Presentation — Feminist Strategies and Tactics: Staging Australian Women's Lives and Radical Creative Praxis (Drama Australia 2023)

Citation: Stacy Holman Jones, Feminist Strategies and Tactics: Staging Australian Women's Lives and Radical Creative Praxis, Keynote, Drama Australia Conference, University of Newcastle, 2023. This keynote presentation draws on the Staging Australian Women’s Lives (SAWL) ARC Discovery Project to examine the histories, erasures, and creative resistances that have shaped womxn’s participation in Australian theatre from the 1970s to the present. The presentation opens by interrogating the complexities of naming and representation, including the contested politics of the terms womxn and womyn, before tracing an incomplete history of over sixty years of womxn’s theatre making in Australia. Moving decade by decade, it surveys the feminist activism of the 1970s, the systemic inequities of the 1980s and 1990s, the wave of industry inquiries with limited impact in the 2000s, and the ongoing challenges of the 2010s and 2020s, including the devastating economic losses wrought by COVID-19. The presentation also addresses the themes of erasure and anger as central to understanding womxn’s experiences in Australian theatre. In its final movement, the keynote introduces the concept of radical, cheeky, and crafty feminist tactics — creative and activist strategies developed by womxn practitioners to challenge gender-based discrimination and advance feminist ways of working — and invites participants to develop their own tactics. The presentation concludes with provocations for educators working to prepare future theatre makers, calling for attention to complexity, hurt, exclusion, and care as foundations of a feminist creative praxis.