- ___Point of View KRISTIN M. LANGELLIER Voiceless Bodies, Bodiless Voices: The Future of Personal Narrative Performance Kristin M. Langllier recived her Ph.D. from Southern Hiinois University (Carbondale) in 1980 cand curently teaches courses in performance studs, communication theory, and wonwen's studies at ‘the University of Maine, Recenty she recived a five year appointment to the University of Maine's Mark and Maria Baily Profescorship, which was erated to promote excellence in teaching by recognizing an ontstanding professor of speech or theatre. Langellier bas numerous publications in journals and edited volumes, based on her research in personal narrative, family storytelling, quilt ‘making culture, breast cancer narratives, and Franco-Amercan women’s writings. She is former Ecitor of Text and Performance Quarterly (1992-94). ‘The ten years since my first publications on personal narrative have witnessed an explosion in personal narrative. As part of a National Communication Association program on “Critical Perspectives on Petsonal Narrative Performance,” Carol Benton describes a “preoccupation” and “infatuation” with personal narrative in performance studies and warns us of the dangers of a “talk show” discipline, modeled on confessional television programming.’ Our recent fascination with personal narrative does indeed reflect the larger U.S. culture, which is arguably on storytelling overload, with personal narrative proliferating, multiplying, and dispersing as the growth of mass media, the increase in consumption, the rise of cultural intermediaries and experts, and the expansion of therapeutic culture license more and more storytelling (Plummes). ‘One way to answer the question “why personal narrative now for performance studies?” is to identify the convergence of two shifts in contemporary culture. From literature, the disembodied modernist novels, “which have been all voice,” have dwindled in power at the same time the longing for narration, “the oldest claim on the reading heart,” has risen up again (Gornick 5). The voice needs a body which personal narrative furnishes. From social life, 2 complementary movement applies: the body needs a voice to resist the colonizing powers of discourse (¢g., Frank). The rise of social movements, from numerous civil rights movements to therapeutic and medical cultures, have produced all manner of participant stories and furthered the belief that one’s own life signifies. These movements to reclaim voice and body gfound personal natrative performance: to narrative, the personal gives body; to lived expetience, narrative gives voice. Personal natrative responds to both the wreckage and the reflexivity of postmodern times when master narratives disintegrate (Bochner). ‘My own engagement with personal narrative as a teacher, scholar, and performer arose ten years ago from two exemplars: women storytelling and family storytelling. In the first, I was concerned with a creative, collaborative, conversational practice of personal narrative that we call “spinstorying” as a way to negotiate personal identity and effect social change (Peterson; Langellier and Peterson, “Spinstorying”). In the second, our concerns were again ideological as well as performative: the power of family storytelling, both entertaining and instructive, to ‘maintain a family and to reproduce the Family within and through generations (Peterson; Langelier and Peterson, “Family Storytelling,” “Critical Pedagogy”). I recall these exemplars as my “roots” because they emphasize how personal narrative interweaves aesthetics and polities in the context of performance. The hallmark of personal natrative is to be radically 207208 ‘The Future of Performance Studies contextualized —not just in identity’s body but also in dialogue with empirically present listeners and other “ghostly audiences” (Minister); and not just within locally occasioned talk (conversation, ritual, interview) but also within the forces of discourse that shape language, experience, and identity. Thus I have approached personal narrative not as a text for performance but asa situated performance practice which must be eritically examined for its text/context relations (Langellier, “Personal Narratives”; Peterson and Langellir) In view of the recent explosion in personal narrative, I argue here that performance studies | scholars must not only petform personal narrative but also must go beyond the knowledge arrived at through performance to critically investigate the production of personal narrative itself. Put most simply, personal narrative performance must be informed by theory which takes context as seriously as it docs text and which takes the social relations of power as. seriously as it does personal reflexivity. Approaching personal narrative as a situated performance practice entails two related but distinet arguments about performance. Although scholars customarily use one term, ‘Performance, to embrace these two senses (HopKins), here I will use a second term, performatiity in order to clarify my argument. Personal narrative is performed in the speech act “let me tell you