Journal articles on the topic 'Feminist theatre practice'

As a theatre and gender studies double major at the University of Victoria, I have been ableto critically think about the ways each of my fields of study could benefit the other. In myexperience, many courses in the UVic Department of Theatre generally focus on dramatic texts andtheoretical literature written by white men. Consequently, contributions to the theatre by women,people of colour, and/or non-Western theatre practitioners are largely dismissed or ignored. Myfrustration with this pattern was what led me to create Big Daddy Lives or Don’t Say the F Word,a part scripted, part devised performance piece that staged scenes from classic and contemporaryplays using directing theory written by feminists, for feminists. I curated the excerpts, wrote thetransition-text, and directed the play using an intersectional feminist framework. The project wasan experiment in applying intersectional feminism to theatre directing in order to critique the waythe male-dominated canon of plays and theories shapes theatre education. Through this project, Ifound that intersectional feminist directing techniques foster collaboration; encourage discussionand mutual education about identity, oppression, and representation; and can be applied to theproduction of both classics and contemporary feminist plays and to the creation of new work by anensemble.

A feminist analysis of the repertoire written and directed by women within mainstream Australian theatre at the end of the millennium reveals that, in spite of thirty years of active feminism in Australia, as well as feminist theatre criticism and practice, the mainstream has only partially absorbed the influence of feminist ideas. A survey of all the mainland state theatre companies reveals the number of women making work for the mainstream and discusses the production politics that frames their representation as repertoire. Although theatre has become increasingly feminized, closer analysis reveals that women's theatre is either contained or diminished by its presence within the mainstream or utilizes conventional theatrical genres and dramatic narratives. Feminist theatre criticism, thus, needs to become more concerned with the material politics of mainstream culture, in which gender relations are being reconstructed under the power of a new economic and social order.

Through this position paper the author seeks to provide a focus for extended discussion of some of the key issues arising from feminist approaches to theatre research. She indicates some of the insights made possible by feminist theoretical analyses of theatre historiography as well as some of the implications of the various positions inscribed in articles on Canadian feminist theatre historiography over the past ten years. The author hopes to facilitate more discussion of the wide variety of feminist challenges to and transformation of the theory and practice of theatre research and theatre historiography.

One of the most important influences on the development of Cherríe Moraga's feminist theatre was undoubtedly the work of Maria Irene Fornes, the Cuban American playwright and director. Moraga wrote the first drafts of her second play Shadow of a Man while on Fornes's residency programme at the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory in New York, and later Fornes directed the premiere at the Brava-Eureka Theatre in San Francisco (1990). The play radically restages the Chicana body through an exploration of the sexual and gendered politics of the family. Much has been written on how the family has traditionally been the stronghold of Chicana/o culture, but Shadow of a Man stages one of its most powerful criticisms, revealing how the complex kinship structures often mask male violence and sexual abuse. Using archival material and a range of critical studies, in this article Elizabeth Jacobs explores Moraga's theatre as an embodied feminist practice and as a means to displace the entrenched ideology of the family. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, as part of the 2014 International Women's Day events. Elizabeth Jacobs is the author of Mexican American Literature: the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 2006). Her articles have appeared in Comparative American Studies (2012), Journal of Adaptation and Film Studies (2009), Theatres of Thought: Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy (2008), and New Theatre Quarterly (2007). She works at Aberystwyth University.

This is the second in a series of interviews with women who are involved, in various capacities, in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, in NTQ21, was with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, and provided an update of a previously published interview as well as a discussion of contemporary work: its aim was to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by making available the views and opinions of one of Britain's leading young women playwrights, Charlotte Keatley, along with a detailed account of the origins of her 1989 Royal Court success, My Mother Said I Never Should. Charlotte Keatley was born in London in 1960, but has lived in Leeds and Manchester since she was nineteen. Her many plays include Underneath the Arndale (1982). Dressing for Dinner (1983–84), Citizens (BBC 4, 1987–88), and My Mother Said I Never Should (Contact Theatre, Manchester, 1987, and Royal Court Theatre, London, February 1989; Gaieté Theatre, Paris, September 1989, and European tour). She has been directing playwriting workshops for students while in Cambridge on a Junior Judish E. Wilson Fellowship, 1988–89, and is currently at work on her next plays. The interviewer, and compiler of this series, Lizbeth Goodman, is a New Yorker who is now a Scholar of St John's College, Cambridge, where she is preparing her doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and completing a book on the politics of theatre funding.

Most of the heavily-quoted interviews available on feminist theatre are in serious need of updating. A current account is needed of ‘feminism and theatre’ as experienced by feminist theatre practitioners, and as perceived by feminist theatre students, critics, players and their audiences. To meet this need, NTQ plans a series of interviews with women involved in the British feminist theatre movement today, whose career paths trace developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview is with Gillian Hanna, who worked with the 7:84 Theatre Company and with Belt and Braces from 1971 to 1975, before co-founding the Monstrous Regiment feminist theatre group in 1975. Hanna worked exclusively within the Regiment from 1975 until 1981–82. and is one of the three original members who still actively participate in Regimental management, production, and performance, though she now works extensively outside the group as well, having acted in repertory at the Liverpool Everyman and in Newcastle, Sheffield and Derby. Recently, Hanna spent the best part of a year playing in The House of Bernardo Alba. which opened at the Lyric. Hammersmith, and ran in the West End, and in the Spring of 1989 she played in Caryl Churchill's Ice Cream at the Royal Court. Her acting credits include work in TV and film, and her interests extend to translation of playtexts from French and Italian: she translated Dario Fo's Elizabeth, and is currently on a commission to translate (and re-translate) the complete oeuvre of the one-woman plays of Franca Rame and Dario Fo. Three of the Rame/Fo plays – under the joint title A Common Woman – were recently produced at the Sheffield Crucible and at the Half Moon in London, for which performance Hanna won the 1989 Time Out ‘01 for London’ Award. Projects currently under way within the Regiment include an adaptation of a Marivaux play (The Colony), and possible plans to tour both A Common Woman and Beatrice. She is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, originally a New Yorker, and currently a junior member and scholar of St. John's College and a graduate researcher in the English Faculty of Cambridge University, where she is working on a doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and a book on the politics of theatre funding.

Hysteria, first performed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro's Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the show's critique of Western feminism's claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).

