SOURCE: Murray, Piper. “‘They are Well Together. Women are Not’: Productive Ambivalence and Female Hom(m)osociality in Fefu and Her Friends.” Modern Drama 44, no. 4 (winter 2001): 398-415.

Participating in your economy, I did not know what I could have desired. Made phallic, whether by procuration or by delegation, I forgot what my jouissance could have been.

—Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (61)

Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends leaves us with a vision that is nothing if not ambivalent. Coming as the climax of eight women's efforts to throw off “the stifling conditions” (45) that have brought them together, Julia's sympathetic death—apparently the result of a shot fired by Phillip's unsympathetic gun—shocks and confuses. In an effort to explain this strangely ambiguous ending, many critics have looked to one of its most obvious roots: the conflicted psyches of Fefu and her friends. In such an interpretation, Julia's real and hallucinated struggle, however dramatic, becomes just an extreme example of the pain and paralysis that all the women experience. All of these women, it would seem, have internalized the kind of judges Julia hallucinates in her Part Two monologue. All of them must strive to create an identity not dependent on men (or “man”) for its definition, one that celebrates both the plumbing that women can call their own and the fact that women can do all their “own plumbing” (13).

Besides identifying this “common denominator” (29), as Cecilia might put it, critical discussions about how all of these fractured identities finally add up tend to fall into two camps. The first, less sanguine approach tends to focus on how thoroughly the psyches of Fefu and her friends have been inscribed by male dominance. Read as a dramatization of the effects of that dominance, Fefu and her friends come to represent the psychic fragments that, when pieced together, give us a reflection of the male structure that literally surrounds them. According to this reading, the most significant bond that exists between the play's all-female cast would seem to be their common interest in making a place for themselves within that structure. W. B. Worthen, for example, has attempted to show how, despite the fact that no men actually appear on stage, “[t]he authority of the absent male is everywhere evident in Fefu” (176). It is the male (or his absence), in other words, that holds the women—and each woman—together.

Other critics, on the other hand, have de-emphasized the absent presence of the men, opting instead to see Fefu and her friends as a positive presence in their own right. Penny Farfan, for example, suggests that “Fefu and Her Friends posits postmodern feminist theatre practice as a constructive response to the psychic dilemmas of the play's female characters” (443). Even more celebratory, Deborah Geis has argued that Fefu represents the successful formation of a “transgressive […] community of listeners […] capable of generating enormous power” (298). In this view, it is not solely the men's power that bonds these women to one another but also a power they can call their own, resistant to but not solely defined by the men's. So much power do they generate on their own, in fact, that Julia's conflicted psyche must be sacrificed in order to baptize this community's capacity to, as Geis quotes Fefu, “blow the world apart” (298).

Apocalyptic as that sounds, however, both readings tend to elide much of the ambivalence that I find at the heart of this play's production. To celebrate theirs as an unambivalent “joining together,” I would suggest, ignores many of the limits of identity and desire that, individually and together, Fefu and her friends perform. After all, the female characters who do make it outside the house to stargaze on the lawn must finally come running back inside, where they stand over Julia's violently (yet imperceptibly) murdered body. And even earlier in the play, it becomes gravely clear that whatever power has been produced by these women's performances depends on more than their individual psyches; it also depends on how their performances are received—by one another, by us. To conclude either that the gathering of Fefu and her friends functions primarily as a performance of the lack of men on the scene or that the women triumph by “ending […] their physical/verbal paralysis” and “joining together as a community of women” (Geis 298). I think, glosses over many of the complicated ways in which, in this play, by Fefu's own admission, men “are well together” and “women are not” (15).

In part, then, what I want to explore is the ways in which, as a set of performances staged on many levels, Fefu and Her Friends urges us toward a more complicated notion, not just of the female psyche, but also of female—and feminist—homosociality. Between women, forming a feminist sociality has often meant, quite simply, cultivating women's capacity for “identifying” with each other: women-identified women joining other women-identified women to create a community that is not dependent on men for its constitution. As the work of theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown, however, the power and even the possibility of any homosociality comes not just from same-sex identification but from a whole spectrum of same-sex desire—a spectrum we find missing in any theory that posits the relation between woman and women solely in terms of either identification or desire. Whereas the power of male homosociality has been shown to work along the entire spectrum of male homosocial desire, no similar attempt seems to have been made by feminist or queer theory to analyze female homosociality from the point of view of homosocial (including, but not exclusively, homosexual) desire. In other words, Sedgwick has a whole tradition in anthropology and poststructuralism to draw from in formulating, in Between Men, her theory of male homosocial desire; when it comes to women, however, we still seem to be stuck at the level of identity and identification, where women are forced either to identify with others of their sex or to desire someone else of that sex—not really a choice at all. And it is about this concern with female homosocial desire, with how any powerful community of women can and must be formed by passionate attachments to one another, that I find Fefu and Her Friends most productively—and performatively—ambivalent.¹

In Bodies That Matter, Butler describes how sex and gender identities, far from being natural facts of life, are produced performatively, as ideal constructs “forcibly materialized through time. [Sex] is not a simple fact or static condition of a body,” Butler writes, “but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize ‘sex’ and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms” (1-2). What can come to matter in terms of sexual identity, in other words, depends on what can or will be recognized at the social level: a matter less of nature than of norms. Subjects are discursively urged to “assume” a sex by identifying with these norms, as well as by disidentifying with what is marked (again and again) as “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” (3)—all those bodies and identities, in short, that do not matter. The subject is thus founded in part on the very identities and desires it must abject in order to constitute itself. All those sexed identifications that do not matter, that are forcibly excluded in order to constitute a subject who does matter, become what Butler calls the “founding repudiations” (3) of that subject. Founded as much on the sexualities it abjects as on the sexed identifications is assumes, then, the subject is nothing if not ambivalent (15).