a story about what happened to me” (Maclean). By peformancy, I refer to the enhancement of experience (“a story about what happened to me”), how narrative is carried out “above and beyond its referential content” in dialogue with an audience (Bauman). Enhancement is ‘augmented through performance features that intensify experience, among them narrative deual, xeported speech, parallelisms, appeals to the audience, paralinguistics and gestures (c.g, Fine) By performatiip, I refer to personal natrative as a site where the social is articulated, structured, and struggled over (Butler; Twigg; Smith, Sabjectini) In performativity, narrator and listener(s) are themselves constituted (“let me tell ou a story”), participants whose subjectivities are a symbiosis of the performed story and the social relations in which itis embedded: relations of sex, class, race, sexuality, geography, religion, and other expressions of identity, Personal narrative performance gives shape to these social relations, but because such relations are multiple, polysemic, complexly interconnected, and contradictory, it can do so only in unstable and destabilizing ways for narrator and audience. Personal narrative thus implies a performative struggle over personal and social identity rather than the act of a self ‘with a fixed, unified, stable, or final essence which serves as the origin or accomplishment of experience (Smith, “Identity’s Body”). Performativity situates personal narrative within action and discourse, the insttutionalized networks of power relations, for example, medicine, the law, the media, the family, which constitute and order context. Personal narrative as a situated practice is particularized, embodied, and material—a story of the body told through the body which makes cultural conflict conerete, ‘An example drawn from anthropologist Barbara Meyerhof?’s work on cultural performance can illustrate the distinct contributions of performance and perfotmativity to personal narrative study. Meyerhof?s projects on ritual, storytelling, and ageing among American Jews opened up discursive space for personal narrative as cultural performance. From Meyerhoff, personal narrative may be understood as a definitional ceremony, a strategy to proclaim self-definitions to an audience. Like a misror, personal narrative is reflective, showing ourselves to ourselves; like a stage, personal narrative is also reflexive, arousing Consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves (Meyethoff 234). In Meyerhof's terms, personal narrative is a performance strategy to be seen on our own terms (the voice with a body) and to be heard in our own terms (the body with a voice) which has particular valence for socially marginal, disdained, ot ignored groups or for individuals with “spoiled identities.”lies ch y “The Future of Performance Seudies 209 “The transformative power of personal narrative as cultural performance asserts existence and meaning, worth and vitality—self-definitions not otherwise available to an audience. Persoaal narrative performance functions as social bonding, the creation of virtual community to celebrate identity and values. Significantly, however, Meyerhoff distinguishes definitional ceremonies from Turner's social dramas which have effects in the social world: “That the ceremonies changed nothing was signal, and is what distinguished them from social dramas. It seemed, in fact, that their purpose was fo allow things 60 stay th same, to permit people to dixver and rediscover sameness in. the midst of furor, antagonism, and threats of splitting apart” (263; my emphasis). Marc Kaminsky offers an alternative reading of Meyerhoff’s definitional ceremonies, based in the concerns of performativity, that clarifies the danger of performance to depoliticize and reenchant experience. Put most simply, performance gives the poetics of enhancement and the reflexivity of experience; performativity adds the workings of power and resistance to power. Whereas performance addresses issues of semantics, the definitions of a self ot bonds of a group, it eschews the consequences of performance within cultural struggle—“the ‘ceremonies changed nothing.” When performance draws a boundary between itself and social life, culture is reduced to a container of performance, and the audience of personal narrative is defined as the self. Addressed to the self or self-same others (“to discover and rediscover, sameness”), personal narrative re-stories experience outside the workings of power and resistance, and exempts the story from critique. Here the reflexivity of performance may serve to personalize and individualize meanings rather than to open access to the sociality of experience and the politics of knowledge. Transformation of the self in performance is not identical to the transgression of discourse. Although personal narrative performance may momentarily disrupt social relations and display individual agency, it may restabilize (“to allow things to stay the same”) rather than destabilizing identities, meanings, or values. The point here is not that performance cannot be transgressive