This is the third in a series of interviews with women who are involved in various capacities in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, set out to provide an update of previously published information, and thereby to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. The second interview, with playwright Charlotte Keatley, put forward a new vision of a ‘map’ to women and (play)writing. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by putting forward the responses of one of Britain's strongest young performers, Tilda Swinton, to questions about the challenges and expectations involved in performing gender roles and reversals, or of ‘playing woman’, on film and on stage. Tilda Swinton was born in London in 1960. She studied Social and Political Sciences and English at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1980 to 1983, under the supervision of Margot Heinemann. It was at Cambridge that Swinton first met and worked with director Stephen Unwin, her closest colleague throughout her career. In 1983, she went to Southampton and worked for six months at the Nuffield Theatre, where she earned her Equity card. In 1984–85, she worked with the RSC, but has chosen not to work on the main stages of the nationally subsidized theatres since. Swinton is primarily known for her work in political theatre, based at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, the Almeida (most notably on The Tourist Guide in 1987 and Mozart and Salieri in 1989), and the Royal Court in London, where she starred in the celebrated Man to Man – a transfer from the Traverse – in 1987, and where she assistant-directed Conquest of the South Pole in 1988. Swinton has also worked at the National Theatre Studio, and has just played Nova at the Cottesloe in a production of Peter Handke's The Long Way Round. She has worked in Italian opera (1988), and has collaborated on and been featured in films by John Berger (Play Me Something, 1988) and Derek Jarman (most notably, Caravaggio, 1986; The Last of England, 1987; and War Requiem, 1988): she continues to collaborate with both. Current and future projects include work on a TV series written by John Byme, which began filming in late September 1989, and work with director Sally Potter on a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in which Swinton plays Orlando.

Indian theatre has a long and rich tradition of adapting theory and practice from a variety of representational modes from western theatre that subsequently played key roles in major political and cultural upheavals and provided fodder for social changes and progress in Indian social and cultural life. Feminist theatre practice in India clearly demonstrates this cross-cultural interaction, and Nireeksha from the southern state of Kerala is one among them. As a women’s theatre, Nireeksha has a unique history of survival not only through its theatre productions but also through its committed social work in bringing women and children together as part of its community projects. This article focuses on Nireeksha’s incessant struggle to build resistance and find a creative space within the main stream theatre and patriarchal society of Kerala. I do a close analysis of Nireeksha’s performances and its methodology of practice to understand and explain how aesthetics and ideology inform the practice and processes of the leading women’s theatre groups in Kerala.

Reading backwards, through the feminist critique, Sue-Ellen Case explores the role of sexuality in women's lives as portrayed in the work of British women playwrights during the past three decades. She illustrates the way in which the oppressive uses of sexuality in the patriarchy, identified by the social movement as rape and pornography, have been dramatized through dramatic narrative and character construction. In contrast to this representation of oppression, she discusses how the liberating role of pleasure and of women reclaiming their own desires provide a revolutionary feminist stage practice, in both heterosexual and lesbian social contexts. Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and her works includeFeminism and TheatreandPerforming Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre.

Murga porteña, the satirical street theatre tradition associated with Carnival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is historically a strongly patriarchal institution. Prominent roles such as reciting poetry, singing, and playing percussion instruments have been reserved exclusively for men. As the feminist movement in Argentina has grown in visibility and importance in recent years, feminist murga participants disrupted these patriarchal patterns. Women murga performers (murgueras) have begun to use murga as a space for feminist practice, both by creating women-only organizations to learn murga skills and by bringing feminist perspectives into mixed-gender murgas. Murgueras are engaged in a multifaceted feminist project that disrupts gendered patterns by building women-only spaces to develop competence in the performance of historically masculine skills such as percussion. Drawing on ethnographic participant-observation of murga events as well as in-depth interviews with key organizers at the confluence of murga and feminism, we explore the ways in which murga has provided the spaces and strategies for collective feminist engagement. Murgas have become important social institutions in which women are “undoing gender” and disseminating feminist perspectives, even as most members join them not as explicitly feminist institutions.

This article explores how musical theatre pedagogy might begin to dismantle modes of practice that perpetuate exclusion and a dualistic, gendered perspective. I draw on my experience of directing postgraduate musical theatre students at Mountview in a production of Pippin (1972). Casting a trans man as Pippin – in many respects an archetypal male hero role – set in motion a process of queering and subverting norms. However, casting is only one element of creating an inclusive practice: in this work, I developed a hybrid approach that honoured students’ identities and experiences and took a critical, political view of the material being presented. My approach brings together Elin Diamond’s feminist theoretical framing of Brecht with queer concepts including heteronormativity and chrononormativity, which are then applied to David Barnett’s practical explanation of a Brechtian process. I argue that feminist and queer approaches can work together to meaningfully critique hegemonic forces influencing musical theatre training and production processes.

As one of the most influential feminist theorists in Western academic circles, Hélène Cixous is often associated with écriture feminine (feminine writing), a term she coined in 1977, and with a fluid, poetic style both in her essays and in her fiction. This article investigates how Hélène Cixous uses the concept of the ‘feminine’ in her plays as a container for heterogeneity, liminality and difference, mobilizing it to animate feminist strategies that interrupt male, white and/or hegemonic forms of subjectivity. If for Cixous the practice of feminine writing is fundamentally characterized by the desire to create a mode of expression in which (gendered, embodied, racial) difference and otherness would retain their alterity, in dramatic writing she found an especially conducive medium for the realization of that desire. This article examines Cixous’s anti-realist postdramatic works, from her first produced play Portrait of Dora (1976) to her works for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, in the context of a feminist aesthetics of estrangement, and considers how her plays enact feminist theory’s own movement away from the psychoanalytical discourses of the 1970s and 1980s to postcolonial and materialist critiques. The article employs a range of intersectional critical methodologies for situating Cixous’s dramatic writing within a broader feminist praxis, using the work of feminist performance scholars like Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider and Jill Dolan to consider the liminal Other as a precarious feminine figure that Cixous re-inscribes into discourse. Feminine writing, the progressive movement away from realism towards postdramatic theatre, and Cixous’s artistic collaboration with Mnouchkine are each considered as feminist strategies towards a rendition of the subject that can reiterate its otherness on stage. The central argument is that it is the enactment of these strategies in live performance that makes Hélène Cixous’s concept of femininity as liminal difference so relevant for feminist politics today.