Fefu and Her Friends introduces us early on to the abject—and to the ambivalence that always characterizes its performance. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in Fefu's preoccupation with plumbing. “Plumbing is more important than you think” (15), Fefu tells Christina, and revulsion is exciting:

that which is exposed to the exterior … is smooth and dry and clean. That which is not … underneath, is slimy and filled with fungus and crawling with worms. It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest. It's there. The way worms are underneath the stone. If you don't recognize it … (Whispering.) it eats you.

(9)

Or, in Julia's case, it paralyzes you. As Julia makes clear in her hysterical monologue in Part Two, hers is a constant struggle to forget “the stinking parts of the body,” even though “all those parts [that] must be kept clean and put away […] are the important ones: the genitals, the anus, the mouth, the armpit” (33). Men and women both might be accused of “act[ing] as if they don't have genitals” (27), but, as Julia reiterates through her “prayer,” it is woman who is fundamentally, mythologically, not only condemned to but, in fact, founded on that denial. And we can imagine how exhausting that constant denial must be, considering that “women's entrails are heavier than anything on earth” (33-34).

Though Julia's may be the most extreme case, to some extent we come to know all of Fefu and her friends as abject identities. In the merry-go-round of Part Two, for example, we encounter in each of the scenes a kind of hysterical production through which, into all the play and laughter, erupts a pain neither purely physical nor purely emotional: Cindy relates a dream in which she is nearly strangled by a man who rubs her nipples, while Sue sucks on Fefu's ice cubes before returning them to the freezer, declaring “I'm clean” (38). And through it all, despite her frequent testimony that she takes pleasure in what others find disgusting, Fefu seems to spend an awful lot of time wielding a plunger, presumably in order to keep the abject at bay. Despite her tendency to feed (on) the very things that revolt her, that is, Fefu appears unusually preoccupied with ensuring that the “the rubber stopper […] falls right over the hole” (13)—making sure, that is, that the once-abjected will not reproduce itself. Indeed, for the risk-taker Christina takes her to be, it would seem that Fefu takes a remarkable number of precautions when it comes to plumbing.

Why is plumbing—as Fefu and Julia both describe it—so “important”? Why, in a gathering and performance that is supposed to be about educational reform, does the plumbing seem so often and so insistently to come up? At one level, we might say that the power with which Fefu endows her plumbing makes Fefu a paradoxical performance from the beginning. For plumbing, especially when it is not performing as it is supposed to, reminds us of the physical fact of the body and its production of waste. At the same time, however, when it is functioning as we expect it to, plumbing is also precisely what enables us to conceal, to forget, the fact of our bodily functions. In other words, plumbing is like the perfect performative described by Butler: while it may function as witness to the body and its avenues of abjection, it also functions as a “smooth and dry and clean” denial of that same function. We might also wonder, of course, whether Fefu's prophylactic activity is not meant as a guard against another kind of bodily (re)production, as well. As the Shakespearean sonnet that Emma recites to Fefu in Part Two suggests,² Fefu remains childless; she has not yet “convert[ed]” herself “to store” by fulfilling the promise of reproduction.³ And if Fefu would like to keep it that way, then she must constantly check to make sure that the rubber stopper/diaphragm “falls right over the hole.” For we might remember that it is Fefu's husband, and not Fefu, who controls whether the gun shoots blanks or the real thing—no matter whose hands it is in or who it is aimed at.

As Fefu's question to Christina (“What do you do with revulsion?” [9]) suggests, the abject always serves a performative function. We learn early on in Fefu that so much talk about the abject, along with the revulsion it produces, is never merely talk; it is also a production that does something, that acts. From the very first line, “[m]y husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are” (9), Fornes's play draws us into a world where every utterance does something, enacts some inequality between men and women (and, though this is less frequently noted, between women and women). Julia tells her audience that as soon as she believes the prayer that condemns women as inhuman and spiritually sexual, she “will forget the judges. And when I forget the judges,” she goes on, “I will believe the prayer. They say both happen at once. And all women have done it” (35). In other words, if she can forget the performative and (re)productive nature of the female “sex,” and simply allow it to “materialize” as if it were “natural” (much like the plumbing), then she will finally have become a woman who can walk with other women. Indeed, it would seem that it is this very act of forgetting that makes “woman” what she is in the first place. Julia's failure to live up to this performative demand will, of course, be fatal. To Emma's offer to stage a dance for her (and we know from Julia's monologue where dancing got Isadora Duncan), Julia happily replies, “I'm game” (22). And so she is: like the deer and the rabbit that are literally hunted, Julia's perception that she is “game” for her persecutors finally becomes a paralyzing and deadly reality, and one that, like any performative utterance, is never clearly either the result or the cause of the act it performs.

