Invisible acts
Subtitle: performing violence against women in Early Modern and contemporary drama in English.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 303
Description: This thesis develops a theory and practice for the critical representation of violence against women in performance based on the premise that such violence---be it rape violence or what I define as non-sexual "punitive" violence---has historically been elided, translated into a matter between and about men. Taking "effacement" as the representational norm for women's violence in the drama as well as in the culture of early modern England, I posit a theory of representation that stages elision with difference. I focus on acts of violence left "offstage" or otherwise unrepresented in texts both Early Modern and contemporary, and explore in turn their potential to stage the very process and consequences of effacement itself. The "invisible act" of my title is the theatrical gesture that confronts audiences with the image of violence missed, with their failure to see; it argues that the deliberate refusal of representation is the condition of possibility of a critical, historicized performance of violence against women on the stage.Theoretically, I build this argument in a gap within feminist performance theory. This body of scholarship has been essential in furthering our understanding of the gendered dynamics of performance, but it has curiously never turned its attention to the vexed problem of the woman's body in violence  on stage. I break into this critical lacuna with a new reading of Freud's work on femininity, arguing that Freud's always-already castrated female implies a prior, brutal, and utterly disavowed act of sexualized physical violence against women's bodies. Because feminist performance theory is deeply indebted to---though also productively critical of---Freud's philosophy of subjectivity, it is unable fully to recognize or successfully to countermand the unseen violence at its theoretical core. I then bring Jacques Lacan's writings on vision into this equation, arguing that we may articulate on stage the philosophical and cultural problem of violence's effacement by exploring the performative value of "anamorphosis"---that moment when we realize we operate within an incomplete visual field, when we confront the unsettling feeling that something has been missed, is missing.
Notes: Adviser:  Nancy Copeland.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1596.