This article explores how performance and character can be used to represent the lives of real women in spaces of heritage. It focuses on two different site-specific performances created by the author in the South Ayrshire region of Scotland: CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes and In Hidden Spaces: The Untold Stories of the Women of Rozelle House. These were created with a practice-as-research methodology and aim to offer new models for the use of character in site-specific performance practice. The article explores the variety of methods and techniques used, including verbatim writing, spatial exploration, and Herstorical research, in order to demonstrate the ways in which women’s narratives were represented in a theoretically informed, site-specific manner. Drawing on Phil Smith’s mythogeography, and responding to Laurajane Smith’s work on gender and heritage, the conflicting tensions of identity, performance, and authenticity are drawn together to offer flexible characterization as a new model for the creation of feminist heritage performance. Victoria Bianchi is a theatre-maker and academic in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores the relationship between space, feminism, and identity. She has written and performed work for the National Trust for Scotland, Camden People’s Theatre, and Assembly at Edinburgh, among other institutions.

This creative essay examines how visual culture and Alice Milligan’s re-animation of the Tableaux as a radical form of theatre practice operated as a link between ideas of national culture and revolutionary feminism in Ireland. But the tableaux had other elective affinities too. Theatre, photography and the magic lantern were the most immediately obvious of these; but cinema and art installation are by now also recognizably among them. The moving cinematic image is in fact a series of still pictures which give the effect of movement. As silent films became more popular in Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century they were called ‘living pictures’, the name also used to describe tableaux. But even in the era of the early silent film, directors often suspended action to jolt the viewer into another interpretative realm. We see this in Griffith’s 1909 film A Corner in Wheat — where a shot of a bread queue looks like the film has stopped. Early photography was vital to Alice Milligan’s practice: she raised funds for the first magic lantern for the Gaelic League (first used in Donegal); travelled the country taking photographs of people and sites; projected glass slides as part of community tableaux shows; and Maud Gonne’s early play Dawn uses 3 of her tableaux. During the 1897 royal visit to Dublin, James Connolly, Milligan and Maud Gonne used a magic lantern to project onto Dublin’s city walls photographs of famine that they had witnessed in the west of Ireland.

This article asks how theatre practice may be gendered using not just protest but also resistance as a way of addressing women's oppression. Drawing upon her long experience as a theatre activist, the author traces the various experiments that were made to 'explore alternative images, symbols, metaphors and representation which help construct various forms of [female] subjec tivity' in Tamil theatre. The most recent of these is Avvai, written by Inquilab and directed by the author. In this revisionist account, the historical/mythic poet Avvai, contrary to the prevalent image of her as an old, wise, celibate woman, is rendered as a young, sensuous, creative, 'free' person, a wandering bard. Through a particular understanding of the Sangam era in Tamil his tory, Avvai's inner world as woman, poet and performer, and her external world of community and of politics are represented in ways that satisfy the requirements of a theatre of feminist resistance.

Professional theatre practice in the United States rests on a foundation of patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist white supremacy. Of the many factors reifying theatre’s ties to racial and gender inequity, the theatre curriculum deployed by most American colleges and universities is perhaps one of the most consequential as it both upholds and replicates the profession’s oppressive structures by privileging training in craft over a more humanistic engagement with the discipline. If theatre curriculum actively challenged the profession’s oppressive foundations, and thereby produced artists who are prepared and committed to working for justice, then future generations might be able to change the profession from within the profession. I propose integrating ethics training into theatre curriculum as one way to initiate this process. This manifesto advocates for an ethics-driven theatre education and suggests that training in ethics will prompt students to consider the material consequences of their artistic choices and justify their decision-making using ethical theory. Ethical reasoning requires practice and the classroom is an ideal place for students to rehearse their use of ethics. Working through an ethical dilemma with classmates gives students the opportunity not only to see ethics as a social project, but also to devise anti-racist, feminist and queer-affirming approaches to artmaking. Training the next generation of theatre artists in ethics could lead to profound changes in the way we create and consume theatrical art in the future.

Penny Farfan's Women, Modernism, & Performance, six intricately woven essays about a handful of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female artists, is an absorbing study centered on the premise that “the feminist-modernist aesthetics of key figures in the fields of dance and literature developed in part out of their engagement with dramatic literature and theatrical practice, making their lives and work a part of theatre history” (2). Employing broad definitions of both performance and modernism, Farfan casts a wide net, adopting what she describes as a “‘maximalist’ approach” (117) to construct her arguments about these artists' contributions to “the transformation of the representation of gender in both art and life” (119). Her consideration of public performances such as courtroom trials, lectures, and “the performance of gender in the practice of everyday life” (3) informs her analysis of literary, critical, and performance texts to intriguing effect. In the process, Farfan delineates the cultural landscape out of which these women and their work emerged.

Fanfiction has a long and varied history in the Star Wars franchise since it began in 1977 with the debut of the first film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The decade of the 1970s created new possibilities for science fiction multiverses and metanarratives; science fiction became an adaptive film genre that could be reimagined with seemingly infinite narrational results. The myriad of genre films that were released in the mid-to-late 1970s revealed dynamic syntheses with horror (e.g. Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), franchises that previously had existed solely on television (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and musical theatre (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Cinematic audiences became increasingly accustomed to science fiction tropes and themes in film; audience participation in the theatre (e.g. The Rocky Horror Picture Show) expanded to print zines (often with fanfiction) for multiple franchises as well as fan conventions. Fanfiction’s beginnings as an analogue culture dramatically changed with the advent of the internet and the evolution of fandoms as digital cultures. Web-based platforms such as FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3) host sundry fan communities’ creative outputs including podcasts, art and, most frequently, fanfiction stories. The release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 immediately captured the fandom’s imagination; the animosity and tension between the new villain Kylo Ren (Ben Solo) and protagonist Rey of Jakku particularly fascinated the young adult fans who were lately converted to the Star Wars fandom due to this pairing (known as Reylo within the fandom and within cinematic circles). The newest generations of fans were acclimated to audience participation and paratextual interactions due to their positions as digital natives. The Reylo fan phenomenon particularly erupted into fanfictions as critical data artefacts, even predicting Reylo as a romantic pairing years before the second and third films in the franchise trilogy Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The Reylo pairing is just one example of how online Star Wars fanfiction communities expand audience participation to autonomous collective identity formation. This article examines feminist fanfictions in the Star Wars fandom as gendered critical data artefacts, as collaborative communities of practice, and as counterpublic discourses that apply feminist critiques to conventional gender roles within the most recent film trilogy and the fandom itself.

Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity through novel modes of collectivising experience. The Hearing Voices Movement cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience. Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and join forces with others.

This article, written in the form of an untimely academic novella is a text, which explores academic authoring as thinking and writing practice in a place called Sweden. The aim is on inquiries of geographical space, place, and academia, and the interrelation between the social and symbolic formation of class, gender and whiteness. The novella uses different writing strategies and visual representations such as documentary writing and photographing from the research process, letters to a friend, and memories from childhood, based on three generations of women's lives. The methodology can be described as a critical reflexive writing strategy inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, and additionally by methodological approaches in the humanities and social sciences, such as theorizing of letters, memory work, and narrative, and autobiographical approaches. In particular, it draws on work by the theorist critic and writer of fiction, Hélène Cixous, and the feminist author and theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, drawing on interpretation of Cixous' essay “Enter the Theatre” and Gilman's story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Characteristics of the untimely academic novella elaborate with possible forms of the symbolic, visual, and performative photographic and sensory in writing research; furthermore, time, social change, and unfinal endings play a pervasive role. It may be read as a story that situates and theorizes embodyment, landscape, and power through the interweaving of forest rural farming spaces and academic office spaces by tracing autobiographical imprints of an untimely feminist author. “The Snow Angel and Other Imprints” is the second article in a trilogy of untimely academic novellas. The first, with the title “The Professor's Chair,” was published in Swedish in 2007 (in the anthology “Genus och det akademiska skrivandets former,” (Eds.) Bränström Öhman & Livholts), and forthcoming in English in the journal Life Writing 2010.

Identity mobilises feminist politics in Australia and shapes discursive and theatrical practices. Energised by the affirmative politics of hope, celebration and unity, Australian feminism is also motivated by injustice, prejudice and loss, particularly among Indigenous women and minorities. During the 1970s, when feminist theatre opened up creative spaces on the margins of Australian theatre, women identified with each other on the basis of an unproblematized gender identity, a commitment to socialist collectivism and theatre as a mode of self-representation. The emphasis on shared experience, collectivism and gender unity gave way in the 1980s to a more nuanced critical awareness of inequalities and divisions among women based on sexuality, class, race and ethnicity. My discussion spans broadly the period from the 1970s to the present and concludes with some commentary on recent twists and turns in identity politics.

Identity politics, understood as the analysis of the ways in which social roles are inscribed on the body, affects and behaviour, and in which collective experiences of oppression also produce resistant practices, informed German feminisms and performances during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, major feminist playwrights have shifted into literary production, or abandoned gender as their central critical concern in view of other urgent issues that arose after reunification, including historical revisionism, economic restructuring, rising racism and xenophobia, and globalization fears. Younger white artists playfully unbundled gender and sex and supported the postfeminist consensus that feminist identity politics had become obsolete. The work of Bridge Markland, which can be found on YouTube, emblematizes a burgeoning transgender and drag culture that was transnationalized through film, video, photography exhibitions and workshops. In this critical vacuum, immigrant and minority women were saddled with intensifying, ever more essentialist discourses of gender and ethnic difference, and continued to grapple with them through deconstructive and historicizing, as well as essentializing, deployments of identity.

Given performance history's disciplinary complexity, not to mention the complications of a “we” comprised by so many different scholars, Theatre Survey's question is, in one sense, unanswerable. In another sense, if I translate the question to what I can do (staying fully aware that others will propose answers different from mine), however, I can offer an answer from my position as a feminist performance historian and historiographer. My response to it is twofold. The argument I make here is for performance that foregrounds historiographical operations, making physical, gestural, emotional, and agonistic the processes that construct history out of the past. Concomitantly, I am arguing for history that overtly acknowledges the ways in which it is a performance of the past, but not the past itself. This dual approach is especially important in feminist accounts of the past because performance has historically been a crucial constituent of feminist theories and practices.

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

By the 1990s, the feminist contention that gender norms inform the production and reception of art had become widely accepted in academia. Many theatre journalists, however, continued to insist on the possibility of writing about performance from an apolitical, gender-neutral position. This article examines the gendered history of this insistence from the early 1700s to the present, its effects on the production and reception of plays by women, and its implications for theatre scholarship. Focusing on Carolee Schneemann's critique of a masculine bias in art criticism in her performance Interior Scroll and the Guerrilla Girls' actions against gender discrimination in the art world, this article examines strategies adopted by female and feminist journalists in Britain and the US to counter women's inequitable status in art journalism and playwriting. By engaging with the gendered binaries mind–body and text–performance, Schneemann and the Guerrilla Girls help clarify how reviewing practices have informed critical thinking about femininity and performance. In doing so, these artists anticipate poststructuralist feminist critiques of visibility and the performing body. Stefka Mihaylova holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on performance theory, especially gender and racial aspects of spectatorship in contemporary American and British feminist and radical theatre and performance art.

Gender meaning of fundamentally different from biological sex. Biological sex is a gift; we are born as a man or a woman. However, the path that makes us masculine or feminine is a combination of the building blocks of basic biological and biological interpretation by our culture. From the tiny baby to reach old age, we learn and practice specific ways that have been determined by the community for us to be men and women. Gender is a set of roles as well as costumes and masks at the theater, convey to others that we are feminine or masculine. Device specific behaviors include appearance, dress, attitude, personality, work inside and outside the household, sexuality, family responsibilities and so together polish "gender roles" us. If someone mentions or asks about gender, then what is meant is gender in the context of language approach. This term became very commonly used in the last few decades. Feminist jurisprudence is a legal philosophy that is based on gender equality in politics, economic and social. Feminist jurisprudence unpacks and explain how the law plays a role to legalize the status of women in subordination to men, in other words, the law as a means to preserve the status quo, namely the dominance of men over women. Moreover, feminist jurisprudence is also trying to make a change/transformation changing the status of women by changing laws and its approach and its stance on gender cases be more fair and balanced. This is an emancipatory project woman in law. Keywords: Gender; Feminist Jurisprudence; justice; men and women.

