Performance and the celebration of a subaltern counterpublic

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Abstract
By documenting the creation of a production based on the history of the Women's Center of Carbondale, Illinois, this essay explores difficulties in celebrating, through means of performance, an organization that exists because women are beaten and raped every day. First, we examine how the members of the Women's Center community make sense of their relationship to the dominant culture by forming a parallel or subaltern counterpublic through the formulation of a counterdiscourse. Second, we examine our scripting and staging decisions as the products of our simultaneous immersion in the multiple cultures of the dominant public sphere, the academy, and the Women's Center.