Though they may be staged most conspicuously at the level of Julia's psyche, these abject performances have more than merely psychic relevance. For Fefu also establishes itself early on as also interested in homosociality and its limits. Most obviously, the number of women moving in and out of the living room in the first and third parts of the play amounts to a real crowd; each woman is given what we might call her own “character,” and yet, with the exception of the more isolated scenes of Part Two, there are just enough of them to make the spectator's intimate identification with any of the individual characters difficult. (Interestingly, we often find ourselves remembering who each one is by paying attention to whom she is most often “coupled” with, but even these relations tend to change from scene to scene, part to part.) As Cecilia declares, all of these women, despite their “same-sex” relation to one another, are still searching for the “common denominator” that will make them cohere: “We must be part of a community, perhaps 10, 100, 1000” (44). At the same time, however, the search for this common denominator is an inevitably risky one. As Worthen's reading suggests, even before the first blast from the shot-gun, the men in some ways already represent the common denominator by which all the women are divided. Fefu and her friends must thus struggle to find some common denominator that will not actually divide them, make them identical to one another, or reduce them to their differences.

Even more than Cecilia's, Fefu's attitude toward women's sociality reflects these risks. Explaining to Cindy and Christina why she would rather identify herself with men, Fefu describes the essential difference between men, who have “natural strength,” and women, whose strength seems somehow artificial, unnatural, even dangerous. Fefu then goes on to develop a whole theory of how men are “well together” and “women are not”:

Women are restless with each other. They are like live wires … either chattering to keep themselves from making contact, or else, if they don't chatter, they avert their eyes … like Orpheus … as if a god once said “and if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart.” They are always eager for the men to arrive. When they do, they can put themselves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. With the men they feel safe. The danger is gone. That's the closest they can be to feeling wholesome. Men are muscle that cover the raw nerve. They are the insulators. The danger is gone, but the price is the mind and the spirit.

(15)

Ironically, in her description of how women are socially and psychically put “together,” Fefu would seem to agree more with Worthen than with any of her more sanguine feminist critics, many of whom read the play as a triumph of feminist community. Like Worthen, Fefu believes that it is indeed the men that make the women feel whole, and that it is the presence or absence of the men that determines how “well together” the women can be. This point, of course, seems to be the one thing on which the outrageous Fefu and the conventional Christina can agree: “I too have wished for that trust men have for each other,” Christina admits. “The faith the world puts in them and they in turn put in the world. I know I don't have it” (15). Unlike either Christina or Worthen, however, Fefu attributes this lack of faith and trust not to women's lack of power but to a power so dangerous that it threatens to undo men and women both, to blow apart the world as they know it. In fact, Fefu does not exactly seem to blame women's inability to be well with one another on the men who surround them. Some presumably masculine “god” might have decreed that men might enjoy “the fresh air and the sun, while [the women] sit here in the dark […]” (15), but it is the women themselves who have internalized this prohibition in the form of fear—fear of their own power, their own collective mind and spirit. It is not the men's fault, after all, that the women walk around waiting for them to arrive.

Considering how “unwell” they seem to be together, what bonds do tie women like Fefu and her friends to one another? From Fefu's description of how women act together—chattering, restless, eager for the men to arrive—it is difficult to imagine why they would desire one another's company at all. And from their inability even to “recognize” one another, it would seem that there is little in the way of either identification or desire between these women. The term Irigaray might give the critical foreclosure Fefu describes is “hom(m)osexuality” (This Sex 171); in the masculine “logic” of thought and desire in which women find themselves, Irigaray writes, “the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual” (Irigaray, This Sex 86; original emphasis). In such a system, in other words, how women are together seems always to “boil down to” a reiteration of women as they have already been described by male homosocial structures—that is, the logic that defines the feminine and the female as the not-masculine, as the not-male (This Sex 69). After all, as “the judges” tell Julia, the “human being is of the masculine gender” (35).

As Cecilia might put it, the

system can function with such a bias that it could take any situation and translate it into one formula. That is […] the main reason for stupidity or even madness, not being able to tell the difference between things.[…] That is […] the concern of the educator—to teach how to be sensitive to the differences, in ourselves as well as outside ourselves.

(43-44)

And in many ways, we find Cecilia's call incorporated into the very structure of Fefu and Her Friends. As we attempt to make some overall sense of each of its different and various “parts,” we often get the impression that this play would make us more “sensitive,” not only to the differences among Fefu and her friends, but also to the differences between them and their various audiences. In fact, I would suggest that, from the simultaneous scenes and seasonal play in Part Two to the play's overall setting in a specific historical time and place. Fefu and Her Friends attempts to keep in play the very differences that hom(m)osexuality would deny.

