Feminist Drama Research Articles

Resignification of feminist drama: the translation of The Vagina Monologues in China

ABSTRACT This study examines the resignification of the world-famous feminist drama, The Vagina Monologues (TVM), in its translation and adaptation to the Chinese context. Specifically, it explores how TVM, along with its feminist agendas and values, is resignified in China through textual alterations and follow-up activism. The specific alterations in translation primarily revolve around themes including infant abandonment as gender-based violence, the emphasis on acquaintance rape as a form of sexual violence, and the unveiling of victim-blaming as a rape stereotype constructed in the Chinese context. The follow-up activism led by scholars entails different forms of actions that interact with social reality, with the most influential one being the assistance provided to individuals affected by gender injustice. Through the examination of TVM's transnational metamorphosis, this study finds that drama translation not only provides a channel for feminist awareness-raising in contemporary China but promotes the dialogue between local and global feminist activism.

Democracy, Gender Issues and Women Empowerment in Nigeria: Reflections on Selected Nigerian Feminist Drama

Purpose: Gender inequality has thrived in Nigeria for too long. Feminist scholars therefore feel that there is urgent need to change the status quo through feminist inputs and this led to the present persistent advocacy for women empowerment. Drama has been mostly deployed as a means of expressing this new trend of discourse. Thus, Nigerian writers, especially feminist dramatists, consciously reflect in their works the frightening realities of the prevailing socio- political and economic situations in the country, drawing the attention of the masses, especially the female gender to the inequality inherent in their exploitation, mobilizing the society to rise up against their oppressors. This paper therefore, is set to examine the issues of gender and women empowerment in Nigeria as reflected in selected Nigerian plays. The plays include Tess Onwueme’s The Reign of Wazobia, J.P. Clark’s The Wives’ Revolt and Fred Agbeyegbe’s The King Must Dance Naked.
 Methodology: Textual analysis of the selected plays is carried out.
 Findings: The analysis reveals that drama can be employed as a weapon to break the walls of cultural barriers that impede the struggle of women for social, political and economic empowerment.
 Unique Contribution to Theory Policy and Practice: Thus, premised on the Womanist theory, this paper concludes that drama can be deployed as a means of promoting justice, gender equity and fair play in Nigeria’s drive towards the possibilities of true democracy. This is the playwrights’ contribution to the theory and practice of feminist drama in Nigeria.

Philosophical ideas in drama on the example of women's drama

In this article, specific methodological approaches to analyzing drama from a philosophical point of view are formulated. Our research’s principal conceptual basis consists of considering the personalities of the drama characters animated in the text (and especially in the stage action) as primary attractors for readers-viewers (recipients). Drama consideration (in addition to philological, psychological, semiotic, and other aspects) is proposed as a metaphor that leads to a holistic intellectual and spiritual understanding of its social and philosophical meanings in the unity of the personal-conscious, collective unconscious, and socially determined content. In addition, a conceptual system of socio-philosophical analysis of drama as a unity of society’s real microsocial and macrosocial environments, expressed by the images of the virtual world of the dramatic work in society as a whole, is proposed and implemented. The author explains and systematizes the socio-philosophical ideas and the geo-sociocultural aspect of feminism and feminist literature (features of feminism and feminist drama in the Anglo-American reality). In addition, the author contributes to understanding an important aspect of the modern Western mentality. It is shown that women’s drama is one of the most significant genres of expression of the “philosophy of women’s lives” in the socio-cultural dimension and contains relevant social and philosophical ideas related to gender issues. The article considers the application of the modern literary approach of “feminist criticism” in combination with traditional philological and philosophical approaches, which allowed us to offer a more systematic understanding of the phenomenon of “women’s drama” and revealed the links between the ideology and practice of the feminist movement with the peculiarity of expressing the positions of specific subjects in the form of dramatic works.

The Analysis of Why Women Kill Season 2 Based on the Development of Feminism in China

The second season of Why Women Kill has been widely disseminated and discussed in China. By combining an in-depth viewing of Why Women Kill II and the current development of Chinese feminism, this paper adopts the textual close reading to analyze the connotation of beauty, the awakening of female self-awareness, and the abnormal development of Chinese feminism. The work hopes to promote the further development of Chinese feminism, raise the level of gender consciousness in the whole society and accumulate experience and provide reference for similar feminist drama series and related researches in China and abroad.

