In an answer to the question, ‘Who are we as women?’, Western feminisms have developed diverse theories. Appropriating post-structuralist theories, Linda Alcoff rearticulates female subjectivity as positionality, thus avoiding essentialism and yet including a historical dimension in her configuration. Allison Weir calls for a reformulation of the concept of women's identity which includes difference, connection and heterogeneity. Thus, the issues of meaning and interpretation regarding the concept of woman seems to occupy the central locus in the discussions of Western feminisms.

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carter's A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of women's lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.

Tari Ito is so far the only ‘out’ lesbian performance artist in Japan. After performing as a pantomime artist in Tokyo and Holland for ten years, she began her series of solo performances in 1989. In 1996, she ‘came out’ as a lesbian, in a performance entitled Self-Portrait. In her performances Ito makes various uses of a latex ‘skin’ which she uses to create an interface between discursive practices and desire, revealing the constructedness of our desire and sexuality. Along with this skin, Ito's verbal assertion of her lesbian identity at the end of the otherwise non-verbal Self-Portrait unsettles a heterosexual reading of her performances that would assume the construction of desire and sexuality in terms of heterosexuality.

As a materialist feminist from the former West Berlin I have always been in support of the German Democratic Republic as a system that granted womenextensive social benefits through the law. Before German reunification, rights to apprenticeship, employment, day care, and abortion were secured for East German women. Thus, in my imagination, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied a space where gender and class equality were guaranteed—at least on paper.

On 10 March 1913, the artist, arsonist, and suffragette Mary Richardson, alias Polly Dick, a member of the militant Women's Social and Political Union, walked into London's National Gallery and took an axe to Velázquez's ‘Rokeby Venus’. Her act resulted in the closure of the National Gallery and other museums. At her trial Richardson announced: ‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.’ In 1911 Umberto Boccioni wrote to his friend Gino Severini in heady enthusiasm about the manifestos he had co-written and signed—Futurist Painting and Sculpture (January 1910), and Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (April 1910). The first featured the familiar futurist exhortation to smash the ‘cult of the past, all things old, academic pedantry’, to bear ‘bravely and proudly’ the banner of ‘madness’ with which ‘they’ try to dismiss innovators. Boccioni echoes the words of Marinetti's The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909):

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! … Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! O the joy of seeing the glorious old canvasses bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded … Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the vulnerable cities.

In the autumn of 1997 the World Bank issued ‘China 2020’, a seven-volume report on the key issues and challenges that ‘China must face over the next two decades’. The opening passage reads:

China is in the throes of two transitions: from a command economy to a market-based one and from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. So far, both transitions have been spectacultarly successful. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, with per capita incomes more than quadrupling sine 1978, achieving in two generations what took other countries centuries.

When sexuality is a formally censored topic on the stage, how can one represent this fundamental human desire? For centuries, Western playwrights have used sex in highly coded language so that it is simultaneously acceptable and titillating. But Nehad Gad, one of Egypt's most prominent writers in the late twentieth century, and the only Egyptian woman to have her plays translated into English for publication, devised her own method to mention that taboo subject. She filled her plays with the desire for commercial goods—an important topic in this increasingly materialistic country. But for her characters, men and women alike, the desire to acquire and exchange commercial items is also a means of expressing sexual desire.

H Art Chaos stands out from other Japanese performance troupes as it performs against traditions. The troupe is a all-woman ensemble directed by a woman whose aim is to wage war on the culturally constructed Japanese female body. Oshima Sakiko, the director, and Shirakawa Naoko, the main solo performer, combine their visions of violence to extract the most precise gesture, exact timing, flawless shape, and perfect prop to project those images to rigorous excess. They focus on a kind of distortion and extreme manipulation of the female body which evokes painful kinaesthetic sensations. Their choreography produces discomfort, strain, and anguish through frantic, wrenching movement which aims at stressing the performer's body to the point of explosion or dismemberment. While their movement is based in modern, jazz, and ballet dance idioms, they push the stereotyped and classic vocabulary beyond pretty lines and feel-good sensations. They take technique to the point of excess in order to undo its forms They play with the overt meanings of props and costumes and destabilize those readings, like metaphors in a waking dream where their daily meaning drops out.

Transculturation refers to an intercultural body associated with hybrid encounters and with a system that resists and contests the powers of domination. The term transculturation was coined by the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940. He formulated this neologism as a way to counteract and subvert the homogenizing grammars implicit in the term ‘acculturation’, which Anglo anthropologists had coined in the late 1930s. Mary Louise Pratt suggested that as a function of the ‘contact zone’, transculturation dramatizes dialectical bodies ready to be reconstrued, re-embodied, and re-visioned. Specifically, Pratt refers to the ‘contact zone’ as the space of colonial encounters. While the contact zone can be materialized at any point in time and space, interculturalism in the study of Latina performance not only shapes the heterogeneous character of the term Latin American and its hybrid variants, but also influences diverse modes of representation. Within the specificity of US Latina performance, I propose to expand the idea of transculturation as it opens possibilities for understanding the intercultural body—the hybrid that can redefine notions of mestizaje itself. In this study, the concepts of transculturation and performance suggest a framework in which cultural norms and practices must be rooted in the materiality of human agency. Therefore, before discussing transculturation and performance, it is necessary to clarify the term Latina as an identity marker, which displaces hegemonic representation across linguistic and cultural borders.