The play's attempt to make “how women are together” matter, in real historical terms, is signaled most obviously by its setting in a specific historical time and place: New England, Spring, 1935. Fefu and her friends are meeting to rehearse a presentation on the current state of education, a presentation in which one of the speeches (Emma's) is actually taken from the preface of a real historical book published in 1917 and written by a real historical character, an educator named Emma Sheridan Fry. More abstractly, however, we might also identify in the play other historicizing modes of representation, modes that are in some ways suggestive of the “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory” dialectic that Elin Diamond has made familiar to theatre criticism. Certainly there is little in Fornes's play to suggest a classic Brechtian distanciation between the identifications of character and actor, or between character and audience. In fact, that the audience is asked to share the characters' various habitudes in the second part of the play might be seen as an attempt to collapse the distance between character and spectator.

Still, the fragmentation of narratives and identities in Fefu in many ways functions to demystify representation. Though the play may not necessarily, as Diamond puts it, “releas[e] the spectator from imaginary and illusory identifications” (121), it does, most extremely in Julia's case but also in that of the other characters, expose just how much the feminine identity itself is bound to such imaginary and illusory—or, as Butler might put it, “phantasmatic”—identification. Julia listens and speaks to, even gets slapped by, the male judges she hallucinates, while Fefu hallucinates a functioning Julia who can walk into the living room and check to see how much sugar is in the bowl. And there is even a way in which the black cat that crawls into Fefu's kitchen each morning appears as a part of her (parceled-out) self, a “monster” that only she can feed because its appetite is in some strange way hers to satisfy (29). As many critics have noted, Fefu and her friends are nothing if not fractured identities, and those identities appear to depend a great deal on context: on who is performing what and for whom. In other words, by representing representation, the play represents the psyches and bodies of Fefu and her friends as discursive productions, tensions, and identifications themselves. It exposes how the female body is always “a part of a theatrical sign system whose conventions of gesturing, voicing, and impersonating are referents” that gain much of their signifying power by disguising their traces (Diamond, “Brechtian Theory” 129). That is, it performs the performative nature of the naturalized performance.

In Part Two of the play, the mise en scène changes to incorporate another mode of representing difference. Four separate but overlapping scenes (and seasons) are presented simultaneously, while the audience, moving from one of these repeated scenes to the next, is invited to view the women's interactions more intimately. Instead of watching from the historical distance and linear time of Parts One and Three, the audience watches from the intimate proximity and synchronicity that only simultaneous scenes can represent. As the bizarre narrative and emotional eruptions in each scene “represent” the characters as fragmented subjects, the simultaneity of the scenes dramatizes the kind of sedimentation that constitutes identity and desire (or forecloses it). Repeated over and over so that performance and rehearsal become nearly indistinguishable, the arrangement of Part Two reveals both the reiteration and the potential discontinuity that performance and performativity entail. As the characters in Part Two literally travel from one simultaneous scene to another, producing an overflow across the boundaries of each, we get a view not just of woman as never fully identical with herself but also of women as never fully identical with themselves or one another. The mise en scène constantly reminds us of our inability to see all there is to see of these women; while attempting to absorb all that is being performed in one of the scenes, we can always hear echoes of another performance going on elsewhere, in our absence.

As fragmented and contextually bound as the identities of Fefu and her friends seem to be, then, we should hardly be surprised that the “reeducation” that Cecilia calls for never takes place in quite the linear fashion of feminist narrative. Still, there is a way in which so much fragmentation and difference makes it more rather than less difficult to comprehend just what it is that draws these women together again in time and space in Part Three. The kind of “sensitivity” to difference that Cecilia calls for, after all, does not necessarily amount to anything we might confidently call desire. For as long as women continue to be defined by their difference from men, the differences among them tend to get elided (as Paula finally asserts in her monologue in Part Three). And it is no doubt difficult to imagine identical subjects desiring one another. After all, what difference would their desire make, what would it matter? As Teresa de Lauretis has suggested, “so-called sexual difference” always amounts to “sexual indifference” (18; emphasis added), so long as hom(m)osexuality denies women a way of being together in which desire and identification might meet along a continuum of same-sex relations. Indeed, we might even say that what hom(m)osexuality allows women is not really a homosociality of their own at all but, instead, what we might call a hom(m)osociality. No matter how strongly Fefu and her friends identify with one another, hom(m)osociality continues to ensure that women cannot be well together in the way that men are; the women are always left desiring the presence of the men, even if no one but Fefu is willing to admit it.

We might remember that, for Butler, the woman who identifies herself with other, “naturally” heterosexual women does so by “foreclosing” the possibility of desiring other women. For what is performatively produced in the assumption of a sexual identity is not just an ideal body but an ideal sexuality, a “heterosexual imperative” that operates by both “enabl[ing] certain sexed identifications and foreclos[ing] and/or disavow[ing] other identifications” (Bodies 3). Because heterosexuality is constituted as a prohibition against homosexuality, to identify oneself as a heterosexual woman entails more than the loss of the “other” woman who would be desired; it also entails the denial of that loss, since actually to mourn the same-sex object of desire would be in some way to recognize that that desire “matters” in the first place (Butler, Psychic Life 136-37). As a result, according to Butler, heterosexual identity is an inevitably, fundamentally melancholic one, founded on an ungrievable loss.

