Toward a pleasure‐centered economy: Wondering a feminist aesthetics of performance

The visceral, somatic, and material pleasures of performance have been masked in text‐centered approaches to performance that divest the performer of materiality and agency while investing the text with corporeality and power. A feminist aesthetics would place pleasure at the center of performance theory to imagine alternate discourses of performance practice, to interrogate sexuality in and of performance as constitutive of its power, and to mark the tensive boundaries of identity politics negotiated in performance. In this libidinal economy of pleasure, French feminisms' “wonder” and jouissance are strategies for claiming the materiality, agency, and ethics of the performer. This economy of pleasure is inseparable from a pedagogy of pleasure that intervenes in the politics of vision and the culturally bounded ways of looking at performance.