What do women want (in theatre)?

This Introductory Chapter to Part 1V ( Feminist Approaches to Gender in Performance) of The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (eds Lizbeth Goodman and Jane De Gay), attempted, in 1998, to establish a slightly different perspective with regard to some of the issues specific to a feminist undertaking. It argues that the constitutive complexity of performance is such that a "feminist approach to performance" (as distinct, for example, from feminist critical, spectatorial responses to the same) might be difficult to define, difficult to account for, difficult to attempt, and difficult to actualise in the event. Might we more usefully speak of a "woman's work in performance-making", in the conditions that prevail at the time of writing? Although in Part IV Gayle Austin, Sue-Ellen Case, Barbara Smith and Sandra L. Richards variously set out what, in their view, these "feminist approaches" might be (or have been), each did so, unsurprisingly, from perspectives tied to the time of their writing - for Case, 1988, for Austin, 1990, for Smith, 1977, and for Richards, 1995. Feminisms, after all, have changed, between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, while gendered identities, in turn, have been differently configured, in performance-making, writing and performance events, and differently accounted for, and sometimes by men