Staking claims and positions: The women and theatre program, San diego, and the danger zone

Standing back from an historical moment to comment on it is difficult when you’re in the middle of living through it. I’m speculating now about this moment in feminism, which seems to me an awkward one. The movement is fractured and afraid, subject to external influences that make our issues loaded and divisive. If I could do anything as grandiose as speculate on the shape of the contemporary American feminist movement, I would suggest that the 1980s have moved us from a conception of women and feminism as monolithic and universal, to an investigation of differences prompted by an insistence on identity politics, toward an inquiry into the ways in which differences among us and within us are crafted by discourse and reside in the very language we use to describe ourselves.