Feminist Drama

Feminist Drama
Author: Janet Brown
Publisher: Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 1979
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Feminism and Theatre

Feminism and Theatre
Author: Sue-Ellen Case
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2014-09-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136735208

This classic study is both an introduction to, and an overview of, the relationship between feminism and theatre.

Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama

Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama
Author: Lisa M. Anderson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2008
Genre: African Americans in literature
ISBN: 0252032284

In tracing black feminism in contemporary drama by black women playwrights, Lisa M. Anderson reviews the history of black feminism through analysis of plays by Pearl Cleage, Glenda Dickerson, Breena Clarke, Kia Corthron, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sharon Bridgforth, and Shirlene Holmes.Black Feminism in Contemporary Dramarepresents a cross section of women who have diverse writing and performance styles and generational differences that highlight the artistic and political breadth of black feminist theater. Anderson closely investigates each play's construction and the context of its production, including how the play critiques, shifts, or alters dominant culture stereotypes; how it positions goals of the "community"; and how it engages with the concept of art's function. She not only discusses what shapes the black feminism of these writers but also points out how the meaning of the term black feminism shifts among them.

The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights

The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights
Author: Brenda Murphy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1999-06-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521576802

This volume addresses the work of women playwrights throughout the history of the American theatre, from the early pioneers to contemporary feminists. Each chapter introduces the reader to the work of one or more playwrights and to a way of thinking about plays. Together they cover significant writers such as Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Lillian Hellman, Sophie Treadwell, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Megan Terry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Wendy Wasserstein, Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Maria Irene Fornes. Playwrights are discussed in the context of topics such as early comedy and melodrama, feminism and realism, the Harlem Renaissance, the feminist resurgence of the 1970s and feminist dramatic theory. A detailed chronology and illustrations enhance the volume, which also includes bibliographical essays on recent criticism and on African-American women playwrights before 1930.

The Oxford Handbook of American Drama

The Oxford Handbook of American Drama
Author: Jeffrey H. Richards
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2014-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0199731497

This volume explores the history of American drama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It describes origins of early republican drama and its evolution during the pre-war and post-war periods. It traces the emergence of different types of American drama including protest plays, reform drama, political drama, experimental drama, urban plays, feminist drama and realist plays. This volume also analyzes the works of some of the most notable American playwrights including Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and those written by women dramatists.

Performing Feminisms

Performing Feminisms
Author: Sue-Ellen Case
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 1990-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780801839696

A valuable, provoking, important addition to any theatre scholar or practitioner's library, especially since feminist theory is a relative newcomer to the world of theatre.

Difficult Women on Television Drama

Difficult Women on Television Drama
Author: Isabel C. Pinedo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2021-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000342891

Difficult Women on Television Drama analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or address: equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, and the need for intersectional approaches. Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change. This book is a must-read for scholars of media and communication studies; television and film studies; cultural studies; American studies; sociology of gender and sexualities; women and gender studies; and international film, media and cinema studies.

Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama

Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama
Author: Kanika Batra
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2011-04-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136887539

In this timely study, Batra examines contemporary drama from India, Jamaica, and Nigeria in conjunction with feminist and incipient queer movements in these countries. Postcolonial drama, Batra contends, furthers the struggle for gender justice in both these movements by contesting the idea of the heterosexual, middle class, wage-earning male as the model citizen and by suggesting alternative conceptions of citizenship premised on working-class sexual identities. Further, Batra considers the possibility of Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian drama generating a discourse on a rights-bearing conception of citizenship that derives from representations of non-biological, non-generational forms of kinship. Her study is one of the first to examine the ways in which postcolonial dramatists are creating the possibility of a dialogue between cultural activism, women’s movements, and an emerging discourse on queer sexualities.

The Feminist Spectator as Critic

The Feminist Spectator as Critic
Author: Jill Dolan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 1991
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780472081608

Extends the feminist analysis of representation to the realm of performance

Performing the Wound

Performing the Wound
Author: Niki Tulk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2022-05-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000580644

This book offers a matrixial, feminist-centered analysis of trauma and performance, through examining the work of three artists: Ann Hamilton, Renée Green, and Cecilia Vicuña. Each artist engages in a multi-media, or “combination” performance practice; this includes the use of site, embodied performance, material elements, film, and writing. Each case study involves traumatic content, including the legacy of slavery, child sexual abuse and environmental degradation; each artist constructs an aesthetic milieu that invites rather than immerses—this allows an audience to have agency, as well as multiple pathways into their engagement with the art. The author Niki Tulk suggests that these works facilitate an audience-performance relationship based on the concept of ethical witnessing/wit(h)nessing, in which viewers are not positioned as voyeurs, nor made to risk re-traumatization by being forced to view traumatic events re-played on stage. This approach also allows agency to the art itself, in that an ethical space is created where the art is not objectified or looked at—but joined with. Foundational to this investigation are the writings of Bracha L. Ettinger, Jill Bennett and Diana Taylor—particularly Ettinger’s concepts of the matrixial, carriance and border-linking. These artists and scholars present a capacity to expand and articulate answers to questions regarding how to make performance that remains compelling and truthful to the trauma experience, but not re-traumatizing. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, art history, visual arts, feminist studies, theatre, film, performance art, postcolonialism, rhetoric and writing.