Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’. In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.

Our co-authored article provides an introduction to the UCLA-based conference Actions of Transfer: Women's Performance in the Americas (2008), a sister event to the opening of the new cultural and performance space with FOMMA – Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (Fortress of the Mayan Woman) – supported by the Hemispheric Institute and the Ford Foundation. Introducing the articles and contributions to the performance dossier arising out of the event and brought together for this special issue, we reflect critically on our conference set-up. Detailing our multi-sited project as a dialogic, hemispheric practice, we offer our reflections with the hope that this will lead to new possibilities and paradigms for international performance research and practice.

Greek tragedy served as a disciplinary state apparatus that displaced women's public performances of the lament. Yet, in spite of its displacements and regulatory structures, the tragedy has been adopted by Euro-American playwrights and performers for political and even feminist political purposes. From Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial to readings of the comedy of Lysistrata, the structures of the Greek stage are currently deployed to stage the relation of gender to state practices. While these examples may seem to be in contradiction to the Greek structures, they actually further the use of the classical dramaturgical devices for their purposes within the tradition. However, certain Arabic revisions of Lysistrata reveal the assumptions in the model that prevent its adoption.

Recently Ruby Cohn, the expert on Samuel Beckett, was staying at my house. One morning she announced to me in a disapproving tone: “Your library has no focus.” Nor, I fear, would Ruby find a focus in my reading. I read several books at once from various disciplines and approaches. They lay about in different rooms of the house, where I read them at different times of the day. For example, the 4:00 p.m. read in the library is something less demanding, suggesting rather than theorizing or documenting; whereas the morning read in my study is a note-taking venture, in proximity to little yellow stickies or the computer so I can type in passages as they generate new ideas. Worse yet, I am on the Internet multiple times daily, The New Yorker is usually open to some article I read while waiting for my partner to get ready for a date, and various novels are next to the bed for reading before going to sleep. Reading is not what it used to be. It more closely resembles online surfing than the removed, “focused” (as Ruby would say) reading in, say, the British Library. In part, my selection of books reflects the variety of articles I will be completing within the coming months; in part, the nature of current postcanon scholarship, which is held to account for a complex and variegated critical perspective.

Feminist studies resulted from activist challenges to the very institutionalization of knowledge. Feminist studies, like studies of performance imagine their ground in embodied actions performed, somehow, socially, breaking down disciplinary boundaries to create a ‘field’ of study regarded as ‘interdisciplinary’. However, the term ‘post-disciplinary’, now in current usage, announces a different relationship to fields of study than the earlier term ‘interdisciplinary’ might connote. ‘Interdisciplinary’ is a term that signals a sense of a unified field, produced through the historical convergence of subcultures, social structures, and training practices. ‘Post-disciplinary’ retains nothing of the notion that a shared consciousness, or a shared objective, brings together a broad range of discrete studies. Instead, it suggests that the organizing structures of disciplines themselves will not hold. Only conditional conjunctions of social and intellectual forces exist, at which scholarship and performance may be produced.

Reading backwards, through the feminist critique, Sue-Ellen Case explores the role of sexuality in women's lives as portrayed in the work of British women playwrights during the past three decades. She illustrates the way in which the oppressive uses of sexuality in the patriarchy, identified by the social movement as rape and pornography, have been dramatized through dramatic narrative and character construction. In contrast to this representation of oppression, she discusses how the liberating role of pleasure and of women reclaiming their own desires provide a revolutionary feminist stage practice, in both heterosexual and lesbian social contexts. Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and her works include Feminism and Theatre and Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre.