“The play is there as a lesson:” Staging consciousness raising in María Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends

This article investigates the reciprocal relationship between feminist theater and consciousness raising in María Irene Fornés’s 1977 all-woman play Fefu and Her Friends. By exploring the avant-garde immersive play alongside archives of US-American feminist activism and performance from the 1960s to the 1980s, I argue that Fefu and Her Friends both depicts and enacts the feminist phenomenon of consciousness raising, a movement practice popularized in the 1970s that asked participants to collectively speak their felt experiences aloud and theorize new activist politics from within them. In Fefu, this process unfolds as a series of heated, unpredictable exchanges between Fornés’s characters, all of whom are grappling with ambivalent feelings about their subject positions as women. Because of Fefu’s experimental erosion of the boundaries between performers and spectators, Fornés uniquely invites audience members to participate in these volatile consciousness raising sessions. The play subsequently establishes feminist ambivalence (and even revulsion) as a site of potential recognition across difference and invents new embodied models for reckoning with such ambivalence between and among feminists. These models resonate in their original 1977 context and today, as feminism continues to seek political community without a single, stable subject – in this case, “woman” – to organize around.