This book sheds light on the critical role that women artists have played in the evolution of the American avant-garde. ""Cutting Performances"" boldly challenges four decades of scholarship to revise the history of American avant-garde performance. Focusing on the modernist period, the book explores the work of five celebrated women artists whose performance aesthetics make prominent use of collage techniques - Elsa von Freytag-Loring-hoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas - to reveal how their work gave a decisively feminist inflection to collage as a mode of avant-garde expression. Drawing upon broadly conceptualized notions of collage aesthetics and performance art, this impressively interdisciplinary work will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that feminist experimental artists have played in it.