Delarivier Manley’in The Royal Mischief Oyununda Erkek Bakışının Yeniden Şekillendirilmesi ve Cinsiyet Rollerinin Tersine Çevrilmesi

Women’s professional involvement in drama dates back to the restoration period in England, during which female dramatists emerged in English drama both as playwrights and actresses. The plays written by the female dramatists included mostly domestic issues, modesty, obedience, and chastity in the early restoration period, following the traits of the patriarchal authors depicting women within the limits of female virtue. Aphra Behn emerged as one of the most important and well-known dramatists of her period, who later encouraged a group of female dramatists, including Delarivier Manley, Catherine Trotter, and Mary Pix. These dramatists demonstrated female solidarity and contributed to each other’s writing, giving way to the rise of the early feminist drama in England through their plays on the question of women and their conditions in the society, challenging the patriarchal discourse. They also adopted a more radical voice sometimes by subverting the established gender roles and male gaze at times. Furthermore, these female dramatists mostly parodied and subverted traditional male libertinism as appeared in many of the restoration comedies and tragedies. Delarivier Manley, in this respect, wrote a series of plays in the direction of “proto-feminist” discourse and reversed the gender roles by giving voice to the female protagonists in her plays, especially in The Royal Mischief.

Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren

Reviewed by: Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren Le’mil L. Eiland Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance. By La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 376. La Donna Forsgren’s Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance is the first history to highlight Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, which explicitly melded artistic expression with Black racial pride during the 1960s and ’70s as a challenge to white supremacy in the United States. Historiography on the Black Arts Movement is often male-dominated with a genealogy crediting figures like Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal. Countering the logic that Black feminist drama was tangential to the movement, Sistuhs in the Struggles organizes a plethora of Black women artists to explain how they developed their Black aesthetics, nourished the racial politics of the Black Arts Movement, and advanced the genre of Black feminist drama. Centering these Black women’s artistic contributions, Forsgren offers a new perspective on the intertwining gender and race politics of the movement. Sans neat conclusions, Sistuhs in the Struggle examines the individual contributions of Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, their inspirations and accolades, and their methods for navigating sexism and racism. Forsgren’s project offers wonderful firsthand accounts of women in the Black Arts Movement and their legacies as their aesthetics informed various arenas of theatre and performance. In addition to providing a window into the movement, through these interviews Forsgren archives not only their aesthetic practices, but the politics that informed their work. She interviews a range of artists, some iconic like Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Micki Grant, and Jackie Taylor, and some lesser known like Dawn Alli and Nora Cole. What began as a project to include nineteen interviews expanded to include the contributions of their dearly departed sistuhs, such as founder of Harlem’s National Black Theatre Barbara Ann Teer, as interviewees acknowledged her contributions to theatre. Forsgren was wise in including Black women intellectuals working on and behind the stage. In particular, her interview with Kathy Perkins reveals how distinct gender and racial politics impacted her career in lighting design. Each of the four chapters includes edited fragments of interviews, but concludes to resemble a roundtable of familiar scholars or an intimate space where women of your family gather. Each chapter orbits around a distinct concept in an effort to expand the discussion of Black women’s artistic contributions to Black theatre and performance. Chapter 1, “Spiritual Sister: The Black Aesthetic, Feminism, and Black Power,” explores the melding of and, sometimes, tensions between Black art, feminism, and Black Power politics. Chapter 2, “Black Theaters Matter: The Art of Institution Building,” charts how institutions like the Harlem Children’s Theatre Company, the Black Ensemble Theatre of Chicago, and the National Black Theatre of Harlem advance Black theatre on a regional and national stage. Chapter 3, “‘Traveling with Ears to the Ground’: Black Arts Movement Drama, Ritual, Teleplays, and Musicals,” explores various women’s transition from playwrighting to writing for television and Broadway, off-Broadway, and musical theatre. Chapter 4, “Performative Embodiment on Black Arts and Alternative Stages,” provides a glimpse into artists’ performance practices in front of and behind the stage. Forsgren’s methodology intertwines Black feminist oral history with critical performance ethnography to interrogate the “relationship between the Black aesthetic, performance, and Black empowerment” (5). Building off Dwight Conquergood’s praxis of witnessing, Forsgren includes her own responses to and commentary on the interview process and reflections on how her presence shaped her respondents’ engagement and candidness. This project also illuminates how Black women artists developed their art in dialogue with one another. Forsgren intentionally arranges the interview transcripts so that she shows multiple perspectives on (and sometimes disagreements about) a single issue or event. For example, some women like Shange associate themselves with the feminist movement, whereas others such as Doris Derby intentionally distance themselves from [End Page 202] feminism and define themselves as “womanist.” This book highlights disagreements among the...

