Historic Feminist Ghosts Dining in a Theatrical Landscape: Judy Chicago´s Dinner Party and Caryl Churchill´s Top Girls

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Campion Decent
La Trobe University

Abstract

Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play Top Girls and Judy Chicago’s 1979 art installation The Dinner Party might be considered ‘cultural ghosts’ of second-wave feminism. Yet both works endure: The Dinner Party is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum and Top Girls is frequently revived in productions around the world. This article reads these seminal works for their ghostly inclinations and considers if it is the figure of the ghost that sustains their ongoing cultural life. This includes a consideration of the ghost’s intersection with concepts of absence and presence, death, loss, and mourning. Drawing on ideas of the ghost in historiography, philosophy, sociology, and spectrality, theatre and performance studies, the article discusses how Churchill and Chicago, through the deployment of the ghost, not only offer something back to the dead through these works, but call on the living to act on behalf of their historic women.

Keywords: Ghosts, History, Dinner, Judy Chicago, Caryl Churchill, Performance

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