Lara Stevens

Introduction: ‘Street-Fighters and Philosophers’: Traversing Ecofeminisms

Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene emerges at the intersection of two progressive twentieth-century political movements, one concerned with the fight for women’s rights and the other with ecological sustainability within the environment. The book celebrates the ongoing philosophical and activist advocacy of feminist ecologies as it traces the ecofeminist movement’s roots and alignment with recent social, cultural and artistic developments. It proposes the broad term ‘feminist ecologies’ to capture the diversity of the movement over the last 45 years and the range of possible ways in which feminist and ecological concerns can speak to one another in the era of the Anthropocene. To find solutions to ecological and feminist issues we need new modes of theory and praxis, activism and philosophizing as well as radical rethinking of policy, law, spirituality and education. Feminist Ecologies sets us on this path. It challenges us to take control over the Anthropocene and shift our environments towards new and more sustainable directions.

From The Female Eunuch to White Beech: Germaine Greer and Ecological Feminism

Although she is still publicly active in the twenty-first century, iconoclastic feminist Germaine Greer is best known for The Female Eunuch (1970), her radical critique of patriarchy. Greer has recently published White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2013), a memoir that recounts her experience of ageing as she contends with the challenges of her ambitious, long-term project of protecting and rejuvenating 60 hectares of Australian land from ‘steep rocky country most of it impenetrable scrub’ (1) to its original rainforest ecology. This chapter seeks to better understand The Female Eunuch by applying ecofeminist thought. Such a reading reveals aspects of the book that were ahead of their time, advancing, rather than simply rehearsing, the critiques of patriarchy made by key feminist foremothers Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft. This is not to say that The Female Eunuch is a work of ecofeminism, but, rather, that aspects of its critique can be better appreciated using ecofeminist thought and that this mode of analysis carries through to Greers writing on ecology and natural history in White Beech.

Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland

Since the late 1960s Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has created work across a range of different artistic forms. Her oeuvre includes: radio plays, poetry, theatre texts, polemical essays, anthologies, novels, translations, screenplays, musical compositions, libretti and ballets, film and video art; a large body of work that continues to expand at a rapid rate. A child musical prodigy, Jelinek studied theatre arts and art history at the University of Vienna and classical music and piano performance at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory of Music (Sieg 1994, 149). In 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the committee described as: ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power’.

From Epic to Dialectical Theatre

Not long before his death in 1956, Brecht expressed dissatisfaction with the terminology ‘epic theatre’ that had long described his dramaturgical aesthetic and advocated a shift to what he termed ‘dialectical theatre’ (1964, 281–2). Brecht’s use of the term dialectics invokes a long philosophical history that can be traced to the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers such as Heraclitus, through to German idealists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and nineteenth-century materialist philosophers like Karl Marx. The influence of historical materialist thought and dialectics on Brecht’s theory for the theatre has long been acknowledged by Brechtian scholars including, most notably, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Peter Brooker, Antony Tatlow, David Barnett and Sean Carney. This book surveys this scholarship and builds upon it by offering a detailed reading of Brechtian dialectics in a late capitalist or post-Marxist context.

Performing the ‘War on Terror’

From 15 to 16 February 2003, an estimated 10 million people in over 800 cities worldwide marched to protest against the second Iraq War. The largest anti-war protests in history, these rallies clearly demonstrated a global lack of popular support for the Iraq War on an unprecedented scale. Yet, unlike the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the governments of the American-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ ignored the performing bodies of the 2003 anti-war demonstrators. In the mainstream media and scholarly commentary, the resistance movements were described as impotent and atrophied. The performative strategies of 1960s-style peaceful protest proved ineffectual models for the twenty-first century. The failure of these protests prompts the question: what is the relationship between politics and performance today?

The Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail

French theatre company the Theâtre du Soleil, led by Ariane Mnouchkine, have been making political theatre and staging political protests since the company’s inception in 1964. Since then, the Theâtre du Soleil have collectively devised works that respond to national and international political issues by developing aesthetics that draw upon a range of European and Asian performance traditions. In the post-9/11 period, the company turned their focus to refugees from different parts of the globe and the contradictions they face when attempting to seek asylum in Western democratic nations.

Caryl Churchill’s Iraq.doc and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza

British playwright Caryl Churchill is best known as a socialist feminist playwright who engages with philosophical and theoretical ideas in her plays. Churchill began her career writing radio plays in the 1960s, in the political climate of the Cold War. She was particularly interested in capturing the ambiance of fear and paranoia that was indicative of the Cold War historical moment in the West. With the revival of widespread anxiety during the ‘War on Terror’, Churchill has more recently returned to creating plays that represent globalized conflict and the pervasive threat of terror that such conflicts respond to and breed.

Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy

American playwright Tony Kushner is best known for his two-part Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1993). Angels in America thematizes the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s as a literal and metaphoric exposition of the corruption within the American legal and political system. The work moves between long, didactic political arguments between characters on the state of the American legal and political system to fantastical scenes in which glittering angels come crashing through New York apartment and hospital ceilings to deliver messages to sick mortals. Kushner’s dramatic style is flamboyant and playful as well as politically engaged and instructive. The Brechtian imperative that learning should be enjoyable is realized in Kushner’s merging of complex political and philosophical ideas with the glamour and ironic humour of a drag performance.