NEW WOMEN PERFORMANCE WRITERS - ENGLISH,ROSE AND HUGHES,HOLLY

This paper suggests a particular framework for investigating contempor ary women performance artists who write and perform written texts. It argues that these texts are an important force in contemporary feminis t writing, and that they are largely ignored as such. Two texts are an alysed in detail, these are; Rose English's Walks on Water and Holly H ughes' World Without End. This is guided by the play between the physi cal presence of the performer, and the concern within the texts to de- stabilise a complete sense of self-refuse the simplicity of binaries. The paper argues that these texts, and these women's performance of th em, crack open the possibilities of the performative.