Rural lesbian subjectivities & writing with the nonhuman: a feminist dramaturgical practice

Clayton, Jessi Lee (2023) Rural lesbian subjectivities & writing with the nonhuman: a feminist dramaturgical practice. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This practice-based project seeks to address gaps in theory and practice, through my own work as a writer and performance practitioner, concerning rural lesbian subjectivities. It asks how my feminist playwriting performance practice might critically utilise ideas around the nonhuman and erotic in site-specific/sited creative writing to offer up dramaturgical forms articulating a rural lesbian experience. It explores specific lesbian feminist methods which successfully engaged rural queer and lesbian women in the 1960s and 1970s. In historicising these methods, it seeks to build a feminist framework from which new dramaturgical methodologies inclusive of rural lesbian subjectivities might be created. It explores the shortcomings of those feminist methods regarding the historic Anglo-European relationship to land and ‘nature’. It asks how critical approaches offered by Indigenous American scholars might allow new understandings of landscape and its nonhuman residents in relation to lesbian sited playwriting practice. It looks to Black Feminist understandings of the erotic in establishing alternative human relationships to land and exploring how this might be articulated in work dealing with rural lesbian subjectivities. The project then considers how sited performance in the UK privileges hetero-masculinist structures, and how an erotic and nonhuman writing methodology within a National Trust heritage site might disrupt and reform this. The practice portion of the project will present and reflect on a sited playtext. It will dissect the ways in which my own creative writing practice was essential in attempting to address the interdisciplinary metronormative and heteronormative gaps in queer and feminist theory. It looks to feminist, queer, and lesbian writing across literature and ‘nature writing’ as cognate creative practices yet to be considered in queer and feminist written performance practice. In this, it offers a new dramaturgical mode which might resist dominant male discourses around the rural, site, and land and re-insert lesbian subjects into historic and future landscapes through an unsettled written performance practice.

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