Subversive acts : gender, representation, and race in contemporary feminist theatre / Raima Evan.

Format:

• Book
• Manuscript
• Microformat
• Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

• Evan, Raima.

Contributor:

• University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Penn dissertations--English literature.
• English literature--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

• Penn dissertations--English literature.
• English literature--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

vii, 430 leaves ; 29 cm

Production:

1994.

Summary:

• An examination of the work of Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, and Marguerite Duras, Subversive Acts traces contemporary feminist theatre's concern with exposing and subverting dominant constructions of gender, representation, and race. My study argues that these writers are united by their disruption of binaries which are at the center of Western discourse: male/female; heterosexual/homosexual; self/other; human/non-human; white/black. By staging bodies, desires, and identities which refuse these boundaries, the playwrights reconceive the relation between body and voice, dismantle the formal apparatus of realism, destabilize the spectator's relation to the stage, and threaten conventional notions of subjectivity. Throughout my discussion, I attend to the strategies by which these playwrights problematize representation and the very notion of visibility by making the body on stage the site of multiple--and contradictory--meanings.
• The dissertation places the work of these writers in dialogue not only with recent feminist theory and feminist theatre studies, but also with issues of reception and canonization. Thus, I historicize the ways in which the writers have been received by theatre critics and scholars alike, examining how different readers and spectators respond to dominant and oppositional discourses. By analyzing the reception of both well known and little-known plays, I explore how mainstream theatre critics as well as theatre scholars marginalize plays which pose more of a threat to realism's formal apparatus and to Western binary thinking. I argue that plays such as Churchill's A Mouthful of Birds, Fornes's Drowning, Kennedy's A Beast Story, and Duras's L'Eden Cinema have been neglected precisely because they reject dominant constructions of women, "minorities," and heterosexuality.
• Finally, I explore the different strategies by which these writers invoke the invisible in order to disrupt a dominant discourse invested in aligning women and "minorities" with the visible, silent, abject body. In the process, I demonstrate contemporary feminist theatre's capacity for moving beyond a critique of the dominant discourse and inventing a new theatre vocabulary which expresses hitherto marginalized subjectivities, sexualities, and identities.

Notes:

• Thesis (Ph.D. in English Literature) -- Graduate School of Arts and Science, University of Pennsylvania, 1994.
• Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 95-21024.

OCLC:

187450685