Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-Dressing in the Parsi Theatre

Hansen, Kathryn

doi:10.1353/tj.1999.0031

Cited by 41 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Her ability to mimic Parsi and Hindu modes of femininity, her touching singing, accurate pronunciation, acting talent, and fair skin, as well as the stories circulating about her private life, created a sensation. Her embodiment of domesticity helped to define the new gendered code of conduct for women just as they were entering public spaces and gaining visibility (Hansen, 1999).…”

Section: Domesticating Melodrama: the Rise Of The Socialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social

Hansen

2016

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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This essay documents the transnational circulation of Victorian domestic melodrama and its adaptation to Indian theatrical practice, through the example of The Colleen Bawn, one of Dion Boucicault’s most successful works. Using the historical South Asian newspaper archives, the study traces the introduction of melodrama and modern stagecraft into India via the Lewis Company, an enterprising Anglo-Australian family troupe. The drama’s performance history and reception are charted as it traveled from Calcutta to Simla and Bombay. Its subsequent translation and reworking in the Parsi theater, in the form of Bholi Jan, the Gujarati-language version authored by K.N. Kabraji, reveal the highly productive role of melodrama in the South Asian environment. From melodrama developed the “social”, a distinct genre centered on women, the family, and the tensions of modernity. Domestic melodrama’s shape and meaning were thus recast in the new location, leaving a legacy of great importance to the evolution of modern theater and cinema in Indian languages.

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Section: Domesticating Melodrama: the Rise Of The Socialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social

Hansen

2016

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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“…According to now standard Kuchipudi histories, due to the popularity of strī veṣam in Andhra and elsewhere in South Asia, there was little to no female involvement in theatrical traditions such as those practiced at Kuchipudi village (see Hansen 1998, 1999). At the 1959 Seminar, however, participants were noticeably preoccupied with accounting for the anonymity or lack of female practitioners in Kuchipudi.…”

Section: Kuchipudi's Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between History and Historiography: The Origins of Classical Kuchipudi Dance

Putcha¹

2013

Dance Res. J.

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“…Greer's interpretation of androgyny rendered it, and transvestitism, synonymous with impotence and powerlessness in the world. Whether or not she was aware of the venerable status of androgyny in societies influenced by Himalayan and Inner Asian Buddhist (Gyatso 2003), Jaina, and Sufi mystic practices (Kugle 2007(Kugle , 2010, or of the great popularity of theatrical transvestismwhen women acted in male roles and men acted in female ones-in nineteenthcentury subcontinental cultures (Hansen 1992(Hansen , 1999(Hansen , 2004 was never at issue. Yet her manifesto was a call to all women to reclaim their "libido," their faculty of desire, from which they had apparently been separated.…”

Section: Colonialism and The Seduction Of "Sexuality"mentioning

confidence: 99%

When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia

Chatterjee¹

2012

J of Asian Stud

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From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler Miller 1977; Sweet 2002; Wujastyk 2005, 2009; Zysk 2002). The subcontinent's textual cultures, they argue, interrogate Freudian notions of human personality as rooted in the “truth” of sexual desire. These scholars placed the study of erotica and the sciences pertaining to human bodies within structures of teaching-learning with very long historical pedigrees.

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Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-Dressing in the Parsi Theatre

Cited by 41 publications

References 3 publications

Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social

Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social

Between History and Historiography: The Origins of Classical Kuchipudi Dance

When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia

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