The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas Margarita Vargas The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas. By Yolanda Flores. New York: Peter Lang, 2000; pp. 132. $32.95 paper. In The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas, Yolanda Flores embarks on the ambitious project of examining how issues of race, gender, and class are represented on the North and South American stages. To illustrate the theoretical and methodological approaches of her study, which entail the application of materialist and radical feminist concepts, Flores reads selected plays by primarily the following playwrights: Leilah Assunção (Brazil), Susana Torres Molina (Argentina), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Josefina López (United States). Flores follows a critical practice she identifies as current among critics of categories such as Latin American theatre. According to her, critics continue to pursue two original objectives of the 1970s feminist agenda: first, the rescuing from oblivion of texts written by women and, second, the study of female characters in male-authored texts. Her main goal, indeed, is to demarginalize and thus introduce Latin American drama, especially that written by women, to North American audiences for whom these works remain a mystery. Flores points outs thatNorth American and European critics are partially responsible for the marginalization of this work. Her most vivid example comes from Diana Taylor's reference in Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics to a 1968 issue of The Drama Review in which the editor cited two US critics who described Latin American theatre as backward and a compendium of clumsily borrowed dramatic forms with dead shapes moving about onstage (15). That Latin American women playwrights are still not well known in the United States should not come as such a surprise, for as Flores reminds us, even though Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which marks the birth of feminist literary criticism, appeared in 1970, dramatic studies had to wait until 1988 for the publication of Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and Theatre, the first extensive feminist study on drama. Coincidentally, in 1988 the First International Conference of Women Playwrights—the brainchild of Anna Kay France, a professor of English and theatre—took place in Buffalo. Despite her investment in a project of recovery, Flores fails to mention that two of the playwrights in her study—Leilah Assunção and Sabina Berman—participated in this momentous event. In addition to the close readings of each of the plays, readers will find particularly informative the [End Page 526] sociopolitical and literary contexts that Flores provides at the beginning of each chapter. She contextualizes the work of the playwrights in terms of their place in the literary histories of their respective countries, discusses their introduction into the world of letters, and then proceeds to outline their particular projects within race, class, and gender. Flores positions herself within a postmodernist discourse that promotes pluralism over a universalized vision of woman as a single nonracial entity. At the same time, however, she recognizes that it is necessary to presume a signifier "woman" in order to be able to study its misrepresentation and exclusion from the hegemonic discourse, and to identify commonalties among women that will enable them to form coalitions and create social change. Thus, Flores recognizes that her study is caught in the eternal conundrum of the paradox: in order to speak of women as a group, she needs to define them in opposition to the fixed term "man," thus undermining her own postmodern aspirations. One of Flores's smartest moves was to include Chicano theatre in her book, for it affords her the opportunity to speak to questions of class and race and specifically what it means to be a woman of color writing in a first-world country. This materialist approach highlights a stark difference between Latin-American writers, who for the most part come from the upper classes, and Latinas in the United States, who often do not. Flores remarks that all the Chicana writers she has studied are of working-class background and therefore feel more akin to the oppressed groups in Latin America than to other writers. One example she offers is...