Fefu and her friends might all be said to play in some way the role of the melancholic heterosexual woman, compulsively performing what they refuse to mourn: the repudiated desire for another woman.⁴ Julia struggles to make more and more believable her performance of the “prayer” that condemns women as undesirable, and she does so precisely because so much is at stake for her in the act of identifying herself with, much less desiring, Fefu. Julia calls her love life “[f]ar away,” declaring that she has no need for it (52), but we also know from her hallucinations that she fears identifying with or loving Fefu, afraid that her desire will prove deadly for Fefu, that its recognition might, indeed, blow their world apart. Ironically, however, the foreclosure of Julia's passionate attachment to Fefu proves deadly not for Fefu but for Julia herself. Meanwhile, Fefu is left complaining about her “revolting” (11) attachment to her husband: “I need him. […] I need his touch. I need his kiss. I need the person he is. I can't give him up” (58-59). It is as though Fefu takes it for granted that, when it comes to her marriage, there is only one whole “person” between them. She needs her husband in order to be whole.

With Butler, then, Fefu seems to ask,

what happens when a certain foreclosure of love becomes the condition of possibility for social existence? Does this not produce a sociality afflicted by melancholia, a sociality in which loss cannot be grieved because it cannot be recognized as loss, because what is lost never had any entitlement to existence?

(Psychic Life 24)

Or, to put it differently, we might ask what happens when the social life of women is itself founded on the repudiation of women's desire for one another. Is it any wonder that, in a such a world, we find Fefu and her friends constantly waiting for the men to arrive?

Indeed, by the play's violent ending, we might wonder whether constructing a feminist homosociality is possible at all without performing some challenge to this foreclosure of homosocial desire. In her discussion of “the lesbian phallus,” Butler implies just how much female homosocial desire, and not just identification, matters for doing anything more than reproducing the indifference between women. By dislocating the power of signification from its status as a tool of masculine desire, the lesbian phallus offers a potential recuperation of a female desire that matters, that signifies. Such an “act” can engender a powerful disruption of the “central figures of power” that characterize “masculinist contexts,” Butler suggests, by revealing both the phallus's association with the penis and its transferability (Bodies 89): “When the phallus is lesbian […] [it] (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus. This opens up anatomy—and sexual difference itself—as a site of proliferative resignifications” (89). The phallus relocated among women who not only identify with but also desire other women, then, offers a powerful critique of the masculinist context in which the power to (re)signify is confused with that which men have and women do not.

The object that most obviously figures as a lesbian phallus in Fefu and Her Friends—the shotgun that circulates among them in Fefu's living room—does not function so simply. The hope Butler holds for the lesbian phallus would suggest that Fefu and her friends, in becoming together the keepers of Phillip's shotgun, might cease to be the phallus (the embodiment of lack) and come instead to possess it. For we might remember that, repelled as she is by Fefu and Phillip's game, it is the skittish Cindy, and not Fefu, who reloads the gun once Julia has removed the remaining slug. And in some ways, all the women (except Julia, who unloads it) conspire to keep the gun present and loaded. Still, as the disastrous, unpredictable, and even indecipherable consequences of the gun's circulation among the women point out, Fefu and her friends finally fail to “remov[e] it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange” by “recirculating and reprivileging it between women” (Butler 88). Far from recirculating the phallus within a context of female homosociality, they remain trapped in, “insulated” by, the heterosexual terms set by male homosociality—a failure that seems to have less to do with whom they identify themselves with (men or women, homosexual or heterosexual) and more to do with the difficulty of finding any other use for it between women. Nor can they simply ignore it: loaded or not, the gun remains an imposing presence.

Ultimately, it is never quite clear whether or not the performances these women give really do create new possibilities that matter—to them, to the men outside on the lawn, to us. In the opening banter between Fefu and Cindy (with the appalled Christina looking on), we get a whole series of what we might call ambivalent performatives, in which the “heaviness” and “loathsomeness” of women and their “entrails” gets rehearsed, but with the lightness and laughter we might expect from a play with a title as frivolous as Fefu and Her Friends. Fefu's marriage, we learn right away, is itself a rehearsal of the loathsomeness of women, a fact which can never be established once and for all but must be repeatedly reiterated. Fefu declares that she finds this reminder somehow “funny.—And it's true. That's why I laugh […] when he tells me” (8). But how could it be that her husband's statement seems both to have convinced Fefu of women's loathsomeness and to have made her laugh in the believing (and retelling)? Is Fefu's laugh the counter-performative laugh of Cixous's Medusa, re-citing the old myth (that women are loathsome) with just enough mockery to alter its truth in the very act of repeating it? Does her laughter really matter, after all?

