The Gendered Terrain in Contemporary Theatre of War by Women

Friedman, Sharon M.

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-27080-1_8

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…Second, until recently, artists, playwrights, and scholars of contemporary conflicts have focused on the male soldier, with women/LGBT+ soldiers often rendered invisible (Beck 2018;Bourke 2017;Caso 2020;Corris 2017;Cree 2019;Kay and Reynolds 2016;Koobak 2019;Messham-Muir 2019;Reason 2017;Welland 2017). This outcome is both reflected in and reflective of the significant gender imbalance within the theater industries in the UK, the United States (US), and Australia, with women playwrights and directors constituting the minority (Aston 2020, 15) and an even smaller proportion of feminist and/or queer artists who focus on the experience of women/ LGBT+ soldiers (see Friedman 2010). This triple marginalization has led to the invisibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers' experiences on stage.…”

Section: Visibility Soldiering and Art/theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater

Dolan

Danilova

2022

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Building on Judith Butler's understanding of visibility as "the object of continuous regulation and contestation," art/aesthetics studies in international relations, and feminist theater studies, we identify feminist "herstory" theater as a unique site where Western "gender-/sexuality-inclusive" soldiering is visibilized, contested, and subverted. Drawing on ethnographic observations of two award-winning dramas, interviews with artists and military hosts, and findings from a wider research project on contemporary British military culture, we reveal the key role of heteronormative and patriarchal cultural discourses in reproducing the ambivalent positionalities of women/LGBT+ soldiers. We argue that the very visibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers on the stage paradoxically operates to make the complexities ofand struggles againstmasculinized heteronormative military cultures invisible. Furthermore, despite artists' attempts to dissociate empowerment through soldiering from the problematic context of modern conflicts, "herstory" theater ultimately entrenches gendered/racialized hierarchies that normalize Western military interventions. We conclude that only through sustained feminist reflection on the contours of "imagined" futures of female/ LGBT+ soldiering can this persistently problematic (in)visibility be productively disrupted.

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Section: Visibility Soldiering and Art/theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater

Dolan

Danilova

2022

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Yael Farber’s Molora and Colleen Wagner’s the Monument as Post-Conflict Redress Theater

Vellino¹,

Waisvisz²

2013

lit

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In this essay, the authors present two examples of a subgenre of political theatre which they term ‘redress theater.’ This subgenre, they argue, contributes to the legal and quasi-legal mandate of official transitional initiatives in post-conflict societies. Playwrights responding to human rights violations or to transitional justice efforts often point to unresolved issues in excess of institutional mechanisms of social redress. At one and the same time, they evoke what commissions and tribunals cannot do and point to the necessity of doing redress work into the future. While Yael Farber’s Molora adapts Aeschylus’s Oresteia to a post-apartheid TRC context in the ‘New South Africa,’ Colleen Wagner’s The Monument is itself purposefully adaptable to diverse contexts of war, gendered violence, and human rights abuses. The metaphor of adaptation and the spectral presence of the Antigone figure haunt these contemporary plays and compel audience and reader responses of a more active kind.

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Iraqi Ghosts in the Heart of America: Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Turina¹

2017

Studies in the Literary Imagination

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The Gendered Terrain in Contemporary Theatre of War by Women

Cited by 7 publications

References 5 publications

“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater

“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater

Yael Farber’s Molora and Colleen Wagner’s the Monument as Post-Conflict Redress Theater

Iraqi Ghosts in the Heart of America: Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

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