Jill Dolan's Feminist Spectator as Critic (FSAC) was first published in 1988, emerging out of a vital moment in lesbian feminist performance, cultural studies, film theory and reader-reception theory. University of Michigan Press published a second edition in 2012 with a revised introduction and bibliography. A number of key ideas have come out of FSAC, and continue to inform teaching and feminist debate today. Dolan was instrumental, for example, in calling out the white male hegemony of US theatre criticism and mapping its exclusionary aesthetics onto the theatrical canon; she identified three ‘substrands’ of feminism informing feminist debate in the late 1980s (liberal, cultural, materialist feminism), demonstrated the gender-blind nature of much postmodern and avant-garde theatre, and staged ‘lesbian subjectivity as the vanguard of gender disruption’ (p. xxi). Dolan forges a compelling argument for situating oneself as a ‘feminist critic’ and illustrates how a materialist reading can work to uncover normalized ideological values. Informed by Althusser, Foucault, Irigaray and Cixous, Dolan's interest in viewing positions emerges alongside theories of female spectatorship in film by E. Ann Kaplan, Mary Ann Doane and Teresa de Lauretis. This era witnessed a critical mass of energy around identity, subjectivity and spectatorship. For example, Stuart Hall published his seminal essay ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’ in 1989 and bell hooks ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’ in 1992. Hall argues for the complexity of cultural identity and the need to acknowledge difference amongst cultures misrecognized as ‘one’. He argues for the need to identify one's ‘position of enunciation’ in order to claim agency. In her essay, hooks makes a case for ‘the oppositional gaze’ to be used as a tool of resistance and a way of identifying how the mass media uncritically reproduce the ideology of white supremacy. In terms of performance scholarship, Dolan can be seen as a contemporary of Sue Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider, Janelle Reinelt, Peggy Phelan and Elinor Fuchs (amongst many more) who worked to galvanize debate around feminism, desire and spectatorship at this time. It is clear that Dolan's book staged a crucial intervention into theories of performance and spectatorship, pushing back against the eclipsing of alternative desires and subject positions by theories of the white, male heterosexual ‘gaze’. In her ‘Afterword’, Dolan writes, ‘Materialist feminism at least acknowledges the varied responses of spectators mixed across ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. By admitting to this heterogeneity, strategies for how to thwart the white, heterosexual, middle-class male's hegemony as the subject of representation can be formulated’ (p. 121).

Reflecting upon the changes wrought by the passage of time between 1988 and 2012, Dolan observes how the advent of the Internet and mobile viewing technologies has complicated our ability to theorize spectatorship. She reflects that FSAC was published before Judith Butler's revolutionary Gender Trouble, before Queer Nation reappropriated the term ‘queer’, and before ‘gay’ discourse was expanded to be the inclusive LGBTQI+ employed today. Dolan notes that even the term ‘lesbian’ is now contested, for some being ‘assimilationist’ and ‘homonormative’ (p. xxii). She cites the importance of the work of Angela McRobbie to the discourse of post-feminism and the work of J. Jack Halberstam to the notion of ‘female masculinity’ (p. xxiii). For Dolan, US theatre critics remain overwhelmingly white, male and middle-class; however, more women have made an incursion into mainstream theatre and cinema. In the revised introduction, as in more recent scholarship, she models her role differently, resolving to write exclusively about work she likes and for which she can advocate. I find Dolan's recent determination to find ‘utopia’ and ‘hope at the theatre’ seductive and wonder if this shift has come about partly as a desire to distance herself from the forceful criticism of cultural feminist theatre companies such as At the Foot of the Mountain and Women's Experimental Theater.Footnote ¹ In her revised introduction she acknowledges that ‘[c]ultural feminism takes some hard knocks in FSAC’s chapters 4 and 5’ (p. xx) and that ‘over time several things happened that hardened the feminisms into prescriptive and judgmental rather than critically generative categories. The critique of cultural feminism became hegemonic, along with poststructuralism’s insistent (and persuasive) analysis of its attendant gender essentialism’ (p. xvi).

