Voices Made Flesh

by Miller, Lynn C.; Taylor, Jacqueline; Carver, M. Heather

• ISBN13: 9780299184247
• ISBN10: 0299184242
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed. The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers-Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah-tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Editors' Introduction	3	(12)
Lynn C. Miller and Jacqueline Taylor
Risky Business: Exploring Women's Autobiography and Performance	15	(18)
M. Heather Carver
PART I: WOMEN'S HISTORICAL AUTO/BIOGRAPHY
1 Intimate Partners: A Critical Autobiography of Performing Anais	33	(14)
Elylle Lamm Pineau
2 Gertrude Stein Never Enough	47	(19)
Lynn C. Miller
3 Mule of the World: The Embodiment of Mary Church Terrell	66	(18)
Eileen C. Cherry
4 Desire in Evidence	84	(12)
Stacy Wolf
5 Too Wild for Her Own Good: Searching for the Real Calamity Jane	96	(7)
M. Heather Carver
6 Georgia O'Keeffe x Catherine Rogers	103	(22)
Catherine Rogers
7 The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman	125	(27)
Carolyn Gage
8 Performing Historical Figures: The Metadramatics of Women's Autobiographical Performance	152	(15)
Carol Hanhery MacKay
PART II: STAGING THE SELF
9 Illustrated Woman: Autoperformance in "Skins: A Daughter's (Re)construction of Cancer" and "Tattoo Stories: A Postscript to 'Skins"	167	(25)
Tami Spry
10 On Being an Exemplary Lesbian: My Life as a Role Model	192	(23)
Jacqueline Taylor
11 A Clean Breast of It	215	(22)
Linda Park-Fuller
12 sista docta	237	(21)
Joni L. Jones
13 The Performance of Drowning	258	(7)
Terry Galloway
14 Death in the Art and Life of Linda M. Montano	265	(17)
Linda M. Montano
15 Shaping the World with Our Hands	282	(19)
Laila Farah
16 "Orchids in the Arctic": Women's Autobiographical Performances as Mentoring	301	(18)
Elizabeth Bell
Contributors	319