Historians of the theatrical avant-garde who are not yet familiar with Harding's work need to pay attention. His work has been a shot in the arm to the field, mainly by compelling readers to re-evaluate the entire avant-garde tradition, and our acts of examining it. Harding is clear, thorough and a joy to read, and his latest book, which outlines a motion (or perhaps a manifesto) towards creating an explicitly feminist historiographic approach to the American avant-garde, is no exception. Here he explores and attempts to redress the lack of critical attention to the uneasy role of women within the already murky and shifting threads of experimental performance history. The study is unique in that it is not a critique of patriarchal practices, nor is it concerned with the progressive work of feminist performance artists per se, but rather it looks to place individual acts of feminist experimental performance into larger discourses of American politics and performance aesthetics. To do this, Harding ventures into the underexplored zones where feminist theatre historiography and avant-garde historiography overlap, and in so doing exposes debilitating assumptions that underlie both fields.

His study selects five significant moments in twentieth-century feminist performance: the death of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; the performance of Gertrude Stein's Susan B. Anthony bio-play The Mother of Us All; Yoko Ono's Cut Piece; Round House, developed by Carolee Schneeman after her hostile reception at a convention of progressive male authors; and the shooting of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas. These are then positioned as part of what Harding calls a ‘collage’ historiography, drawing on a notional structure for thinking about art and politics found in von Freytag-Loringhoven's pioneering Dada sensibility. It is wildly fertile. Collage aesthetics, Harding argues, contain a denial of positivist (and often chauvinist) history and art and replace them with a vibrantly expressive framework that attends to webs of relationships rather to lines of cause and effect. Harding develops the notion by exploring moments of literal and historiographic collage in the other four performances, drawing on a wealth of knowledge that unpacks moments of exclusion, oppression, violence and even death within an ongoing attempt by female performance artists to assert a feminist discourse in the conversation of the American avant-garde. There are many stellar passages in the book, but the author's tackling of the old question whether feminist scholarship is ‘women's work’, which is to query whether male scholars are useful or even welcome in feminist thought, stands out as a favourite.