Excluded

Excluded PDF

Author: Julia Serano

Publisher: Seal Press

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1580055052

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While many feminist and queer movements are designed to challenge sexism, they often simultaneously police gender and sexuality—sometimes just as fiercely as the straight, male-centric mainstream does. Among LGBTQ activists, there is a long history of lesbians and gay men dismissing bisexuals, transgender people, and other gender and sexual minorities. In each case, exclusion is based on the premise that certain ways of being gendered or sexual are more legitimate, natural, or righteous than others. As a trans woman, bisexual, and femme activist, Julia Serano has spent much of the last ten years challenging various forms of exclusion within feminist and queer/LGBTQ movements. In Excluded, she chronicles many of these instances of exclusion and argues that marginalizing others often stems from a handful of assumptions that are routinely made about gender and sexuality. These false assumptions infect theories, activism, organizations, and communities—and worse, they enable people to vigorously protest certain forms of sexism while simultaneously ignoring and even perpetuating others. Serano advocates for a new approach to fighting sexism that avoids these pitfalls and offers new ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, and sexism that foster inclusivity rather than exclusivity.

Gender, Writing, and Performance

Gender, Writing, and Performance PDF

Author: Helen J. Swift

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-02-28

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0199232237

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Helen Swift examines late-medieval and early-modern French imaginative literature written by men in defence of women of great popularity in its own time - including catalogues of virtuous women, allegorical narratives, and debate poems.

Arab-American Women's Writing and Performance

Arab-American Women's Writing and Performance PDF

Author: Somaya Sami Sabry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-04-30

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0857719742

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The public image of Arabs in America has been radically affected by the 'war on terror'. But stereotypes of Arabs, manifested for instance in Orientalist representations of Sheherazade and the Arabian Nights in Hollywood, have prevailed for much longer. Here Somaya Sabry argues that the Arab-American experience has been powerfully shaped by racial discourse and Orientalism, and is further complicated today by hostility towards Arabs in post-9/11 America. She shows how Arab-American women writers and performers confront and subvert racial stereotypes in this charged context by recasting representations of Sheherazade. Shedding new light on Arab-American women's negotiations of identity, this book will be indispensable for all those interested in the Arab-American world, American ethnic studies and race, as well as diaspora studies, women's studies, literature, cultural studies and performance studies.

Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing

Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing PDF

Author: W. Arons

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-10-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0230600735

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In this book, Wendy Arons examines how women writers used theater and performance to investigate the problem of female subjectivity and to intervene in the dominant discourse about ideal femininity. Arons shows how contemporary demands for sincerity and authenticity placed a peculiar burden on women in the public sphere, especially on actresses, who - like professional writers - overstepped the boundaries of what was considered proper behavior for women. Paradoxically, in their representations of ideal women engaged in performance, these writers expose ideal femininity as an impossible act, even as they attempt to perform it in their writing and in their lives.

Gender, Writing, Spectatorships

Gender, Writing, Spectatorships PDF

Author: Katharine Mitchell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1000457486

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This original study makes a valuable contribution to Italian feminist/women’s history, spectatorship studies, and cultural history by examining women as protagonists, producers and consumers of literature, theatre, opera and film. Drawing on archival material – female correspondence, life-writings and journalism – as well as an impressive range of canonical texts, it brings together detailed engagement with female performance and with female spectators’ material responses to "women’s opera, theatre and film," placing these in the context of melodrama from the 1880s to the 1920s in Italy, France, the US, and elsewhere. It is unique in its interdisciplinary approach and in its consideration of female relationships based on admiration among performers and writers – the embodiment of a vibrant, mobile and successful Italian female culture industry during the first wave of feminism.

