears—what they mean, how they mean, and how they mean
differently for girls, staff, and audiences.
Transference, especially in regards to female staff members, must have its limits
if Grrl Action is to serve all female youth, to open up new inroads for performing
girlhood, in more than just girls’ moments onstage. The operation of transference in Grrl
Action, in fact, illuminates an important issue in rethinking the program as a feminist
collective, and in re-imagining feminist collectives in general:
Feminism has often concentrated on consciousness raising, on producing
speech that breaks one’s silence and inaugurates one as a feminist. The
question of how to listen and respond to these testimonials has been
largely unaddressed, since the question of listening in general tends to be
under-theorized and under-valued: more often than not, we assume we
know how to listen. (Chun 144)
As we build coalition in Grrl Action, we must learn how to listen—more closely, more
carefully, and without the assumption that we already understand.
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Conclusion
Collective Constructions of Girlhood:
Girls and Women Co-Performing
If there’s anything that the Zen of the South has taught me, it’s that you’re
not going to figure out everything, especially something as malleable as
your future. As you live now, you’re constantly entering your future. And
as it’s going now, my future ain’t lookin’ so bad. So I think it’s alright
sometimes to sit back and enjoy these moments of transition, even if you
yourself are standing still. The future can take you everywhere, but the
paths of the past run ceaselessly internal.
–Sarah Crowe, “Bluebonnet Mysticism” (Grrl Action 2006)
These are the final words of Sarah’s “Bluebonnet Mysticism,” her exploration of
Texan identity during her final Grrl Action summer workshop. With meditations like,
“This place is a breathable heritage, where the sun clings to you and people love you
more. Southern hospitality is just the idea that making friends is only a matter of being
nice to a stranger. And I love this place, but still yet I don’t believe I’m staying here,”
“Bluebonnet Mysticism” is also analogous in many ways to Sarah’s relationship with
Grrl Action. I imagine the “sun” as the stage lights, the “people” as the spectators and
staff members, and the “strangers” as the Grrl Action participants themselves. Most of
all, I imagine—based on the conversations I’ve had with Sarah about the profound effect
Grrl Action has had on her life and her art—that the whole of Grrl Action is a “breathable
heritage” she carries with her once she leaves the theatre space.
It is appropriate then that Sarah speaks about this moment of transition in July
2006 in the language of liminality—a language that is evocative of both performance and
girlhood. I am especially struck by her claim that “the future can take you everywhere,”
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as opposed to anywhere. In the present moment of performance, in the time between
time, she can imagine being everywhere at once. She can try out multiple versions of
herself back to back, even simultaneously, that will inform her performance of self
outside of a theatre space. Rather than coming to any conclusions about her future, Sarah
values the experiential Now, while also acknowledging how the present moment contains
her ever-larger past. She both stresses the immediacy of performance and reveals how
girlhood grows over time until, at some ineffable moment, it turns into womanhood.
Hence, Sarah illustrates how the performance of girlhood identity can be the
connective tissue of intergenerational feminist collectivity. And she poses questions for
female audience members joining the collective themselves: What do girls and women,
immersed in their very different Nows, have to teach each other? How can women draw
on their own girlhood experiences, their own “paths of the past [that] run ceaselessly
internal,” while also honoring the immediacy, the specificity of girls’ experiences in the
present?
My Own Identity Performance
While I was transcribing the epigraph for this chapter, Sarah Crowe uncannily
called me. She is applying for a job teaching summer classes to children at the
Doughterty Arts Center in Austin and wants to use me as a reference. Sarah is in her
second semester of art school at The Cooper Union. She wound up in New York two
years after her performative hypothesizing about what it would mean to be a Texan
“ambassador” in the North. We talked briefly. She told me about school and apartment
hunting, and I told her about the final stages of my dissertation and my performance in a
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collaborative piece about women’s fashion magazines. It’s “so Grrl Action,” I said, “I
wish you could see it.”
