Kim Solga: Spaces Within
and Spaces
Between: Ground Plans for an Architecture of Feminist Performance
Despite the contributions
of
feminist performance and the rush of recent scholarly interest in the
spatial
dynamics of theatre and drama, the spaces of gendered performance have
yet to
be comprehensively theorized. My paper meddles in this lacuna as I
explore the
space-making capacities of feminist performance through the lens of
recent
feminist writings on architecture. Pairing Elin Diamond’s seminal work
on
gestic feminist criticism with the work of architecture theorists
Catherine
Ingraham and Jennifer Bloomer, I locate the convergence of the feminist
performer and the feminist architect in the poché – an
architectural
inscription that marks a hidden space within a wall, a kind of
structural
rabbit hole. Bloomer and Ingraham mine the “hot materiality” of the
poché to
find architecture’s missing (imperfect, [de]generate) bodies, its
disavowed
dimensions; meanwhile, Diamond pries open the “laminate” suturing
female bodies
to “realist” stage representations, finding within a doubled body (a
body
doubled over). The poché is the space of the non-identical; at
turns sheltering
and re-orienting, offering the hope of regeneration and the possibility
of
radical disciplinary intervention, the poché has the potential
to become a
cornerstone of an architecture of feminist performance.