İngiliz Feminist Oyunlarındaki Thatcher’cı Kadınların Sosyal Feminist Açısından Okunması

This study focuses on the representation of women in British feminist drama that challenges gender roles and gets stuck in having obsessive power as an outcome of the policy of the first British woman Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The study discusses excessively ambitious women who question patriarchal order and subvert gender roles to get power and finally left alone on the top like Thatcher. Marlene in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls, Marion in Churchill’s play Owners, Mary Traverse in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play The Grace of Mary Traverse are discussed throughly. Marlene, Marion, and Mary are the representatives of the destructive effects of the ambition for power that characterize Thatcher’s Britain. Socialist/materialist feminism is applied to the plays both to criticize selfish Thatcherite powerful women figures and to express the lack of collaboration among women to improve their position.

Assimilating the Feminist Voice in Service Comedies, 1941-1980

Assimilating the Feminist Voice in Service Comedies, 1941-1980 William R. Glass During the 1940s and '50s, Hollywood produced "service" comedies that dramatized the ordinary civilian's adjustment to military life, a transformation necessary to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese and then to contain the communists. But the transformation was also necessary to maintain the tenets of a conservative, masculinist culture. In the service-comedy genre, reforming a citizen into a soldier through basic training established the fundamental trope of assimilation. For men, this assimilation confirmed their status as contributing citizens. For women, however, especially with films that placed a woman at the narrative center of basic training, the assimilation of the recruit complicated the status of women, especially as feminist voices struggled to emerge from the conservative culture that the military protected. Broadly defined, a "service comedy" is a movie, novel, television show, or other form of popular culture in which humor is derived from the circumstances of life in the military.1 The first use of the term is not clear, though it does start appearing in reviews of military comedies in the 1940s and in the files of the Bureau of Motion Pictures. In tone and character, Hollywood service comedies from the 1940s into the 1960s frequently evoke the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, wherein traditional hierarchies are reversed and authority is undermined, but this inversion obtains only for the duration of the carnival (or movie or television show). These films, in other words, poke fun at the problems and indignities of serving in the military but resolutely avoid poking fun at the institution. The comedy lies in a character's adjustment to the military, not in the military itself. In terms of plot, the stories in service comedies generally include humorous variations of dramatic military films: combat (Battleground [1949] versus What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? [1966]) [End Page 50] burden of command (Run Silent, Run Deep [1958] versus Operation Petticoat [1959]), shore leave (The Clock [1945] versus On the Town [1949]), the homefront (Mrs. Miniver [1942] versus Blondie for Victory [1942]), veterans adjusting to civilian life (The Best Years of Our Lives [1946] versus Hail, the Conquering Hero [1944]), and basic training, the subject at hand here. The trop of basic training—in which the civilian must learn to give up his independence and individuality and adapt to the military's hierarchical authority, with its rigid rules, discipline, and demand for obedience—invites both drama and comedy. Not many dramatic films have focused exclusively on this specific process (Jack Webb's The D.I. [1957], Taylor Hackford's An Officer and a Gentleman [1982], and Joel Schumacher's Tigerland [2000] come immediately to mind), but many combat films do begin with basic-training sequences (see, for example, The Sands of Iwo Jima [1949], Battle Cry [1955], and the harrowing first third of Full Metal Jacket [1987]). In general, the recruit is initially inept in the simplest of military duties and chafes at the regulations and regimen. But over the course of the movie, he becomes an effective soldier (sometimes inspired by a girlfriend) and proves his worth in a climactic training exercise or battle (a trope exercised in both masculinist comedy, as in Stripes [1981], and feminist drama, as in G.I. Jane [1997]). That transformation also forms the ideology of the film: the journey from citizen to soldier is crucial to the success of the nation, be it against Nazis, Kamikazes, or Communists. That same transformation lies at the heart of the comedies. The comic spin on the plot often involves the recruit having an absurd "disability" that undermines his efforts to become an effective soldier—like a fear of loud noises for Bob Hope in Caught in the Draft (1941), hypochondria for Danny Kaye in Up in Arms (1944), clumsiness for Robert Montgomery in See Here, Private Hargrove (1944), simply being a Southerner for Andy Griffith in No Time for Sergeants (1958), or having a misplaced sense of entitlement for the Jewish-American Princess Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin (1980). Whatever the flaw, the military duly purges the individual's impediments to meritorious citizenship. As a trope of assimilation, basic training certifies that...