The performance I described to Sarah was an ensemble creation for the 2009
University Co-op/Cohen New Works Festival called 101 Ways to….48 I had originally
had no intention of taking part in this event, but Halena Kays, a new MFA directing
student at UT roped me into it. Halena and I went to Northwestern University together as
undergraduates, and the last time she directed me in a play, I was 19—only a year older
than many of the girls I write about in this dissertation. Yet I had never worked with
Halena on a collaborative performance like this one. Inspired by the world of women’s
fashion magazines, 101 Ways to… is filled with original pieces both individually written
and collectively created by five actor-writers who had never worked together as an
ensemble prior to this project. The performance began much in the way Grrl Action
does—with silhouetted images we actors made with our bodies in response to words
gleaned from magazines projected on a screen above the stage. It incorporated dance and
music and the ensemble’s honest (and most often comedic) reactions to women’s fashion
magazines. And it underwent a series of revisions, re-orderings, and cuts that sacrificed
several actor-writers’ pieces to the integrity of the whole show.
There were two factors that, while they didn’t necessarily prompt me to join the
101 Ways to… ensemble, definitely solidified my choice to do so: first, the nostalgia I
felt at the prospect of working with a director I had last encountered when I was still a
48 Actually, the full title, taken from real headlines on various fashion magazines, is 101 Ways to Get the
Perfect Look, Have Hotter Sex, Love Your Body, Dress a Whole Lot Cooler, Make Your Boobs Pop, Be
More Adventurous, Be More Cautious, Smell Better, Feel Less Guilty, Read His Mind, Make Him Notice
You, Make Yourself Over, Spend Money Better, Get Smarter by Tomorrow, Connect with Your Kids, Be a
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teenager; and, second, my understanding that the process of this show would, in many
ways, mirror that of Grrl Action. I wanted to put myself in the girls’ positions as best I
could—in ways both exhilarating and terrifying. And wanted to see what it would feel
like to transform my nostalgia about my early acting experiences into practice today in an
entirely different performative structure. While I have created solo autobiographical
work in the past, I have never developed this kind of collective autobiography with an
ensemble before.
The process taught me far more than I anticipated about myself and about the
challenges of collective autobiography for writer-actors. One of the earliest observations
I made in the process was about the politics of representation. Once our ensemble was
determined, I feared (possibly unfairly) how homogenously heterosexual the material
might be. I decided that it was important to me to queer these fashion magazines, so I
wrote parts one, two, and three of “Why I Really Buy Cosmo, Glamour, Elle and/or
Vogue by Sarah Myers” (only one of which made it into the show) about my own use of
these magazines as, essentially, soft core porn. I also wanted to explore how women can
simultaneously desire and objectify other women (or at least I could), so my work
combined explicitly detailed descriptions of the kinds of magazine images I like to look
at with goofy evocations of my fears about being anti-feminist. As I thought about all of
this, I couldn’t help but remember Lequita’s “I just was like, you know, I’m gonna do
that because no one else was doing that” (Bradshaw) in reference to her coming out as a
lesbian onstage. While my final performance was not nearly as risky as Lequita’s, I felt
Hipper Dancer, Have More Fun, Share Your Deepest Darkest Secrets, Recycle!, Find Your Inner Self, and
Do Anything Better.
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like I had a much firmer grasp on the rationale behind her statement than I did previously.
The impetus to perform my queer desire was especially important to me, as I understood
it to be part of the culture of fashion magazine consumption. I began to consider how
highlighting a particular part of oneself can be a kind of filling-in-what’s-missing in
collaborative performance as a whole.
In many ways, I started thinking about my whole performance of self as
productively partial. One of the helpful discourses that Halena adopted in rehearsal was
that of persona—of focusing on a part of oneself and highlighting or even inflating it.
Yet she also stressed the importance of never lying about our opinions, ideas, or
experiences in performance. There was truth to everything that we wrote, even if (as was
the case with my monologue) a piece was comedic as well. I found the language of
persona incredibly freeing, in that it allowed me to remember that I wasn’t being held to
the impossible standard of unveiling my essence, as much as choosing an identity or two
to perform more actively. Interestingly, certain audience members had trouble in
talkbacks believing that the stories we told onstage were “true.” While this may, in part,
be due to the comedic nature of the performance, this phenomenon does lead me to
consider how and why an audience comes to understand the authenticity of a piece—and
how I might take steps to help spectators understand collective autobiography in a more
nuanced way than “true” or “false” in future work I do both myself and with youth.
