Staging Femininities

Staging Femininities
Author: Geraldine Harris
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780719052637

The most complete study of Blier's work to date, Harris traces the director's career from the early 1960s until the present. Outlines the forms, themes and style which dominate in Blier's work, and challenges the many labels that have been used to describe both the corpus of films and the man himself. Provides an original and controversial discussion of Blier's alleged 'misogyny', and invites the reader to understand the scatological and corporeal aspects of Blier's filmmaking in terms of long-established traditions of popular dramatic culture. Brings to light the comic mechanisms underpinning Blier's films and identifies strategies which navigate through one of the most entertaining and disconcerting bodies of work of recent years. The first book on Blier published in English.

Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare's English History Plays

Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare's English History Plays
Author: Hailey Bachrach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009356151

Hailey Bachrach reveals how Shakespeare used female characters in deliberate and consistent ways across his history plays. Illuminating these patterns, she helps us understand these characters not as incidental or marginal presences, but as a key lens through which to understand Shakespeare's process for transforming history into drama. Shakespeare uses female characters to draw deliberate attention to the blurry line between history and fiction onstage, bringing to life the constrained but complex position of women not only in the past itself, but as characters in depictions of said past. In Shakespeare's historical landscape, female characters represent the impossibility of fully recovering voices the record has excluded, and the empowering potential of standing outside history that Shakespeare can only envision by drawing upon the theatre's material conditions. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre
Author: Nancy Copeland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2019-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351898248

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre studies the representation of gender in four of the most important plays by the leading professional women playwrights of the late Stuart period. Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686) and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) are first placed in their original theatrical and cultural contexts and then studied through subsequent productions and adaptations extending from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The detailed analysis of these plays is framed by a discussion of the cultural position of the playwrights and the kind of comedy they wrote. The survival of these plays in the repertoire offers an unusual opportunity to examine the theatrical 'double life' of works by early women playwrights. The lengthy production histories of these comedies placed them in dialogue with radically different ideas of appropriate and permissible behavior for both women and men. The resulting productions, alterations, and adaptations included both feminist reinterpretations and recuperations of the plays' challenges to dominant meanings of gender. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of dramatic literature, theatre, and women's studies.

Mediating Post-Socialist Femininities

Mediating Post-Socialist Femininities
Author: Nadia Kaneva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2017-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131737973X

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this collection of essays examines the ways in which popular media re-construct ideas and ideals of femininity in the post-socialist cultural space. The authors explore a comprehensive range of questions including: How have post-socialist women engaged with media as media producers and consumers, as well as objects of media representation? What are the consequences of the commodification of femininity in the post-socialist context? How does the female body serve as a battleground for the enactment and renegotiation of gendered identities and ideologies? How can we understand and theorize post-socialist women’s activist movements? In seeking answers to such questions, this volume highlights the need to reconsider feminism as a political and theoretical project with many faces. It bridges research on the mediation of post-socialist femininities with broader concerns about the transnational trajectories of feminism today. This book was originally published as a special issue of Feminist Media Studies.

Staging Socialist Femininity

Staging Socialist Femininity
Author: Ana Hofman
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2010-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004191933

Ana Hofman examines the negotiation of the gender performances in Serbian rural areas as a result of the socialist gender policy and creation of the new “femininity” in the public sphere. She focuses on the stage performances of female amateur groups at the Village Gatherings, state-sponsored events held from the 1970s through the mid-1990s in the southeastern Serbian region of Niško Polje. Offering a multifaceted picture of the personal experiences of the socialist ideology of gender equality, Staging Socialist Femininity investigates the complex relationships between personal, interpersonal and political levels in socialism. By showing the interplay between ideology, representational and social practices in the realm of musical performance, it challenges the strong division in scholarly narratives between ideology and practice in socialist societies.

Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television

Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television
Author: R. Mock
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137067136

This book exposes and traces a previously unrecognized performance tradition of extraordinary Jewish women in the Diaspora, from Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt in Nineteenth Century France to Roseanne and Sandra Bernhard in late Twentieth Century America.

Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage

Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage
Author: Viviana Comensoli
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1999
Genre: English drama
ISBN: 9780252067303

Collection of essays which engages debates over gender in the English Renaissance theater--Cover.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre
Author: Sean Metzger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2023-12-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350123188

This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.

Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s

Fearless Femininity by Women in American Theatre, 1910s to 2010s
Author: Lynne Greeley
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2015-08-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1621967425

In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

Gender and the Italian Stage

Gender and the Italian Stage
Author: Maggie Günsberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1997-12-11
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521590280

An exploration of the portrayal of gender on the Italian stage from the Renaissance to the present, in a social and theoretical context.