Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity(Ethnographic Alternatives)

A personal, revealing, and sometimes humorous exploration of female experience, Performing Femininity challenges traditional and feminist perspectives on gender roles. Using ethnographic method, Lesa Lockford transforms herself into an image-obsessed weight watcher, an exotic dancer, and a theatrical performer. In several evocative narratives, Lockford uses this experimental methodology to rupture the conventional dichotomy of patriarchal versus feminist points of view, goading and challenging her audience as she breaches the borders of these typically opposed ideologies. She explores how both paradigms constrain women, but also how they are simultaneously enacted and subverted in the 'performances' women play in their daily lives. Performing Femininity will be a provocative read for the student of feminist thought and for those researchers looking at innovative ways to produce and present their research.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 The Abject Body and Subversive Femininity Chapter 2 Stepping on the Black Box: Kinesthetic Experience and the Transformation of Body Size Chapter 3 "Would You Do It?": Doing the Scholarly Striptease for Academic Gain Chapter 4 Reading the Body: Consuming the Feminist Scholar Chapter 5 Reading Pink: The Beauty Persuasion 6 Thinking and Rethinking Tails, Tales and Tellings

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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.