Yet I would say too that this questioning of what is “real” can also be critically
and creatively productive for both audience and actor—in challenging assumptions and
figuring through what we take to be autobiography. I am thinking of Leela’s Grrl Action
performance in 2008, in which she delivered a first-person monologue about an
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anthropomorphized and badly behaved armadillo that caused all sorts of problems at a
house party. While some audience members were amused by the piece, others felt it
wasn’t autobiographical enough because it wasn’t “true.” I prefer to consider Leela’s
piece in terms of identity performance. What part of herself was she performing when
she delivered this fictionalized monologue? What prompted her to want to create a piece
like this under the auspices of autobiographical performance? How could she
communicate important ideas about herself and girlhood—regarding self-control,
censorship, responsibility, friendship, and societal expectations—that might have been
more difficult to do through another narrative frame? And how might Leela’s adoption
of an obvious persona expose more covert forms of autobiography, as well as
(re)embodied girlhood?
Outside of, or (more appropriately) in relation to, my observations about persona
and authenticity, I was struck by my own emotional responses to 101 Ways to….
When
my three-part “Why I Really Buy Cosmo, Glamour, Elle and/or Vogue by Sarah Myers”
was cut down into a single monologue—partially my own suggestion, partially Halena’s
decision—I felt a mixture of relief, disappointment, and fidelity to the ensemble.
Because the pieces grew increasingly revealing, I was scared of sharing the final
monologue especially. It was both the anonymity and unpredictability of certain
audience members and the presence of some of my former college students that made me
most nervous about describing both masturbation and internalized misogyny. I’m still
not sure what exactly I was afraid of. Their dismissal? Their discomfort? Being
misunderstood? Sounding anti-feminist? Or too casual in my queerness? Not achieving
some level of communitas? I was certainly highly attuned to audience reactions, as much
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of the material was delivered in direct address; when spectators reacted in unexpected
ways, I began to understand how and why Bryanna uses the science fair approach to
gauge audience response.
I was also struck during 101 Ways to… by my simultaneous disappointment and
acceptance of my work being cut. Though the pieces grew increasingly revealing, they
essentially did what I call, as a playwright, the “same work” in that they were designed
for similar purposes. Elements of a singularly written play that do the same work are
generally the ones easiest and most obvious to cut in the revision process. While I felt
satisfied that the cuts in 101 Ways to… added to the integrity of the whole performance
and were, in effect, the best collective decision, I couldn’t help but be a little hurt that
there was less of my voice onstage, less of my humor to laugh at. These conflicted
feelings remind me most obviously of girls whose pieces are cut or shortened in the
rearranging of the entire Grrl Action performance (or who elect to cut or shorten them
themselves). But they also make me think of Sarah Crowe’s jealousy over the attention
girls receive in performing more traumatic pieces. Was my performance going to be seen
as not funny or important enough because I wound up having less airtime than originally
planned? Was this lack of airtime a reflection on me as a performer or writer? Was I
being selfish by even having these feelings?
In terms of the other members of the ensemble, I was struck by how their pieces
both freed and implicated me. MFA playwright Jenny Connell performed a piece that
revealed the hold that commercial beauty culture has over her. In post-show talkbacks,
audience members pointed to this monologue as the most explicitly vulnerable
performance in 101 Ways to…, which reminded me of the more traumatic Grrl Action
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pieces. Watching Jenny, I felt torn: I was grateful that she portrayed the more dangerous
and destructive side of magazine culture to balance out the humor of the whole
performance and expose the earnestness beneath the satire and broad comedy, thankful
that she had taken on the more dramatic role so that I could focus on other issues myself,
and nervous for her in terms of just how much she revealed about her fears of her own
shortcomings. I also played parts in a couple of her pieces, which made me feel strangely
culpable in the hegemony of fashion magazine culture. At one point, I read off
“Cosmosutra” positions that she performed sans partner; at another, I stripped a dress off
of her to signify the destructiveness of commercial print media. While I certainly didn’t
disapprove of her pieces as, say, girls disapproved of thongs in Zoey’s performance, I
couldn’t help but feel implicated in the power structure of magazine culture in ways that
weren’t always comfortable.