In NTQ47 (August 1996), Sarah Werner argued that contemporary voice training did not provide a neutral set of tools to help actors perform classical texts, and that it was needful to reveal the cultural biases and underlying ideology of voice work in order to clarify a feminist understanding of acting and speaking Shakespeare. The three leading voice practitioners who came under Ms Werner's fire – Cicely Berry, Kristin Linklater, and Patsy Rodenburg – mounted a sturdy defence of their methods in NTQ49 (February 1997), to which Sarah Werner responded in the following issue. Now Jane Boston takes a fresh view of all sides in the argument, putting these into a broader historical context which embraces the culture of our own times as much as of Shakespeare's, and calls for an understanding and reconciliation of mutual misconceptions between the academy and the conservatoire. Jane Boston was a founding member of the feminist Siren Theatre in the ‘eighties, and has subsequently taught at the National Youth Theatre, the Poor School, and at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was Head of Voice for the BA in Acting, which she helped to create. She now combines a pedagogical and practical role at Central as supervisor and trainer on the Postgraduate Diploma in Voice Studies, and has recently presented papers on acting and stress at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Summary The approach elaborated here is derived from feminist analyses which take seriously the notion that gender relations are social constructions. Using the metaphor of theatre, the article proposes an analysis which takes meaning systems as well as practices seriously. From this point of view, both the mode of regulation and the societal paradigm depend upon actors' strategies in creating their representational systems and thereby constructing their collective identities. Besides, contrary to studies that reduce regulation to the wage relation, this analysis points to the importance of many different political organisations and identities. In so doing, the argument provides a way of understanding why it is that some historical times are more open to recognising marginalised actors' demands for greater power while other moments ignore their claims by silencing their voices.

This essay explores contemporary cultural practices of feminist politics emerging within the women's college campus at the University of Delhi. Through the study of two examples of a public demonstration and campaign against high prices of certain essential provisions and a formal performance outside the campus, the essay tries to map cultural practices, transgressions and political potentials, but also the limits and shortcomings. The essay intends to read these examples through a gender critique and alternate registers of sisterhood, collective imagination and solidarity.

Is there a way for the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic art form par excellence, the theatre, or performance art for that matter, to expand beyond their human and humanist bias? Is the term Anthropocene in any way useful for theatre and performance studies or performance-as-research? In the anthology Anthropocene Feminism (Grusin 2017) Rosi Braidotti proposes four theses for a posthumanist feminism: 1) feminism is not a humanism, 2) anthropos is off-center, 3) zoe is the ruling principle, 4) sexuality is a force beyond gender. These assertions can undoubtedly be put on stage, but do they have relevance for developing or understanding performance practices off-stage and off-center, such as those trying to explore alternative ways and sites of performing, like performing with plants? In this text, I examine Braidotti’s affirmative theses and explore their usefulness with regard to performance analysis, use some of my experiments in the artistic research project “Performing with plants” as examples, and consider what the implications and possible uses of these theses are for our understanding of performances with other-than-human entities, which we share our planet with.

This article is based on an ethnographic participation study of the production of a play called All about the ADHD and A+ Children of Noisy Village (ännu mer om alla vi ADHD- och MVG-barn i Bullerbyn) staged at one of Sweden’s most prominent playhouses for children’s and youth theatre: ung scen/öst. Within the familiar setting of the classroom, the play takes on the challenging task of questioning and scrutinizing the complex and tangled situation of contemporary neoliberal ideas and practices, their connections to capitalism and their impact on everyday school-life. This in front of an audience consisting mainly of individuals who were not even born at the time when the political map was radically re-drawn in Berlin in 1989, and who have grown up during a period when neoliberal governance has gained increasing influence in Swedish culture and society. The play mediates its dense, political content and its descriptions of teenagers’ everyday lives through a large portion of good old-fashioned entertainment, with music, singing and bizarre, laughter-provoking situations. The main research question to be answered in the article is: In what ways are the abstract contemporary economic-political manifestations of power and govern-ance expressed in this good-humored play for youth, and how can this be read from a feminist perspective? Hence, the article circles around three nodes that intersect in various ways: theatre, economic-political issues and feminist perspectives. The theoretical framework of the article is primarily based on a merger between, on the one hand, feminist social science and, on the other, feminist cultural analysis.

This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.

Over ten years ago, two community media initiatives were founded by young people in their early twenties in Bogota, Colombia and Quito, Ecuador. While the Colombia-based collective, Ojo al Sancocho, has struggled to build bridges among urban and migratory communities uprooted by an entrenched, decades-old armed conflict, the Ecuadorian group, El Churo Comunicacin, has fostered audiovisual autonomy and resistance among indigenous, feminist and ecological social movements that have had to defend their rights even though they were supposedly guaranteed by a so-called progressive government. Despite formidable challenges, each has fulfilled a long-held dream - a community movie theater, and the expansion of a radio-based practice to a multiplicity of practices that include community filmmaking, cyberfeminism and capacity-building of communities across Ecuador and Latin America. Together with other collectives, Ojo al Sancocho and El Churo are building a network of community filmmakers across Latin America. Using each organizations 2017 annual gathering as a point of departure, and subsequent meetings in 2018-2019, this article analyzes the characteristics that have led to innovation and sustainability in diverse contexts. It also indicates key challenges they face. This is an engaged, ethnographically-based, scholarly work.

This article discusses the theatrical practice of women performing traditionally male roles in Shakespeare. Whilst historically the phenomenon is nothing new, since the 1970s the practice has been particularly associated with the politics of feminism. This article proposes to examine this connection in order to explore how far the convention of casting women in the male roles of Shakespeare has been influenced by changing social, political, and cultural discourses. It will do so by considering two specific manifestations of the theatrical practice: firstly, the National Theatre’s 1995/6 Richard II directed by Deborah Warner, in which Fiona Shaw played the eponymous male character and secondly the 2012/13 all-female Julius Caesar, directed by Phyllida Lloyd for the Donmar Warehouse. Moreover, it will locate these two productions, separated by seventeen years and the turn of a century, within their specific historical, theatrical, and theoretical contexts. Through an analysis of the material conditions that gave rise to the contemporary receptions of these two productions, the objective of this article is to draw conclusions concerning the differing ways in which, through casting women in the male roles of Shakespeare, theatre practitioners have created particular theatrical conversations with their audiences.

