Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Humorous yet touching, Performing Femininity challenges traditional and feminist perspectives on gender. As a woman whose brand of feminism is suspect, Lesa Lockford places herself in the most shameful, the most abject circumstances: an image obsessed weight-watcher, an exotic dancer, and a theatrical performer. By exposing herself to the abject, she reclaims her body's symbolic value from society. This experimental autoethnography provides a provocative model to the ethnographer and rewards the student of gender studies with a rare perspective.

Reviews

This book is a groundbreaking work of utterly fine prose rendered in a most intriguing and often beguiling style. It is a full performance of theory and self on every page. The exploration of women via 'subversive feminism' is a welcome addition to the growing complexity of theoretical and ethnographic explorations of womanhood in postmodern culture. Lesa Lockford's book is a major contribution to that dialogue and one that I am quite sure will spark a great deal of self-reflexive thought, writing, performance, and debate. -- H. L. Goodall, Jr., head, Hugh Downs School of Communication, Arizona State University

Author Bio

Lesa Lockford teaches courses in theatre and performance studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently, her scholarly interests are performance methods and composition, gender and sexuality, alternative forms of scholarly representation, and qualitative methods of inquiry. Journals in which her work has appeared include Text and Performance Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Theatre Annual, and Women's Studies in Communication. She has performed her original creative texts and texts by others at regional and national academic conferences. Before returning to the Academy to pursue graduate studies, she trained and worked as a professional actor in the United Kingdom.