One thing, at least, is sure: despite Fefu's showy laughter at her husband's beliefs about women, or the squealing school-girlishness of the water-fight scene, it is difficult to characterize the play of Fefu and her friends as an unproblematically “happy” performance. (I use “happy” here in two senses, in both its affective sense and its effective one, a doubling that I take from J. L. Austin [21] and to which I will return below). Fefu assures Christina and Cynthia that women's loathsomeness is simply something to think about, a “thought.” As “just a thought,” the statement does not really matter after all, apparently, because it addresses the condition of women in general. It does not actually apply to “anyone in particular” (8). In other words, “women,” once set in the quotation marks Fefu's gay announcement seems to put them in, are apparently one thing, while each individual women remains entirely another. But Fefu's friends appear not to be convinced—either that women are loathsome or that such a statement might not apply to them. “I don't feel loathsome,” Cindy protests (8). “And how is women being loathsome an exciting idea?” Christina wonders aloud (9).

With Fefu's impossible response, “I take it all back,” we learn an important lesson not only about the performative nature of gender and sex but also about the difficulty of reconstructing “how women are together”: namely, that no performative utterance can be taken back. If the saying is the doing, then once it has been said it has been done.⁵ Once Fefu has said “I do,” she will always have been married to Phillip. Once she has declared women loathsome, they will always have been loathsome. As Butler shows us, there is no true woman behind “her” discursive production, only a series of sedimented identities. And as these “founding” performatives and unperformable performatives suggest, there is no “taking it back,” only resignifying. Even more, there are limits to the powers of signification, to what can come to matter. Saying it doesn't make it so if no one can understand what is said, or why it might matter. (Otherwise, we can imagine that creating a feminist homosociality would be easy enough: just to wish for it in words would be enough to call it into being.) The potential for resignification is bounded in part by the very limits which it might exceed—that is, the limits of what is already recognized as performable. And it is with these limits that the performance of Fefu flirts most persistently by asking, Just whose utterances, and whose laughter, matters?

In How to Do Things with Words, Austin considers the role that audience plays in determining the effectiveness of a particularly performative utterance—an issue necessarily of concern to the playwright or the critic who wants to “do” feminist work. Considered apart from any real rhetorical context, the performative utterance distinguishes itself automatically from the constative utterance by accomplishing the very act it enunciates—and by concealing the performative nature of that act in the very process of enacting it. Austin also suggests, however, that the accomplishment of the effect (and, it turns out, affect) of that performative utterance depends on the presence of a recognizable context, on a kind of conscious or unconscious consensus among its audience about what signifies, what matters. Auditors in a courtroom, say, or at a marriage ceremony must recognize the authority of the ceremonial language; they must recognize the judge's or priest's utterance as the citation of a phrase already invested with the authority to accomplish what it names. If, however, “something goes wrong in the performance of a performative, ‘the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false but in general unhappy.’” It suffers from an “‘infelicity,’” an “‘ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts’” (Austin, qtd. in Parker and Sedgwick 3; original emphasis). In other words, it is precisely its conventionality that lends the performative utterance both its power and its vulnerability. Only the utterance that is somehow already invested with meaning can actually do as it says; however, that very iterability always puts the utterance at risk of being regarded as mere convention, as mere performance—and therefore of failing to matter.

If, as Austin suggests, the success—or “happiness”—of a particular performance is both dependent on and made vulnerable by its own conventionality, then it would seem that the more performance-like a performative utterance becomes, not only the more unhappy it becomes, but also the more downright perverse—or, at least, that seems to be the “consensus” on which Austin builds his argument.

[A] performative utterance will […] be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. […] Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration.

(Austin, qtd. in Parker and Sedgwick 3; emphasis added)

For Austin, then, there is something about any performative that insists on calling attention to itself, on performing its own limits, that makes it unhappy, excluded from “serious” consideration. But as this passage also demonstrates, such utterances must be actively excluded from consideration, performatively. Indeed, in the introduction to their collection Performativity and Performance, Parker and Sedgewick suggest that, by labeling certain performatives as not only abnormal but also “parasitic,” part of the “doctrine” of the “etioliations of language”—in a word, queer—Austin effectively puts them into the same unhappy camp as “the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the abnormal, the decadent, the effete, the diseased” (5): in other words, the abject. The distinction between the ordinary and the parasitic citation thus becomes not an objective but an abjective one, and one that attempts to cover its own performative tracks but which nonetheless depends for its meaning on the consensus of its audience.⁶

If simply performing the performative does not necessarily make it so—indeed, if the explicit “performance” of the performative necessarily makes it not so—then how “seriously” can we take Fefu's declaration that women are loathsome, not to mention Cindy's protest that she does not feel loathsome? What can the audience ultimately make of the series of performances that constitute Fefu and Her Friends? Gathered together as these women are with the self-conscious aim of rehearsing their performance, do the struggles they perform ultimately undermine their own power, render them “hollow” or “void,” “parasitic” upon their “normal use”? Such a problem obviously—and performatively—begs the question of what the “normal use” of such utterances might be, as well as how that determination is made to matter.