Why Not Now?
By drawing comparisons between 101 Ways to… and Grrl Action, I am not
arguing that my experiences were entirely analogous to the girls’. 101 Ways to… was
about as comedic as Grrl Action is dramatic, there were not major generational
differences between the director and the cast, the ensemble included both women and
men, and the participants were all experienced theatre artists. But I do believe that taking
part in a form of collective autobiographical creation myself was the most illuminating
thing I could have done as a critical pedagogue and ethnographer. By putting my own
body, my own identity performances on the line, I have a slightly better understanding of
what is pleasurable and what is at stake for girl performers and a better vocabulary for
talking about collective identity performance onstage. Further, I have a better response
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for those women who wish there had been a Grrl Action when they were younger: Why
not start one today with other interested actors? Or why not join ranks with girls and
create performance together? Why not, in fact, explore what an intergenerational
feminist collective might add to the discourse of feminist performance in general—and
how it might address issues of ageism in both directions? And in terms of my own
experience, I will continue to ask how other adult staff members and I can put our bodies
on the line within programs like Grrl Action, while also addressing the needs of girls in a
pedagogically responsible way.
New Approaches to Family
Girls certainly provide any number of insights for women into the ways feminist
collectives might be redefined today. I am most moved perhaps by the discourse of
family that so many participants in Grrl Action adopt. For girls today, family means
something quite different than it did for those of us who were girls one or two generations
ago. Whenever Grrl Action girls describe the program as a family or “sisterhood” (the
word of choice in 2007), it is with the explanation that they are bonded by a common
goal/desire/ideal, even if they don’t all get along, agree, or share common experiences.
In fact, they expect not to get along, agree, or share common experiences, and yet they
see the worth in working with and learning from each other anyway.
While the discourses of family and sisterhood might have obscured differences
and marginalized the experiences of women of color, queer women, and working-class
women in earlier feminist collectives, today, it is often the more marginalized girls who
adopt the language of family most readily. As Isaura explains on one of many occasions,
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Now, I sort of, like, I consider Grrl Action kind of like my own set of
family groupings even though everybody’s, like, different, you know.
And it just kind of opened my mind up ’cause some of the girls come from
different backgrounds. Actually, that first day I was in Grrl Action was
the first time I met people from the Settlement Home. I didn’t know there
was such a place. It sounds awful, you know? But, at the same time, there
are some positive aspects—just you kind of hope that they find a home,
you know? But now it’s like everybody in my family—I may not always
like them too much, but I seem to have some kind of connection to them,
and some of the stuff that they write is pretty good. (Martinez)
Not only do girls perform their identities for the audience; they also perform them
for each other—and in ways that allow them to make connections and develop
friendships they didn’t necessarily anticipate. In describing Anna’s 2007 piece,
“Through the Eyes of a Stranger,” Isaura explains, “She was talking about wanting
something, but you already have it there, but it was about her like mom. […] It was really
touching, you know? Finally, someone here who actually understands what I am feeling
inside!” (Martinez). Isaura credits this performance—in which Anna describes looking in
on her life through the eyes of multiple people and finding the good in her everyday
existence and in her mother especially—as the catalyst for the friendship that followed.
“Through the Eyes of a Stranger,” an overt exercise in taking on multiple identities to try
out new ways of seeing the world, is what prompts the emotional coalition between Anna
and Isaura.
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Grrl Action, and programs like it, can be more than a training ground for digging
deeper into coalitions among girls. It can also be a site for girls to redefine their interests
and occupations for and with women—but only if women are willing to take heed of
what girls are communicating. One of Anna’s other pieces in 2007, “Secrets of the
Bedroom,” actually prompted a post-rehearsal conversation among girls about a struggle
they hadn’t realized they shared: their mistreatment or neglect by adult family members.
