Producing Knowledges That Matter: Practicing Performance Studies Through Theatre Studies

Abstract

As my contribution toward charting an itinerary through performance studies, I want to talk about institutions and how they enable or obstruct the production of certain knowledges. I also want to talk about ways that I have practiced and observed performance studies, at the site of the disciplinary formation I know as theatre studies, itself a connected, contested, and, hopefully, coalitional site. I want to locate myself and my ideas in several ways at the outset. I come to this conference as a representative of two of its cosponsoring institutions: One is ATHE, the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, of which I am the President-Elect. The other is my primary locale, the PhD Program in Theatre of the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, for which I serve as Executive Officer. These institutional locations mark in a very real way the knowledges I produce-here at this conference, in my classrooms, and in my scholarship. The longer I'm engaged in these institutional structures, the more important I think it is to learn how they work so that I can open their gaps and insert contradictions. As a professor and chair, I wield institutional power, about which I can't be naive or romantic, or simplistically resistant. I hope to be oppositional within the institution, but I am within it. The marketplace it creates around my ideas, and the disciplinary structures it provides, ensnare me, or at least require that I arrange myself around them, consciously and pointedly. I can't pretend that just because I do feminist studies, gay and lesbian, maybe queer studies, performance studies, or theatre studies, I'm somehow outside the circuit of supply and demand, of commodification and desire, of discipline and punishment, that academic conferences, publishing, and teaching create. Part of my argument is that performance studies, too, has to own up to its institutionalization and the power and privilege that come with it, just as it continues to practice oppositional, resistant, hopefully activist and progressive

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