Thirty-five years, the age of TRI, is roughly the length of time I have been involved in our discipline. I completed my Ph.D. in 1974 and entered the profession on the cusp of a generational shift. During my first decade in the academy, a number of new young scholars emerged and began to take the places of an older cohort who were primarily theatre historians and/or drama critics and interpreters. The theory explosion changed the way that both theatre history and dramatic criticism were carried out, and a whole new range of methods and objects of study began to appear in our journals and conferences. Post-structural and postmodernist ideas upset the reigning conventions of scholarship and also influenced creative artists who changed their practice to reflect these new ideas. Feminism transformed our field, as did new research on race, class and sexuality, while competing theories of the subject brought forward psychoanalysis and phenomenology as important tools for performance analysis. Cultural studies and the new historicism challenged positivist historiography and began to change the kind of theatre history (including subjects and documents) scholars researched and wrote about. Political critique was in the ascendency, after a battle to discredit what many of us perceived as a false objectivity in previous scholarship. This became, eventually, the new orthodoxy for many of us, and the senior scholars in our field today (for example Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Josette Féral, Erika Fisher-Lichte, Freddie Rokem, Joseph Roach) all participated in making these major changes happen as young scholars – while not necessarily agreeing with each other: the new generation was thoroughly heterodox in its approach to methods and topics.

Purpose This paper aims to accomplish two things: to build on current research which interrogates the role of management history in the neglect of women leaders and labor programs and to draw attention to Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theater Project and their lost contributions to management and organizational studies. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a feminist poststructural lens fused with critical discourse analysis to capture the role of discourses in concealing a more fragmented view of history. Findings The findings are openly discursive and aim to disrupt current knowledge and thinking in the practice of making history. The paper calls for an undoing of history and an examination of the powerful forces, which result in a gendered and limited understanding of the past. Originality/value The objective of this paper is to help scholarship continue to transform management and organizational studies and management history and to raise the profile of remarkable leaders, like Flanagan and similarly remarkable programs like the Federal Theater Project. Flanagan managed arguably the most ambitious and novel labor program under the New Deal, which resulted in an average of 10,000 workers in the arts being employed over four years, in a project which engaged audiences of over 30,000,000 Americans.

When is a widely-known fairy tale more than a story? Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers1 in those two regions. Here the local people still participate in a ritual dramatization of a story which for them represents a crucial renewal of life in their yearly calendar – a celebration of the roots of feminine magical power which goes back to the ancient historical south-east Asian practice by which a victorious ruler would carry back as booty to his kingdom the wives and dancers of the vanquished. Since most of the members of these royal harems were mediums gifted with special powers of healing and communicating with spirits, they were seen as valuable additions to a ruler's aura of divinity – and consequently to his terrestrial power. More importantly, the theatrical art form known as Manora, which enshrines the ‘birdwoman’ tale, is said to have been founded by two royal female trance mediums, regarded as primal healers and guardians of a life-renewing elixir: thus, each performance also serves as a shamanic and healing ritual. The performances here described by Poh Sim Plowright also have links with drama in China and Japan, and at the end of her article she explores the powerful connection with W. B. Yeats's celebrated ‘birdwoman’ play, At the Hawk's Well, which features a ‘Hawk’ Woman guarding a ‘well of miraculous water’ against male intrusion. Poh Sim Plowright is Director of the Centre for the Study of Noh Drama and Lecturer in Oriental Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Ferdinand Hérold's 1827 ballet-pantomime La Somnambule, written for the Paris Opéra, is generally remembered today only as a source for Bellini's 1831 opera La sonnambula. However, Hérold's work – which also inspired a series of popular vaudevilles on the same theme – illustrates the strong, voyeuristic appeal of the trance phenomenon at the end of the Bourbon Restoration. It can be viewed as encapsulating wide-ranging contemporary ideas about the relationship between sleepwalking, mesmerism, madness and the supernatural. The aims of this article are twofold. First, it seeks to introduce important nuances into the received and often generalised claims usually made about the containing nature of trance scenes in nineteenth-century theatre, positing an alternative model to that of the unhinged heroine of Italian opera familiar from recent feminist writing on opera. Second, it illuminates the musical practices specific to late Restoration Paris that were so crucial to the aesthetic – and the success – of these sleepwalking heroines. A web of visual and musical allusions conjured up an entranced figure who, although related to the Italian operatic madwoman, has a personality and social implications all her own.

This research report is focused on an emergent methodology developed to support a transformational actor‐researcher engaged in heuristic inquiry. Rooted in Stanislavskian practices, transformational acting outlines a character building technique that is, at its core, a physical process. By including costume as an integral component of this physical character-building process, the actor is equipped with a material tool with which they may alter their means of perception. A combined reading of modern cognitive theory and feminist theory asserts that such perceptual alterations as costume affords may then result in a fundamental shift in the performer’s identity, facilitating a lived experience of the character’s identity. Considering costume within a Stanislavskian context introduces a material set of given circumstances; an embodied experience of another’s possibilities or impossibilities of movement. While these perceptual changes stimulate transformation, an actor‐researcher may also find themselves in active collaboration with a ‘character’ outside of themselves, potentially lending new-found insight within a research setting. Starting from a materialist approach to character, I chose to use Shakespeare’s character Richard III as a case study to test my hypothesis. What I soon began to realize was that this unidentified ‘materiality’ that I had been drawn to could not be distinguished from Richard’s ‘disability’. I began to ask, what are the ethical implications of an actor donning various external costume-based tools in embodying a disabled character? How does such an approach help us move away from the medical model of disability to the social, and perhaps even towards the affirmative and to resituate disability as a lived experience rather than metaphor? This research report details an emergent methodology confronted with the ethical implications of costume’s impact on the portrayal and understanding of disability in theatre today.