Narrative of Post Feminist Drama Series and its Political Implications ―Focused on the TV Drama Geomsaekeureul ibryeokhaseyo WWW(Serch WWW)

Narrative of Post Feminist Drama Series and its Political Implications ―Focused on the TV Drama Geomsaekeureul ibryeokhaseyo WWW(Serch WWW)

WOMEN FROM WITCH HUNTING IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A SOCIALIST FEMINIST CRITICISM OF CHURCHILL S VINEGAR TOM

As a socialist feminist dramatist of the 20th century, Caryl Churchill draws attention to women’s oppression through Vinegar Tom in which she experiments Brechtian theatrical techniques. She shifts in time, from the past to the present, to illuminate the historical context of women’s oppression. She combines successfully witch hunting of the seventeenth century because of which many women were executed and social economic conditions of women in the 1970s. The aim of the study is to provide a socialist feminist criticism of Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom. First of all, the study gives background information about how women were oppressed under the cover of witch hunting in Britain in the seventeenth century. Then, it focuses on their ongoing tough life conditions in the twentieth-century. It also presents socialist feminist views which sought to shed light upon the influence of capitalism in reinforcing the patriarchal oppression over women at those times. After that, the study examines Churchill’s Vinegar Tom as an example of socialist feminist drama. It reveals that Churchill indicates the role of institutions, men and submissive women in legitimising and perpetuating the patriarchal oppression over women to maintain the social, economic and political status quo of Britain for centuries

From Suffragette to Diversity of Voices in Feminist Drama: Pam Gems’s Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi

Feminist hareketin kendi içerisindeki farklı görüşlere ilişkin tartışmaları ele almak için uygun bir tür olan feminist drama kadın hareketine paralel bir şekilde gelişmiştir. Britanya’da birinci dalga drama örneklerine, esasen kadınların oy kullanma hakkı kazanmasına yönelik bir çaba olan Süfrajet (Suffragette) hareket tarafından desteklenen Actress’s Franchise League gibi Süfrajet tiyatro grupları için yazılan kadınlar ile ilgili oyunlarda rastlanmaktadır. Bu oyunlar farkındalık yaratmak için yazılmış oyunlardır. Süfrajet tiyatronun gelişiminden sonra, Britanya’da 1968 Parlamento Kararı ile sansürün kaldırılması İngiltere’de feminist tiyatronun gelişimi açısından hem bir dönüm noktası hem de ikinci adım olarak değerlendirilebilir; zira bu karar feminist oyun yazarlarına önceleri yasak kabul edilen birçok konuyu ele alma olanağı sağlamıştır. Dolayısıyla, birinci dalga, diğer bir deyişle, Süfrajet tiyatronun aksine, savaş sonrası ikinci dalga feminist tiyatro kadın sorunlarını daha geniş bir ölçekte ele alma özelliği taşımaktadır. Bu dönemde, farklı yaklaşımlar benimseyen kadın oyun yazarlarının neredeyse tümü kadın sorunları ile ilgili kaygılarını sahnede ifade etme olanağı bulmuş ve bu yazarların çoğu daha küçük ölçekli alternatif tiyatrolarca ve kadın birliklerince desteklenmiştir. Bu bilgiler ışığında, bu çalışmanın amacı, savaş sonrası İngiliz feminist tiyatrosunda görülen çok sesliliği veya çeşitliliği Pam Gems’in Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (1976) başlıklı oyunu üzerinde ayrıntılı bir inceleme yapmak suretiyle incelemek ve örneklendirmektir.

Flying? Falling? – Conflicting Representations of Disability in Kevin Kerr’s Skydive (2007) and Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now (2013)

AbstractCanadian contemporary theatre is defined by a preponderance of previously marginalised discourses such as Feminist drama, First Nations drama, or Queer drama. The centre to periphery dispersal that has driven the Canadian cultural scene since the Massey Commission’s final report (1951) has favoured the rise of these traditions into public awareness. At the same time, the voice of disabled persons is hardly ever heard on Canadian stages. This paper takes a closer look at two recent texts, Kevin Kerr’sAfter a concise review of critical texts on disability studies, disability theatre, and disability aesthetics in order to establish an appropriate theoretical framework and terminology, the two plays are analysed for how they represent disability and disabled people. Kerr chooses to elide the different physicalities of his abled and disabled actors, establishing a transformative disability aesthetics. Fraser, in line with his usual modus operandi, opts for a more confrontational hypervisibility of his disabled characters and maximum emotional impact. Both authors are fully abled, however, so while their texts can be considered successful contributions to the representation of disabled persons on the contemporary Canadian stage, with diametrically opposed representational strategies, the question of an appropriation of voice remains pertinent.