because it can (indeed, Kaminsky argues that Meyethof?’s definitional ceremonies do change things) but that performance scholars are not well served by conceptualizations of performance that refit, romanticize, of take for granted the workings of context in personal narrative performance. ‘The risk of performance to depoliticize and reenchant experience collapses the political into the personal. Without performativity, personal natrative is a performance practice without a theory of power to interrogate the constitution of subjectivities and ordering of text/context relations. From the perspective of performance and performativity, I offer three caveats for the future of personal narrative performance studies. Caveat 1: Poltcize the personal. How does personal narrative performance reveal or obscure the politics of the personal? With regard to her performances in Fires in the Mirror and Twilight in LA, Anna Deveare Smith says, “Pm realy, ultimately, (...] not fly interested in acting and this, this thing—this thing of wearing the glove parfeti. You know, I'm interested in where it fits and it doem’t fi.” (68). ‘The glove that fits perfectly, like the mirror that reflects self back to self, engages in a performance of identity that covers over the politics of difference and proposes a universal human subject with unproblematic body identity. Sidonie Smith’s reading of Annie Dillard’s An American Childbood critiques just such a performance of identity: “the gloved hand of the young woman’s (Dillad’s] escape from the body into a universalized imagination, into writing itself, hat private domain where words do not pass through world” (Subjectivity 135). Smith argues that Dillard’s neutralizing, “white-washing” strategies erase the material body and replace it with the metaphor of narrative skin that sustains self-writing and self-consciousness. Drawing away from the specific body it covers, this narrative skin, identified with the position of the universal subject, erases the specific marks of difference and210 ‘The Future of Performance Stucies therefore the cultural meanings assigned people of different skins and physiognomies. Smith contrasts Dillard’s poetics and politics of exclusion to the autobiographical projects of Chicana and lesbian writer Cherrie Moraga and of working-class photographer Jo Spence as they mark and examine the juncture of the personal and politica. According to Anna Deveare Smith and Sidonie Smith, the personal is political only upon condition that identity is articulated in its embodied and material specificity—its problems and ptivileges—and destabilized in performance. The personal gives bodily access to the Politial—the social, cultural, historical construction of differences—but is not automatically Political simply because itis performed in public. The performance of the personal in public ‘ay have the effect of privatizing the public, collapsing the political into the personal “without changing anything,” as Meyerhoff writes. The personal i “just personal” when it postions itself outside culture and history, the perfect ft of mirror to face of glove to hand./By Ppoliticzing the personal, performers resist the neutralizing strategies of the universal human subject and insist upon personal narrative as a practice of performing differences (Langellir, Caster, & Hantzis). How can personal narrative expose rather than erase, mark rather than ‘mask, the politics of the personal? Caveat 2: Problematize antienc and siuation. The audicace may be the most neglected aspect of personal narrative performance studies. Performing personal narrative is always a process of decontextualizing (from experience, from an interview) and tecontextualizing a story for a particular audience. The theoretical positon taken here asserts thatthe fll meaning of Personal narrative is performative rather than semantic, located in the consequences of narrative for an audience. An important implication of this approach is that one cannot determine the transgressive (creation of empowering discursive possibilities) and/or Fecuperative (reproduction of dominant discourses of power and privilege) dynamics of personal natrative performance based upon the text alone nor the performer's identity alone, outside the conditions and consequences of performance (Alcoff, Problem”), What is the site of personal narrative performance (Strine, HopKins, and Long), and how is the audience constructed within it? For example, is the audience constructed as a witness, testifying to the experience; as a therapist unconditionally supporting emotions; as a narrative analyst, cxamining genre, truth, or strategy; as a critic appraising the display of performance knowledge and skill; as a cultural theorist assessing the contestation of meanings, values, and identities in the performance? Each of these possibilities, and there are many others, have different implications for the participation, consumption, and critique by audience in personal narrative performance, Moreover, the audience and situation are in question in every performance as the conditions of performance change. For example, Barney