Young people's sexting is an area of concern amongst parents, policymakers, and educators.1 Much education around the topic of sexting focuses on risk and shame. My creative work, Sexting Scenes – what do you think?, is a film script intended as a sext education resource. It highlights the various reasons for and consequences of sexting, using an intersectional and sex-positive approach not rooted in risk or shame. I address issues of victim blaming and heteronormativity in sext education resources Tagged and Exposed. I utilise the theories of feminist scholars Amy Shields Dobson and Jessica Ringrose and applied theatre scholar Katherine Low. My previous placement at the School of Sexuality Education, my current PhD Practice-as-Research, and my experience as an applied theatre practitioner all informed the script content. The script incorporates multiple storylines, diverse characters, and reflective questions to challenge and question victim blaming and heteronormativity in relation to sexting. Keywords: sexting, sext education, victim blaming, heteronormativity, applied theatre

Blister is a verbatim play that tells the story of Rosie, an Australian woman, who is walking the Camino de Santiago. The Camino is an 800km pilgrimage across Northern Spain that begins in the French Pyrenees and traverses mountains, vineyard covered hills, mesetas (plateaus) and urban centres before concluding at Santiago de Compostela. 200,000 people from across the world walk the Camino every year, often carrying their minimal belongings in a backpack, staying in dormitory-style accommodation with fellow pilgrims in local albergues, and walking between 20-35kms most days. This short essay describes how walking methods merged with the situated, relational and material verbatim theatre practice of community immersion in order to experience and represent the public pedagogy of the Camino in performance. Informed by a feminist position and engaging with theatrical conventions inspired by queer theory, excerpts of Blister are incorporated across the essay to demonstrate how theatre as a live and embodied medium provides a multi-dimensional platform to depict the motion, emotion and learning experienced by pilgrims walking the Camino.

South African history is such that Blackness/Indigeneity were excluded from institutions of knowledge production. Contemporarily, the traditional University is defined as an institution predicated on the abjection of Blackness. This reality neither predetermined the positions and responses, nor presupposed complete/successful erasure of Blackness/Indigeneity owing to exclusion. I contend and detail how theorising, thinking about and through the Fact of Blackness, continue(d)—using the artistic works of Mhlongo, Makeba, Mbulu, and contemporarily, Leomile as examples. Analysing the music of the abovementioned artists, a move rooted in intersectional feminist approaches, will reveal modes of theorising that characterised the artistic expressions that define(d) the country. Theory generation, so construed, necessitates a judicious philosophical consideration if we are to resurrect the Black Archive. I conclude with an introspective question aimed at inspiring similar projects in other traditions that constitute the Black Archive, i.e. African languages and literature, theatre, art practice and theory.