As Bryanna explains, “I’ll be honest, a lot of what went into my summer performance,
was stuff we were talking about—all the girls. I was surprised, I was like, I didn’t know I
wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Like Anna’s piece, it’s like, yeah, I know how she
feels, except I’ve never really had a desire to be told I’m loved, but it’d be nice” (Estrada
and Rice). I’m struck by two elements of Bryanna’s admission here: first, that she sees
performance as a tool for catalyzing communication with adults she is close to; and,
second, that she indirectly communicates to me in an interview the issues that bring girls
together.
While many adults have preconceived notions about what issues are important to
explore with girls (body image being a major one), girls often have very different ideas
about topics they’re collectively interested in. How then can we be more proactive about
creating curriculum that not only allows girls many in-roads for individual exploration,
but also focuses on issues and material circumstances they share and could explore
productively together? As Isaura explains about the 2005 workshop,
I guess that whole year was about accepting your whole body, you know?
[…] I had never thought about the whole body thing. I was like, “Do I
have to be comfortable with my body?” I was just like, I really didn’t
227
care, you know? You could say I was kind of like a tomboy, but not really
’cause I just like, I didn’t like too much about the girly stuff. I saw girls
putting on makeup and stuff, and I really didn’t care about it. (Martinez)
While many girls do, of course, express concerns about their bodies and benefit from an
emphasis on healthy body image, Isaura brings up an important question: What happens
when adults assume poor body image is part of teenage girlhood and, hence, teach girls
that being a girl means first hating and then learning to love your body, when many girls
never learn to hate their bodies in the first place? When Isaura asks, “Do I have to be
comfortable with my body?” she is not saying that she is uncomfortable with her body.
Rather, she implies, “Can’t I focus on other things that are more important to me than
body image?”
Further, Isaura’s “girly” seems to mean hyper-feminine or appearance-oriented—
qualities she hopes to distance herself from, qualities she links to girls’ exploration of
body image. To overcome body image issues, Isaura seems to argue, you have to be
interested in physical appearance in the first place. Thus, when she chooses to write
pieces about immigration reform instead, we as adult instructors need to understand that
this issue is part of what it means to be a girl, just as much as anorexia might be to
someone else. The more conscious we can be about the topics and forms of girls’
identity performances, the better we can create a worthwhile program and understand the
ways that girlhood itself transmutes over time.
Girls’ Ideas of Girls
As Isaura’s imbuing of “girly” with a negative connotation implies, girls often
have a host of conflicting emotions about what being a girl means. While girls openly
228
discuss their appreciation of and respect for other girls in Grrl Action, I was struck in
several of my interviews by these same girls’ overt mistrust and negativity towards other
girls outside of the program. Even Isaura and Bryanna are quick to point out their
negative perception of girls outside of the theatre space. As Bryanna explains,
Girls scare me. When I was little…The girls who are in Grrl Action now
as opposed to the ones I knew when I was little—SO different. Like when
I was little, they were these shallow little, snobby, prissy girls, and they
never left you alone. And I grew up around boys—like my babysitter was
a boy, and my brother’s friends were all guys, and they always came
around, so I just got more attached to them. And then I would listen to the
way my brother talked about girls—and this was in like fourth grade—and
the way he described them, they were all aliens, like disturbing little
beasties. And when I would try to talk to one, it was always awkward.
(Estrada and Rice)
First, Bryanna defines girls as something Other than (“alien” to) herself. Then, she
ascribes a kind of one-dimensionality to these Others that is validated (or perhaps
prompted) by her brother and the boys whose company she has grown accustomed to.
Shallowness and snobbiness become disturbingly synonymous with girlhood—except,
notably, in Grrl Action.
While Bryanna describes her aversion to girls from a very young age (prompting
questions about internalized ageism, as well as sexism), Isaura points to her discomfort
with adolescent girls especially:
229
I wasn’t used to the whole girl thing, and I was like, I’m gonna have a
hard trouble [in Grrl Action] ’cause I don’t get along too much with girls,
you know? And then I just kind of got used to it. Occasionally, if I did
hang out, it was with one of my friends that was a boy. Girls just—I don’t
know…I sometimes didn’t find the connections, so I was like, well, I’m
better off by myself. […] I guess it’s the whole girls liking makeup and
talking about guys all the time and, you know, don’t you have a life?