For a student at Lancaster University in the early 1990s Dolan's work was a revelation. I encountered a range of new performance work by artists such as Karen Finley, Bobby Baker, Rose English, Annie Sprinkle and Annie Griffin, and relished the language Dolan offered to articulate my sense that these artists were radically challenging heteronormative ways of looking and being seen. Much of the body-centred feminist performance work I had encountered previously had left me feeling squeamish and I was more inclined to identify with performers experimenting with costuming, clothing and make-up in a playful, gender-fluid way.

Dolan describes herself as a post-structuralist materialist scholar, as do I, despite the theories being at odds with one another. Post-structuralism's critique of the humanist subject represents a challenge to feminists who want to invest in the concept of ‘woman’ as a coherent autonomous subject. In her later writing in Utopia in Performance, Dolan argues for a ‘new, more radical humanism’ and ‘social discourse that articulates the possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential’.Footnote ² Although I identify very closely with Dolan, she is based in the US whereas I am based in the UK. This recent rereading has led me to think about the growing visibility and presence of female directors, critics and producers working in the UK and to reflect upon the Arts Council of England's renewed drive to ensure that the subsidized arts are appropriately representational and ‘diverse’.

Campaigns for diversity represent the influence of materialist theory upon the UK government's artistic and cultural policy. However, despite the apparent mainstream acceptance of materialist cultural policy I am all too well aware aware of tensions provoked by the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘diversity’. Queer scholars such as Jean Walton have long been critical of the ‘white heteronormative assumptions in the feminist tradition’ and many women of colour see feminism as having been ‘hijacked by white, middle-class feminists’.Footnote ³ Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Roxanne Gay's Bad Feminist and June Eric-Udorie's Can We All Be Feminists? demonstrate that, despite Kimberlé Crenshaw coining the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1982, white feminism has failed to take account of the multiple ways that women are marginalized and excluded by concatenations of race, class, religion, economic status and physical ability.Footnote ⁴ Dolan champions the ‘Brechtian Legacy’ as a tool for demystifying such ‘social arrangements’. She writes, ‘If the representational apparatus is ideologically marked, its material aspects must be brought into full view and denaturalized for the spectator's inspection. The mystification of social arrangements is exposed and the spectator is presented with the possibility of change’ (p. 107). Dolan's aim to write in an accessible, self-reflexive and located manner has been hugely influential upon my own work, and her dual drive to uncover hidden ideological imperatives and act as an advocate for inspirational work provides a feminist methodology I find attractive and compelling.

The limited space available renders it impossible to chart all of the scholars producing important work during this time, although I have mentioned several peers and counterparts above. In the UK, feminism can be seen to have fallen out of academic favour in the late 1990s and the 2000s, a phenomenon documented by Elaine Aston, who continued to write about feminism and class throughout the 1990s and 2000s.Footnote ⁵ Her joint publications with Geraldine Harris, Feminist Futures? and A Good Night Out for the Girls, contextualize performance in relation to changing modes of feminism and a broad church of musicals, stand-up comedy and popular theatre.Footnote ⁶ Materialist analysis can be seen to inform the work of Lynette Goddard, who wrote Black British Feminisms in 2007, and Stephen Greer and Sarah French also adopt cultural-materialist readings of gender and sexuality in their publications Contemporary British Queer Performance and Staging Queer Feminisms: Sexuality and Gender in Australian Performance in 2012 and 2013 respectively.Footnote ⁷ Portfolios of work by Amelia Jones, David Roman, Jennifer Doyle and José Esteban Muñoz have been of crucial importance to scholars and artists working in the field of performance, gender and sexuality.

FSAC has played a vital role in shaping discourses around performance, gender, sexuality and spectatorship. Dolan's arguments against cultural essentialism and championing of a materialist framework reflected the mood of the 1980s and 1990s as theories of essentialism became entrenched as ‘inherently conservative’.Footnote ⁸ Her revised introduction acknowledges that it is time, perhaps, now for feminists to review this rejection and reflect upon the powerful ‘affective experiences’ being offered. This book remains of key importance to performance scholars, artists and teachers setting out to reflect upon the ways in which conservative value systems become normalized and how oppositional readings might mobilize resistance and counter argument.