In finding patriarchal oppression in linear narratives, early Second Wave feminist writers like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray opposed biologically based Freudian theories that claimed the feminine was grounded in a certain essence of male-ness and female-ness. Cixous’ advocacy of écriture féminine includes her critique of traditional narrative, which she claims is structured by a sexual opposition that “has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing . . . to his laws” (883). Specifically in terms of cinema, the focus of this paper, Laura Mulvey finds similar oppression in filmic linear narratives. For her, the avant-garde’s near limitless possibilities can break this power, thus freeing “the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment” (47). Similarly, Steve Neale’s “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” where he theorizes about placing the male body under the erotic gaze, remains immersed in a discourse on linear narrative. Some pornography theorists like Richard Dyer slightly eschew the overall plot-based notion of narrative by using the visible male orgasm as the structuring device, creating something of a narrative of ejaculation. Specifically, I am referring to Dyer’s “Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography” where he states that cumming “brings the linear narrative drive that structures porn to a clear climax and end” (192). This emphasis on the male orgasm is also a tool used by some anti-porn feminists to read male-supremacy into (heterosexual) porn. Linda Williams, however, is quick to show that the money shot “is after all only male orgasm” which “can also be seen as the very limit of the visual representation of sexual pleasure,” countering some anti-porn arguments of pornography vis-à-vis the recorded male orgasm (Hard Core 101, author’s emphasis). Yet this too comes from an ever-present formalist tradition of film theory that reads meaning almost exclusively on the screen, maintaining the notion that porn is viewed as standard, commercial movies are, a notion that hardly seems thorough enough to account for the particulars of porn spectatorship. (Subsequently, Williams explores patterns of consumption in a later article entitled “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” an article which I will discuss in more detail below.) With specific attention to pornography’s effects on viewers, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon were successful in getting certain municipalities to pass legislation banning pornography based on the detriments of the genre. (For further explanation of their position, please see the Minneapolis, Minnesota and Indianapolis, Indiana city council meeting transcripts in their book In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights.) Although the courts subsequently struck down this legislation, MacKinnon explained some of her reasoning in “Sexuality” where she asked important questions of (heterosexual) pornography’s defining woman in terms of what (heterosexual) male viewers find erotic, and her account of this definition’s role in terms of power seems fairly accurate. “Sexual meaning is not made only, or even primarily, by words and in texts. It is made in social relations of power in the world, through which process gender is also produced” (160). Yet because her argument is grounded in heterosexual porn, I must question some of her conclusions about “man” as a collective gender. In other words, do the erotics of gay porn still define woman as “what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction and is totally tautologous with ‘female sexuality’ and ‘the female sex’” (161)? Or does man—at least in part—now fall into this category, thus disrupting the strict binaries of male and female sexuality? MacKinnon does bring in issues of same-sex desire, and her effort at inclusion should be commended. Her understanding of male-male sex, however, remains wed to the idea that dominance and submission are still defining characteristics, and that these characteristics reinforce the masculine:feminine binary, presumably in terms of sexual positioning, thus eliminating variance within male-male desire. The sum total of this is that many gender-based understandings of narrative are too closely tied to formalism, and much theory that questions the positioning of viewers—via feminist theory or otherwise—fails to account for variety within audiences. Porn theorists can use texts like Bel Ami’s Frisky Summer 1: Best Friends to correct the subtracting of marginalized groups by studying the technological characteristics of DVDs in the domestic sphere. And studying these features will allow for more in depth inquiries about geographies of consumption, a category in need of expansion for all of porn studies, not just gay porn. John Champagne favors this type of culturally-minded analysis of gay porn, focusing on consumption practices within the geographic spaces of gay porn theatres/arcades in his “‘Stop Reading Films!’: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography.” Here, Champagne claims that close analyses of films of any genre act as a gatekeeper for film studies, suggesting that, through formalism, film theorists are able to ward off intrusions from other disciplines (like queer studies), preserve the film text as a privileged site of knowledge, and ensure their own place of authority (79). With regard to gay porn, Champagne claims that these acts of self-preservation film theorists perform when doing close analysis contain any perceived threat that gay porn and the gay porn theatre/arcade present. “In its psychoanalytically inflected variant in particular, it [film studies] uses close analysis to diagnose the desire of (homo)sexualized spectators, a desire it thinks it already knows and can recognize” (77). Offering the gay porn theatre/arcade as a more appropriate location for examination, Champagne aims “to understand the porno film viewing experience as part of a larger set of cultural and social rituals and practices” rather than studying it as simply another filmmaking practice (81). Going hand-in-glove with Champagne’s rejection of close analysis as a tool for porn studies, Linda Williams suggests that pornography—gay, lesbian, straight, or otherwise—is a “body genre,” defining this in terms of its desire to cause a bodily reaction (“Film Bodies” 3). In other words, porn wants to get the viewer off. Champagne’s transferring the emphasis from the text to the spectator is very appropriate for a cultural/social investigation into gay porn because of porn’s encoded desires to cause this bodily reaction. (Similarly, work could be done on the video rental store where consumption of pornography—i.e., renting a movie—could be the pretext for a desired sexual encounter.) Yet by focusing so tightly on the theatre/arcade, Champagne misses the opportunity to bridge textual analysis with consumption practices as they are acted out in the home viewing experience. I, as the home viewer, am allowed more control over the text than the theatre/arcade patron. Champagne describes a machine found in some porn theatres/arcades that cycles through movies, showing brief clips from specific scenes as a preview of what the patron could watch (86). Beyond that, the theatre/arcade patron has little control over pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding the film. DVDs, on the other hand, can be viewed non-linearly, something beyond comparison for theatre/arcade patrons and even exceeding what VHS offers. This ability of DVD to turn just about any porn film into a compilation movie infuses far more control over the text than ever before. Because of the overwhelming popularity of home consumption and the ever-expanding DVD market, porn research must account for these newer strategies of consumption. Like most mainstream DVDs, porn DVDs are divided into individual “chapters,” with porn DVDs usually featuring one sex scene at a time, thus acting similarly to the machine Champagne describes. The Frisky Summer DVD is divided into six chapters representing the six sex scenes, but after selecting, say, chapter 6—Ion Davidov and Johan Paulik—the DVD offers sub-chapter options of “play chapter,” “foreplay,” “oral,” “anal,” and “orgasms,” as written on the screen. By beginning with chapter six, the final scene/chapter, I am not missing vital information to understanding what will be present in this final scene because, as a body genre, the film is trying to cause a bodily reaction, trying to produce my orgasm, not necessarily needing me to follow a linear plot. In other words, what happens in chapter 1—Ion Davidov’s sex scene with Daniel Valent—has no bearing on the visceral pleasure of chapter 6. In fact, porn DVDs like Frisky Summer provide the pieces for me to construct my own sequences that meet my visceral desires. But we shouldn’t completely disregard formalist film theory because one of the offered pieces is the film as “sequenced” by the filmmakers. After all, following characters/actors from encounter to encounter could help drive the orgasmic pleasure for some viewers or possibly even satisfy other visual interests unintended by the filmmakers. Separating home porn consumption from other forms of domestic cinema consumption is that porn filmmakers must expect their product to be seen in fragments, illustrating their knowledge of porn viewer behavior. Furthermore, dividing the film into not only the individual sex scenes but also the types of sex featured in that scene suggests that the home viewer is not interested in watching the movie form beginning to end because porn’s true goal of viewer orgasm can be met more efficiently by watching a specific sexual act. Jumping right to, say, the anal sex in chapter six allows me to construct a meta-narrative that both defies the diegetic story offered by the filmmakers yet complies with the genre’s, and therefore, the filmmakers’ larger goal to produce my orgasm. And with my orgasm, the narrative truly comes to an end because, shortly after, I will presumably press stop, thus ending the diegetic narrative at a fairly random place, yet ending the meta-narrative of consumption at its standard and expected post-orgasmic conclusion. Underlining the specificity of the particular sexual act within the sex scene is that, after selecting the anal sex moments between Ion and Johan, the film does not continue on to their orgasms despite this being the next moment in the linear action. Rather, the DVD returns me to the sex act menu within their chapter, allowing me to watch the anal sex again, pick a different type of sex, or return to the chapter menu to pick a different set of actors. With these options of sexual acts within sex scenes, the filmmakers recognize both that I am not necessarily interested in watching the film from beginning to end and that even watching an entire sexual sequence could be more than I want. Furthermore, returning to the menu instead of continuing with the scene as the filmmakers’ edited it suggests that I might never want to see the actor’s orgasms anyway, challenging the formalist importance of the cum shot. An interesting note to consider with this is the time limitation selecting a specific sexual act places on the viewer. The anal sex sequence between Ion and Johan lasts 3:27. This does not guarantee the viewer enough time to reach an orgasm, a fact that appears to counter the film’s body genre qualities. Yet limited time actually results in viewer control. If 3:27 isn’t enough time to orgasm, the film’s return to the sub-chapter menu demands the viewer exercise power over the text by re-watching, rewinding, pausing, or “slow-motioning” the sequence. While the film could at one point be working against my ejaculation, it nevertheless demands that I control the text. Grounding gender-based theories on formalist traditions of narrative and heterosexist notions of spectatorship create a structured absence of marginalized sexual identities in non-linear narrative film viewing. Although my comments on this subscribe to a somewhat limited/“vanilla” idea of solo masturbation by self-identified gay men watching gay porn at home, they should be viewed as a starting point for future research that examines all forces being enacted upon porn viewers. Specifically, we can use this idea of pleasure being found between the text and the orgasm to look at both female and straight male pleasures of their using gay male porn. This middle ground between production and consumption is where I place the structuring device of gay male porn viewed by gay men and should be considered in future studies. References Champagne, John. “‘Stop Reading Films!: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography.” Cinema Journal 36.4 (Summer 1997): 76-97. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875-893. Dyer, Richard. “Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography.” The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002. 187-203. Frisky Summer 1: Best Friends. DVD. Dir. George Duroy. With Ion Davidov and Johan Paulik. Bel Ami, 1995. 87 min. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Sexuality.” The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 158-180. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 34-47. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 253-264. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13. —-. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Rev. ed. Berkeley: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1999. MLA Style Bolton, Michael C. "Cumming to an End: The Male Orgasm and Domestic Consumption of Gay Pornography." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/08_cumming.php>. APA Style Bolton, M. (2004 Oct 11). Cumming to an End: The Male Orgasm and Domestic Consumption of Gay Pornography, M/C Journal 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/08_cumming.php>