Don’t you have something else to talk about? […] Outside of Grrl Action,
they’re probably different, but inside of Grrl Action, it’s like, you know,
you could talk about a variety of things.
In Isaura’s account of why she doesn’t “get along too much with girls,” she associates
girlhood with traditional femininity (makeup) and heteronormativity (“talking about
guys”). However, her phrase “outside of Grrl Action, they’re probably different” clues
me in to the fact that Isaura is making assumptions about girls outside of the program,
rather than presenting evidence however. She is not certain that girls outside of Grrl
Action are any different from the way they are inside of it (i.e., able to “talk about a
variety of things”), but she presumes this to be the case. While I don’t doubt that many
girls in Isaura’s life are consumed by makeup and boys, I also know that Isaura would be
able to find other female youth interested in talking “about a variety of things” outside of
the theatre space—and that these girls are just as validly girls as the ones with whom she
shares less in common.
While Isaura’s and Bryanna’s anti-girl sentiments here worry me, I remember
feeling quite similarly as a teenager. I was turned off by what I took to be feminine
230
activities like shopping, by the worship of cheesy boy bands, and by what I believed was
a lack of gravity and directness among some of my female friends. In my desire to be
taken seriously, I was battling a mixture of internalized misogyny and sex-gender
conflation. Though I need to be careful myself about reading my own experiences onto
girls’, I am interested in the kinds of cross-generational conversations that could take
place around the dislike (or fear) girls like Isaura and Bryanna have of other girls.
I am also excited by the ways that Grrl Action might act as a training ground for
combating prejudices and exploring assumptions about girlhood. By performing multiple
identities and watching other girls do the same, girls like Isaura and Bryanna witness
more and more possibilities of what girlhood can be. They also have the opportunity to
see that femininity itself is more complex than they might have imagined, as there are
certainly girls in the program with more traditionally heteronormative and overtly
feminine ideas. Yet, as Isaura and Bryanna begin to see the validity of other more
seemingly normative identity performances, it is essential that they still feel like their
own non-normative performances of girlhood are honored and validated. Inherent in
their anti-girl statements is, I believe, resistance to and anger at their own performances
of girlhood as unacceptable or “abnormal” in the mainstream. How then might the Off
Center be a site of social change, in which they recognize themselves as girls, and
contemplate and combat the negative connotation the word has taken on in their
vocabularies?
231
They Need Us, We Need Them
They need us! They need that voice, but maybe that’s a judgment I have
about, about the [third wave]. I think they need to hear the word feminist
not used in a derogatory way—like feminism, feminism, feminism is not a
bad word! And I think [they need to] hear adult artists that are making
their ways as artists saying “feminist,” and […] that Deb Margolin thing,
“Your everyday life is worthy of performance,” your experience is
interesting and performative.
–Madge Darlington Interview, 15 Sep. 2008
I agree with Madge. The girls in Grrl Action do need us. And they need us to do
more than use the word feminism and even to tell them their lives are performanceworthy. They need us to help them (re)embody girlhood—first inside, and then outside
of the theatre space. They need to learn that the word girl and the lives of girls are not
worthy of derision. The first step in this process may very well be considering programs
like Grrl Action sites for the collective performance of girlhood—collective in the sense
that they are both ensembles of different individuals and that, within each individual
identity performance, is a kind of present and absent “we” informing the autobiography.
I must consider how every choice I make—from where and whom I recruit, to whom I
bring in as guest artists, to how I plan my workshop lessons, to how we collectively order
the performance, to my informal conversations and pedagogical discourse with girls—
influences not only individual girls, but also the ways that girlhood is (re)embodied
onstage. I play a role as co-performer, in other words, in girls’ identity performances in
ways I may not even consciously know.
Hence, I look to a site like Grrl Action to illuminate the hegemonic issues at stake
in any number of girls’ advocacy organizations and empowerment programs—no matter
how seemingly progressive their aims. Theatre is a place where the benefits and
232
challenges of collectivity are more visible, and the performances themselves show the
mark of many influences, but this doesn’t mean that girlhood isn’t always a collective
creation. Collective autobiographical theatre simply illuminates the power differentials
that other forms of cultural production often obscure.