Acts of Passion

Acts of Passion PDF

Author: Nina Rapi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 131779060X

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The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint. Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses: the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society how questions of purity, ‘authenticity,’and self-definition complicate the field of representation the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible several ‘new wave’performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body what the term ‘lesbian playwright’means within contemporary culture ‘It’s Queer Up North’--a British National Arts Organization the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performance Anyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of ‘positive representation’--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

Gender, Writing, and Performance

Gender, Writing, and Performance PDF

Author: Helen J. Swift

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-02-28

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0191552518

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This book explores the poetics of literary defences of women written by men in late-medieval and early-modern France. It fills an important lacuna in studies of this polemic in imaginative literature by bridging the gap between Christine de Pizan and a later generation of women writers and male, Neo-Platonist writers who have recently all received due critical attention. Whereas male-authored defences composed between 1440 and 1538 have previously been dismissed as 'insincere' or 'mere intellectual games', Swift formulates reading strategies to overcome such critical stumbling blocks and engage with the particular rhetorical and historical contexts of these works. Edited and as yet unedited texts by Martin Le Franc, Jacques Milet, Pierre Michault, and Jean Bouchet-catalogues of women, allegorical narratives, and debate poems-are brought together and analysed in detail for the first time in order to explore, for example, how such works address the misogynistic spectre of Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose. The book seeks to understand the contemporary popularity of the case for women (la querelle des femmes) as literary subject matter. It investigates the publication history across this period, from manuscript to print, of Le Franc's Le Champion des dames. Swift further aims to show how these texts hold interest for modern audiences. A nexus of theoretical concerns centred on performance - Judith Butler's gender performativity, Derrida's re-working of Austin's linguistic performativity through spectrality, and dramatic performance - is enlisted to articulate the interpretative engagement expected by querelle writers of their audience. The reading strategies proposed foster a nuanced and enriched perspective on the question of a male author's 'sincerity' when writing in defence of women.

Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre

Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre PDF

Author: Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0192650173

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Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre argues for a reconsideration of authorship at the Abbey Theatre. The actresses who performed the key roles at the Abbey contributed original ideas, language, stage directions, and revisions to the theatre's most renowned performances and texts, and this study asks that we consider the role of actresses in the development of these plays. Plays that have been historically attributed to W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge have complicated histories, and the neglect of these women's contributions over the past century reflects power dynamics that privilege male, Anglo Irish writers over the contributions of working class actresses. The study asks that readers consider the importance of past performance in the creation of written text. Yeats began his earliest plays performing with and writing for Laura Armstrong, a young woman who was a precursor to Maud Gonne in her irreverent challenge to traditional gender roles. After writing his first plays and poems for Armstrong, Yeats met Gonne and developed two Cathleen plays, The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, for her to perform, beginning a lifetime of fruitful argument between the two writers about how Ireland should appear onstage. The book then turns to Synge's work with Molly Allgood in creating The Playboy of the Western World and Molly's contributions to Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows. A section on Yeats's Deirdre shows the contributions of Lady Gregory and the play's performers. The book ends with a reconsideration of Abbey actress Sara Allgood's performances in British and American film as she brought her earliest work in the pre-Abbey tableau movement to American audiences in the 1940s, in ways that challenged ideas of Irishness, American identity, and aging women on screen.

Telling Performances

Telling Performances PDF

Author: Brian Nelson

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780874137071

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These essays engage with narratives and narrative issues, in particular on the issue of performance in and of narrative, with the telling of performance and the performance of telling, and the way stories perform gender and identity. They focus on narrative as such, on narrative genres, and on particular narratives, but they all seek to inform thinking on narrative.

Casting Gender

Casting Gender PDF

Author: John T. Warren

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780820474199

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Casting Gender puts forward a vision of theatre, storytelling, and the performance of the everyday function within the lived spaces of its performers and audiences, asking how women artists/scholars embody meaning, carry social value, and constitute possible identities. Drawing on scholarship in intercultural communication, performance studies, women's studies, and cultural studies, this collection of new, critically informed research advances our understanding of how theater works as intercultural communication and as a vehicle for change. Casting Gender offers varied locations and sites of research, highlighting the rich diversity of women's cultural identities, roles, and societal positions. This book moves beyond the western-centered nature of intercultural performance and intercultural communication theory and practice by creating a forum for nonwestern voices.