Performing Femininity

Lesa Lockford teaches courses in theatre and performance studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently, her scholarly interests are performance methods and composition, gender and sexuality, alternative forms of scholarly representation, and qualitative methods of inquiry. Journals in which her work has appeared include Text and Performance Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Theatre Annual, and Women's Studies in Communication. She has performed her original creative texts and texts by others at regional and national academic conferences. Before returning to the Academy to pursue graduate studies, she trained and worked as a professional actor in the United Kingdom.

This book is a groundbreaking work of utterly fine prose rendered in a most intriguing and often beguiling style. It is a full performance of theory and self on every page. The exploration of women via 'subversive feminism' is a welcome addition to the growing complexity of theoretical and ethnographic explorations of womanhood in postmodern culture. Lesa Lockford's book is a major contribution to that dialogue and one that I am quite sure will spark a great deal of self-reflexive thought, writing, performance, and debate.

• Chapter 1 The Abject Body and Subversive FemininityChapter 2 Stepping on the Black Box: Kinesthetic Experience and the Transformation of Body SizeChapter 3 "Would You Do It?": Doing the Scholarly Striptease for Academic GainChapter 4 Reading the Body: Consuming the Feminist ScholarChapter 5 Reading Pink: The Beauty Persuasion6 Thinking and Rethinking Tails, Tales and Tellings