Just as importantly as girls needing us, we need them. We need them to
remember and process our own girlhoods, and to challenge our assumptions about what
girlhood is, was, and can be. We need them to inspire us to perform the roles now that
we didn’t get a chance to as girls because of fear, inaccessibility, or lack of interest. We
need them to help us redefine family and collectivity and identity performance. We need
them to continue questioning how feminism does and doesn’t meet the needs of all
females regardless of age. As Madge acknowledges, “The women artistic directors in the
company are pretty solidly second wave and don’t have a lot of patience or tolerance
about some of this third wave stuff. I feel like I’ve got to understand it more if I’m gonna
be working with teenage girls” (Darlington, 15 Sep. 2008). I don’t know that all (or any)
of the girls would necessarily describe themselves as “third wave,” but what I do know,
and what Madge knows as well, is that girlhood has changed in the ten years since Grrl
Action started. As she points out, when the Rude Mechanicals named the program, “We
meant action as a political action, you know? And in 2000, people were, I don’t know,
the culture, girl culture was like zines, and like…” “Do it yourself aesthetic? Riot
Grrrl?” I ask. “Yeah,” Madge says, “And now they’re seeing commercials for Girls
Gone Wild. I don’t know. That stuff was not there eight years ago. […] You just think
about the internet, like that wasn’t true eight years ago. It’s an interesting time”
(Darlington, 15 Sep. 2008).
233
Performance’s Vital Role for Girls
It is an interesting time. Girls today do not know what life is like without cell
phones and the internet. They perform themselves through text messages and email. The
clothes marketed to them through mainstream media are, as Madge points out, far more
overtly sexualized than they were in the past. And yet the girls I’ve met through Grrl
Action are still drawn to the theatre to perform their identities live onstage. They are
drawn to a range of costumes that let them try out a variety of selves, rather than the
hypersexualized fashions that permeates commercial culture. The presence of the
audience, the possibility for combining multiple media, and the ways embodied identity
performance aids their explorations of self are unparalleled in any other kind of cultural
production.
Further, in terms of Girls’ Studies, theatre provides an invaluable lens for
examining intergenerational power exchanges and collective creations of girlhood, as
well as ways that women can reinvest in their own girlhoods without essentializing what
it means to be a girl. As Janie Victoria Ward and Beth Cooper Benjamin explain,
The movement of women on behalf of girls, initially motivated by
women’s recognitions of the connections between their individual
developmental losses and common political context, has given way to a
field that tends to address girls’ concerns solely as concerns for and about
girls. In our efforts to “save the selves of adolescent girls,” we have lost
sight of how these efforts were meant to save ourselves as well: how
addressing girls’ needs also served explicitly feminist ends, as the
234
literature defined work with girls as a form of collective resistance to
patriarchy. (23)
I conclude then with a call for a revisitation of the critical pedagogy that fueled Grrl
Action’s creation in the first place, with an eye towards the unique challenges girls face
today, as opposed to ten years ago. I am reminded in my final thoughts of Paulo Friere’s
belief in problem-posing education as “revolutionary futurity”: “Problem-posing
education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished,
uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (84). In many ways, Grrl
Action is an experiment in problem-posing education, and theatre is a site of
“revolutionary futurity.” We are all co-performers in the larger theatre of girlhood. Let
us be ever more conscious, active, and generous actors.
235
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I have included the complete bibliographic information for the Grrl Action performances
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performances, often quoting girls’ words directly. For ease of reading, I have avoided
parenthetical references after these quotations. As a general rule, unless I indicate
otherwise, all of the quotations that follow the introduction of a girl’s performance piece
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Vita
Sarah Lynn Myers was born in Skokie, Illinois in 1976. After graduating from
John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois in 1994, she entered
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she received her Bachelor of
Science in Speech with a double major in Theatre and English in 1998. After joining
Teach For America and working professionally for four years, Sarah enrolled in the
Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin in 2002, earning her Master of Fine
Arts in Drama and Theatre for Youth/Playwriting from the Department of Theatre and
Dance in 2005.
Permanent address:
203 B Leland Street
Austin, Texas 78704
This dissertation was typed by the author.
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