Modernity and the White Imaginary in Australian Feminist Theatre

In her book The Gender of Modernity, Rita Feiski argues for a reassessment of the significance of women and the feminine in the history of modernity. Changes in women's lives--and feminism itself--are manifestations of modernity even though concepts of the modern have been overwhelmingly aligned with masculinity, whether in the writings of Baudelaire or the cultural analysis of industrialized nations. Twentieth century struggles for women's emancipation have moreover been interwoven with modernization in the social sphere as well as with modern aesthetic and cultural projects. But neither feminism nor modernity produce a univocal narrative, or a unified Zeitgeist, since they have been constituted through diverse, sometimes competing, representations that take place in different genres and different locations. Feminism's imbrication with modernism, as Felski points out, also aligns it formatively with other aspects of modernity, in particular colonial narratives and the formation of the nation state. Feminist texts and practices cannot therefore be assumed to equate with a single progressive politics nor a particular mode of aesthetic production. The singularity of white western feminism must now take account of postcolonial criticism and of those bodies, voices and places that have been excluded from modernity. As Felski writes: 'A text which may appear subversive and destabilizing from one political perspective becomes a bearer of dominant ideologies when read in the context of another.' (1) Any specific woman's text (or its representation of the feminine) is not purely descriptive or normative of ideologies, beliefs and fantasies about gender or race in actual social conditions; rather, feminist criticism must become attuned to how women's texts interact with other cultural discourses, images and representations and specific social formations, including those of gender, race, ethnicity and nation. Analysis helps us to understand the ways in which all aesthetic texts through their construction and reception inco rporate the embedded values of particular social formations. In Australian theatrical history, the contribution of women playwrights to modern interpretations of female lives or feminist perspectives on modern society has been relatively limited. Notwithstanding the important feminist work recuperating earlier generations of women writers, it has been only within the last decade that women have entered the theatrical mainstream with more female playwrights presented, more complex female characters and a greater diversity of roles for female actors. (2) This relative success of feminism, particularly for liberal feminist works has, however, been somewhat disengaged from postmodern critiques of representation, such as those of intertextuality or the death of the author, and resistant to the social changes arising from postmodernism, such as the time-space compression of information and capital flows. Indeed, concepts of the modern, particularly the notion of a benevolent progressive culture, still shape feminist theatre practices and most women's involvement in Australia n theatre. Perhaps one of the most striking continuities from earlier notions of modernity is the investment in realist drama as a means of representing or, indeed, describing social life. It is almost as if the intellectual and creative ferment of the early twentieth century modern era in Europe and America passed Australian theatre by until the most recent generation of female playwrights. One of the few established figures in contemporary Australian theatre to have self-consciously experimented with the possibilities that European modernism offers to the female subject is writer-director Jenny Kemp. (3) Her collection of works from 1989 to the present is both modern and feminist in a double sense. First, her plays begin and end in the domestic reality of bourgeois femininity, since they acknowledge the various identities that modern women have as mothers, lovers, housewives and workers, and in this sense they enact themes and perspectives on the social determinants of gender. …