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(More customer reviews)Davy's engaging history of the anarchist women's theatre group, Women's One World, salvages a neglected history of queer feminist performance theatre in New York's East Village from the late 1970s to the present. Her task was not simple. It turns out anarchists are not good archivists. Through interviews with former and current members and mining the handful of WOW boxes of ephemera at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Davy reconstructs the daily operations of a shifting group of performance artists over time, over a changing neighborhood and over a changing women's movement. Davy tells an infectious grassroots story: two summertime international women's theatre festival in 1980 and 1981 launched WOW. Once operational, the group opened itself to any woman who showed up to the weekly meeting. They worked together under the rubric of "sweat equality" to put on often disorganized, collectively written, and enthusiastically unprofessional shows. The glue holding the sexually and racially diverse group together was the practice of doing something in common, not being something in common. This enabled the group to solve as few problems as possible in the name of getting the show ready. WOW, in the words of a participant, was best understood as "a force, not a place." Davy argues that this "fluid notion of feminist space inhabited by participants who do not necessarily agree on what constitutes `feminism'" can be a model for effective coalition building.
There is much here for scholars of new American Queer Theatre, lesbian and women's historians, and readers interested in performance art and its semiotic workings on audiences. For this reviewer, Davy's challenge to the assumption that queer cultural practice emerged in response to a repressive and anti-sex style of 70s feminism is outstanding. Davy argues that only when we condense diverse kinds of feminism into one falsely hegemonic definition can we see queer growing in opposition to feminist practices. And to do so risks "disappearing" the wild diversity of sex positive, raunchy, identity dislocating feminist practice in the 1980s that included the women affiliated with WOW. The group's sense of themselves as a "city of women," not a beloved consensus-based community of like-minded, like-colored women, enabled them to hold identity in productively anti-essentializing ways, and in doing so, says Davy, made "the unimaginable" imaginable. Specifically, that WOW performances were generative of new ways to be embodied women, which offered ways past the confines of feminism and femininity.
In the first three chapters Davy situates WOW in overlapping histories of performance, theatre and feminism in the 70s, before telling the story of how WOW came into a working theatre group in the wake of the festivals. Festivals acted as an antidote to the "grim mood" of the late 70s women's movement and Davy does a terrific reading of the performances intervention into normative sex/gender scripts. Four takes up the overlapping issues of space and process in WOW's storefront years (1982-1985), giving the reader a vivid sense of what it felt like to watch WOW, and five, (after 1985) the burst of gentrification that swept the East Village into high rent fashionability and WOW into a larger space and new challenges. In six, Davy explores how WOW played with the intersections of whiteness and normative femininity and offers new readings of performances by the Five Lesbian Brothers, among other notables.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Cafe Theatre (Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance)
Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and unbridled eroticism at a women's theater space in the East Village
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