If the “happiness” of any performative, positive or negative, depends on its recognizability, then resignifying how women are psychically and socially put together requires more than the production of new signs. The effectiveness of any feminist performance would also depend a great deal on the constitution of its audience, an audience that must collectively recognize the feminist utterance as authoritative. It demands the construction of an “audience,” that is, who can recognize its power and whose recognition matters—a prospect about which Fefu and Her Friends, with its many unhappy (indeed, “melancholic”) performances, remains remarkably ambivalent. We have seen how what matters as “normal use,” as well as what gets excluded as “hollow” or “void,” must be determined socially as well as psychically. For just how much Fefu's remarks belong to the category of the “etiological” is apparently an object of negotiation—not just among the not-so-absent male authorities (or “judges”) but also among the women. Christina and Cindy dramatize that negotiation from the beginning with their discussion of just how seriously Fefu's remarks should be taken. Fefu's imperative to “just laugh,” whether she believes in its power or not, will never be effective (or “happy”) so long as Christina does not recognize its performative force, or as long as Christina's recognition does not matter anyway.

Much of the difficulty that Fefu (and Fefu) faces in attempting to challenge what counts as “normal” lies in the difficulty of formulating what Parker and Sedgwick call a “negative performative” (9). What often makes the power of the naturalized performative so difficult to resist, they argue, is the inherent difficulty not just of uttering but even of formulating an utterance that denies the authority of the “original” performative. Offering the examples of the gay person invited to a heterosexual wedding or the person who is dared to do something he or she does not want to do, Parker and Sedgwick suggest that many performatives derive their effectiveness less from an audience that actively consents and more from a “lack of a formulaic negative response” that matters to anyone besides the speaker. As Parker and Sedgwick point out, “[i]t requires little presence of mind to find the comfortable formula ‘I dare you,’ but a good deal more for the dragooned witness to disinterpellate with, ‘Don't do it on my account’” (9). Even the successfully formulated negative performative would presumably lose out, if only for the simple fact of its negativity; whatever refusal it is intended to perform must nonetheless be formulated in the terms set by the original performative. Thus, at a loss for a countering “disavowal, renunciation, [or] repudiation” or an authoritative way to say “count me out” (9), the unwilling witness to the original performative remains, unhappily, powerless to signal her dissent to whatever authority is reiterated. Fefu and Her Friends, I would argue, presents us with a continuous struggle to formulate just such a negative performative—to marriage, to heterosexual identification, even to the female sex as it is performatively constituted. Just how far this is possible, and just how difficult, however, becomes central to the play's momentum of working against—and toward—a feminist performance that matters.

Paula's final “monologue” in Part Three (57) does seem to perform the kind of “count me out” that Sedgwick and Parker suggest is so difficult to formulate. By telling her own story about bitter summers spent on the job as her friends floated off to Europe, Paula exposes just how exclusive Emma's performance really is in its emphasis on the spiritual at the expense of the material concerns of educational reform. Paula had appeared grateful for Emma's offer to “work with her” on her part of the presentation, but it becomes clear later that Paula is ambivalent about her role in a production that so blindly reproduces its own conditions. Similarly, by delivering her monologue, as the stage directions make clear, without looking once at Cecilia, Paula performs a kind of “count me out” of the conventional break-up scenario that she enumerates and itemizes earlier in Part Two. When Cecilia embraces her after she is finished, we might assume that her performance was, after all, a “happy one,” since it seems to have performed and produced the kind of passionate attachment between the two women that had formerly been disavowed. Ironically, however, this promising and passionate act is brought about only through a melancholically happy performative, an unhappy burst of dissensus—unfortunately, not quite the happy foundation we might wish for a female homosocial desire.

In the end, of course, Fefu and her friends can hardly be said to blow the world apart, or even to lay the foundation for a new one. But that the play successfully (if not happily) performs this struggle in all its ambivalence might be evident in the fact that, as Fornes herself has noted, nobody seems to know quite what to do with the sheer number of women in this play. As Helene Keyssar writes of her own experience as an audience member, spectators of both sexes often find themselves “disconcerted, not only by being moved from our stable and familiar positions, but by our proximity to each other and to the characters; we are in their spaces but not of them. Their world remains separate from ours, and there is nothing we can do to make a difference in their world” (100; original emphasis). If we are invited to be in their spaces but not of them, made to feel how little difference our presence makes in their world, then what does that say for the status of Fefu as a feminist performance? Does Fefu, in fact, perform the feminist work we might as critics call on it to do? Or does it allow us to remain just indifferent enough to view the happiness and unhappiness of Fefu and her friends as “mere” performance, regarding them as something between real women and drama queens? Fornes's own comments about the play's reception have suggested that many audience members continue to judge how well Fefu and her friends are together through the familiar lens of hom(m)osociality; indeed, many of the post-performance questions about the play often concern neither Fefu nor any of her seven friends, but the few male characters who never even appear.⁷ We, too, it would seem, are always waiting for the men to arrive.