Sisters’ Self-Recognition Represented in Family Relationship: in Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart

Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart is a feminist drama that represents the self-recognition of sisters in family relationships. In this play, sisters attempt to free themselves from their subordinate status in the patriarchal society. In this process, it portrays men as negative figures. They gave violence, oppression, pain, and sadness to sisters; however, it goes without saying that there are exceptions. This process of self-recognition represents a grandparent-grandchildren relationship, parent-children relationship, and sisters-relationship. Their grandparent-grandchild relationship is not portrayed as ideal in the play. The parent-child relationship is very important, but has troubles. Their father deserted his family, causing the mother of the three sisters to commit suicide. The sisters are unable to hold healthy relationships with boyfriends. The parents, generally, have an important role in aiding their daughters to find their “self,” but these sisters’ parents were unable to do it. The relationship among sisters plays a positive role in each of their self-recognition. They come to attain self-recognition by sisterhood. The three sisters become an independent and positive self through the process of self-recognition.

The Oxford Handbook of American Drama

The Oxford Handbook of American Drama

Dual occupancy: Melbourne and the feminist drama of dwelling in Monkey Grip

ABSTRACTMonkey Grip is viewed as a film that evokes the sexual politics of feminism and of city life, and can thus be seen as both a feminist film and a ‘Melbourne film’, a convergence that emerges in other films made and set in Melbourne, including Love and Other Catastrophes. The city appears as a centre of dwelling and habitation, with attention drawn to the spectacle of the interiors of the residences, in which much of the action occurs, and with reflection on the conditions and values of production. Bachelard's notion of the house image is applied to distinguish the performances of gender from those in films in non-urban settings.

The Background and the Characteristics of Feminist Drama

The Background and the Characteristics of Feminist Drama

Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama

Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama

Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama

In the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol, a visitor can stroll the along the parade of great men, admiring the busts, standing figures, and horsed figures carved in Italian marble and other polished chunks of stone. The parade marches on in traditional style until it comes across the suffragists, a memorial to Lucretia Molt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Immediately, the visitor notices the stylistic and ideological incongruities of the suffragist memorial amidst the phalanx of polished soldiers that surrounds it: Matt, Stanton, and Anthony are incompletely carved, their bodies seemingly rising from a partially formed, seven-ton slab of marble, and rising behind them, taller than the three, is an unformed figure, the beginnings of a fourth feminist, yet to be realized. I was introduced to the statue, a gift of the National Woman's Party, by a friend of mine, herself introduced to it by a friend who insists that every young feminist she knows take a photo in front of the statue, as an image of her potential to become that as-yet-unformed fourth figure.

Women and Violence in A Mouthful of Birds

Soon after Caryl Churchill and David Lan's collaborative work A Mouthful of Birds (1986) was published, scholars of feminist theatre recognized the play's significance—most particularly for its bold stagings of transgressive, gender-bending bodies. Elin Diamond and Janelle Reinelt wrote important essays in 1988 and 1989 respectively, which examined the way the play broke out of the representational apparatus of realism to stage bodies and desires that refuse stable, binary constructions of gender and sexuality. 1 Reinelt hailed the play as representative of a third stage of feminist drama, one which goes beyond deconstructing the dominant discourse to stage "the subject-in-process practicing resistance, exploding the strait jacket of gender through doing the 'work' of self-inscription on stage" (52). Reinelt's interest in representation, gender, and the body leads her to analyze two striking episodes in A Mouthful of Birds that involve the staging of an ambiguous, androgynous body. While Diamond examines a number of Churchill plays in the course of her essay and considers several characters in A Mouthful of Birds, she also focuses on the same two episodes: "Dan Dancing" and "Herculine Barbin." At the center of both episodes is an androgynous, shifting body that represents a transgressive sexuality that defies clear-cut boundaries of heterosexuality or homosexuality. As Diamond observes in discussing Derek's possession by Herculine Barbin in the episode named for the nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite, "This body ruins representation. It undermines a patriarchy that disciplines the body into gender opposition . . ." (277).

Susan Glaspell: a critical biography

During her lifetime, playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was regarded as highly as Eugene O'Neill and Edith Wharton. Winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama (for Alison's House), she was cofounder of the Provincetown Players, the little theatre that discovered O'Neill. Later, Glaspell was instrumental in introducing American drama to English audiences when her play The Verge was produced in London. Yet despite her many accomplishments, Glaspell is often overlooked in the standard histories of American theatre. Ozieblo combines an narrative of Glaspell's life with an analysis of her creative work. Rebelling early against the expectations imposed on women of her era, Glaspell grappled with the conflict between Victorian mores and feminist aspirations throughout her life. In Trifles, now recognised as a groundbreaking feminist drama, she explored the reasons for a woman's extreme response to her husband's demanding, authoritarian stance. Ozieblo also investigates Glaspell's relationship with dramatist George Cram Cook, exploring the scandal that surrounded their courtship and marriage as well as the life they led among the bohemians of Greenwich Village.