In “Diary of a Domestic Terrorist,” performance artist Lois Weaver fused lecture and performance formats to discuss current political issues and the history of her performance work in an engaging and entertaining presentation. On November 30th, Weaver performed this piece at UCLA in an event sponsored by the Center for Performance Studies, the Center for the Study of Women, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program. She advocated personal and domestic resistance to authority visualized through the metaphor of hanging laundry in public. Laundry, underwear, and nudity became recurrent themes tying together the threatening possibilities for women’s bodies onstage from Janet Jackson’s nipple to strippers in feminist context to Weaver’s work with incarcerated women.

Weaver has been performing since she began working with the feminist Spiderwoman Theater in the 1970s. She is most known for her work with Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin as Split Britches, who have performed lesbian and feminist theater since 1980. She was instrumental in the founding of the WOW Café in New York, one of the longest-running women’s theater collectives in the United States. She currently lives in London, where she works with the Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company and teaches contemporary performance practices at Queen Mary, University of London. “Diary of a Domestic Terrorist” served as a retrospective of some of Weaver’s past work, including a scene of feminist nudity in the performance of Split Britches’ Lust and Comfort, a video of her work with incarcerated women in London and Brazil, and an excerpt from a performance of her piece “Dress Suits to Hire” by women from the Woman Theatre in Taiwan. She also presented scenes from the show she is currently performing, “What Tammy Needs to Know,” featuring the character of a country-western singer and aspiring lesbian, Tammy Whynot.

In the course of her performance of “Diary of a Domestic Terrorist,” Weaver admits that “I am now and have for some time been a feminist” and asks the audience to stand if they identify as feminist or supports the work of feminists, bringing the whole audience to its feet in a show of solidarity and resistance. This show of feminism is juxtaposed with another identity that Weaver performs… that of a terrorist. Weaver states that “if some of our simplest actions like hanging laundry, standing up for what I believe in, taking off my clothes… are going to place me under suspicion, then, Yes, Mr. President, I am a domestic terrorist.” Throughout the piece, Weaver troubles the notion of terrorism, using it to criticize governments obsessed with security at the expense of public resistance. When activities such as “hanging out laundry, packing bags, taking photographs, writing letters, disagreeing with dinner guests…going to the library [or] baring breasts” become suspicious in a culture that asks citizens to report suspicious activities, Weaver poses performing these private and domestic activities, and performing them publicly and suspiciously, as a means of protest and resistance.

What Tammy Needs to Know

“Diary of a Domestic Terrorist” brought together ideas from throughout Weaver’s body of work to address the current political climate in a provocative way. From the video of Weaver hanging laundry in the middle of the city and at the beach that began the performance, Weaver encouraged the audience to reconceive domestic acts as public and political. Passing out clothespins with “Domestic Terrorist” written on them, Weaver invited the audience to hang their laundry, or use the clothespins as accessories, or for whatever other purpose they could imagine, but in doing so she turned a simple object and a simple domestic act into a political statement of resistance.