Perhaps no other play demonstrates so clearly as Fefu and Her Friends the fundamental—and founding—ambivalence that necessarily constitutes female homosocial desire in a culture where the men play outside in the fresh air while the women gather inside, “in the dark.” Certainly the complicated struggle of Fefu and her friends to become “well together” seems to imply, with Butler, that “[e]xceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound” (Psychic Life 17). In the same way, however, the passionate attachments that Fefu and her friends do develop would also seem to enact the kind of ambivalent hope that Peggy Phelan identifies with feminist critical theory: “What makes feminist criticism performative,” she writes, “is not its utopian pitch toward a better future but, rather, the ‘intimate dissonance’ inspired by the recognition of mutual failure, in the here and now—the failure to enact what one can barely glimpse, can only imagine, and cannot reproduce” (21). In other words, because feminist criticism (and performance) is itself performative, it cannot ever hope to have achieved its end once and for all. Instead, it must find its hope in the very necessity and fragility that repetition has to offer it. Looking at the play in this way, as Fefu and her friends gather around Julia's body in the final scene of Fornes's play, we might ask, not once but many times, just what kinds of passionate attachments Fefu and Her Friends makes possible—between women.

Notes

1. Much recent critical debate has been devoted to drawing and redrawing the boundaries between performance and performativity: Blau (e.g., Eye of Prey 171) has distinguished the former as his subject, Butler the latter (Bodies 234), and Elin Diamond, in a recent article in TDR, has attempted to shorten the distance between the two. Without exactly entering into that debate, I would like to think these two critical meanings of “performance” together in much the same way that Parker and Sedgwick do in the introduction to their collection, Performativity and Performance. There, Parker and Sedgwick draw together these two modes of enactment by returning us to one place where they find that “the philosophical and theatrical meanings of performative actually do establish contact with each other” (3). I want, in other words, to explore how Fefu and her friends, in the process of staging the limits of what we recognize as “how women are together,” might reinforce or exceed those limits in very the act of performing them.

2. The PAJ edition I am quoting from differs slightly but significantly from the Wordplays version. The former includes a stage direction that does not appear in the latter, one that makes Fefu the (absent) addressee of Shakespeare's sonnet. After Fefu exits, “Emma improvises an effigy of Fefu. She puts Fefu's hat and gloves on it.”

3. Considering that the intended audience for Shakespeare's sonnet would have been a young man rather than a woman, it is interesting that Emma would choose this poem in particular to re-cite. Addressed to a woman, the sonnet's commonplace figures for patriarchal reproduction become strikingly literal, bodily. We cannot help but be struck with the importance of plumbing as we realize that a woman equipped with a womb can convert herself “to store” in a way that no man can.

4. And if Melanie Klein is right that guilt is produced not by internalizing an external prohibition but by the fear that one will destroy the object of one's love (Butler, Psychic Life 25), then female homosociality might also be a fundamentally “guilty” sociality as well.

5. Interestingly, Christina would seem to give a similarly impossible performance when she declares, in her first line of the play, “I am speechless” (9). But here the effect is the opposite of Fefu's failed attempt at discursively taking it all back: by performing the statement that she is speechless, Christina unveils—and therefore undermines—the performative reiteration of women's “natural” silence.

6. Parker and Sedgwick offer marriage as the example par excellence of this interplay between the utterance and a willing audience, as well as the necessary denial, through naturalization, of this interplay. As a spectacular ceremony and as an institution, “a kind of fourth wall or invisible proscenium arch that moves through the world” (11), marriage requires its audience both to forever hold its peace and to forever bear silent witness to the “happy couple.” Besides exemplifying the kind of showy but compulsory consensus that the “happy” performative requires, marriage secures its happy status by, like a play, constructing its audience as privileged witnesses who are able neither to look away from nor to intervene in the spectacle (11). At the same time, however, it covers its performative tracks by naturalizing the version of normalcy it enacts and by abjecting others; while a minister might, for example, pronounce any two people “married,” the happy occasion becomes an “unhappy” one in the context of a gay wedding, where the utterance is regarded by the law as a “theatrical” performance only.

7. For a more detailed description of men's limited responses to the play (but, unfortunately, no accompanying account of women's), see Fornes's contribution to “Women in the Theatre.”

Works Cited

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.

Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.

———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 17-39.

Diamond, Elin. “Re: Blau, Butler, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming.” TDR 44.4 (2000): 31-43.

———. “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism.” A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the Stage. Ed. Carol Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996. 120-35.

Farfan, Penny. “Feminism, Metatheatricality, and Mise-en-scène in Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends.” Modern Drama 40 (1997): 442-53.

Fornes, Maria Irene. Fefu and Her Friends. New York: PAJ Pub., 1990.

———. “Women in the Theatre.” Centerpoint 2 (1980): 31-37.

Geis, Deborah R. “Wordscapes of the Body: Performative Language as Gestus in Maria Irene Fornes's Plays.” Theatre Journal 42 (1990): 291-307.

Irigaray, Luce. Elemental Passions. Trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still. London: Athlone, 1992.

———. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.

Keyssar, Helene. “Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends.” Modern Drama 34 (1991): 88-106.

Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Introduction: Performativity and Performance.” Performativity and Performance. Ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995. 1-18.

Phelan, Peggy. “Reciting the Citation of Others; or, A Second Introduction.” Acting Out: Feminist Performances. Ed. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. 13-31.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Worthen, W. B. “Still Playing Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes.” Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 167-85.