Downs first performed “An Unsolicited Gift” at the conference on HIV education and personal narrative performance at Arizona State University in March 1993, Numerous participants identified Downs's performance as a defining moment of the conference, provoking them to examine theit own HIV/AIDS Stories” His performance was invoked frequently during the conference, in focus groups and conversational settings, as well asin its aftermath, Linda Park-Fuller designates Downs’s performance as an impetus for authoring and performing a personal narrative of breast cancer. ‘The following year Downs performed the “same” story at the National Communication Association meeting. Although I make no assumptions about the performer's or particular ‘audience members’ experiences of these performances, I would focus attention on the conditions of performance and suggest the following: th site of audience pantpaton constructed in the HIV conference, in part because of its educational goals and focus-group format, became mote a site of conswmption at the convention where audience came to see andh rk ind y out ons at “The Futute of Performance Studies an hear a personal narrative performance more than to search for, tell, and interrogate their own stories. The conference, as a site of engagement and action in HIV/AIDS education, accomplished a more mutual destabilizing of identities and social relations for participants than the convention format fostered. The caveat to problematize audience and situation asks: what are the consequences of performing this particular story in this particular way to this particular audience in this particular situation?* Caveat 3: Produce knowledge about personal narrative performance. Personal natrative performance must not be seen as an end in itself (“It’s al ust tll stories”) not as a means to study self (“let ‘me tel all my stories”) in a reflecting mirror which simultaneously deflects the social, the cultural, the historical context. Such moves celebrate, even fetishize, the personal without interrogating its production; they reenchant experience without examining the production of cexpericnee, language, and identity in discourse. To “just do it,” to perform personal narrative ‘without producing knowledge about narrative and about performance, risks the naturalizing of storytelling as a cultural practice. We must also produce knowledge about how personal nattative works, how it acquires cultural power (or not), about the conditions and consequences of its performance. What do we learn by performing personal narrative? And what can we leatn in no other way than through the perspectives of performance and performativity about the workings of a practice most often conceptualized in terms of representation rather than embodiment (Riessman)? Whether these studies of personal narrative performance are empirical, interpretive, ot critical, I argue that they take text/context relations as the unit of analysis. Situating petsonal natrative in context—performance and performativity—reminds us, for example, that not all bodies have voice: not all subject positions are open to all subjects, and not all subject positions are equal in cultural power. A series of interrelated questions, adapted from Smith (‘Identity’s Body”), might investigate voice and body in personal narrative performance: Whose body (narrator, performer, researcher) is speaking in performance? How is the body the performative boundary between inner and outer, subject and world? What kind of performance is the body allowed to give? What kinds of personal narrative are privileged by performance? What is the relationship of personal body politics to the body politic, of individual anatomy to cultural anatomy? Why perform personal narrative in public and with ‘what consequences? How are other voices and bodies arranged in the personal narrative? Before whom is the speaker revealing or concealing (or both) her or his body? How do particular performance situations construct sites of participation or consumption? Whose history of the body is being performed? Does personal nattative performance contribute to the empowerment of oppressed peoples? As we perform and study personal narrative, we are aware that personal narrative exists in, through, and across the body. There is no way as narrator, researcher, or performer to “step out of,” “hide behind,” of evacuate the body in personal narrative performance. If, in postmodern times, the voice needs a body and the body needs a voice, the future of personal narrative performance will be shaped by continuing to critically question the production of personal narrative: why personal narrative in performance studies, and why aot? Endnotes + Papers on tha panel were presented by Datlene Hants, Bic E. Peterson and Kista M, Langellier, Ceti Ginggich-Philbrook, and Carol L, Benton. My remarks here ate indebted to continuing coaveesations with these scholars 2 Foran insightful elaboration of this question, see Hantzs 5 For specific gols, contexts, texts, and outcomes of the conference, see Corey. 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