Playing the woman: Gender performance on the contemporary stage.

摘要

My investigation of the politics of representing women on the late twentieth century stage examines four basically uni-gendered plays--Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, and Tomson Highway's companion plays, The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing--and seeks answers to such questions as: what does it mean, given the theatre's dubious legacy, for there to be only women in a play? How does feminist theatre trouble the ideological and dramatic conventions that have historically framed and contained women on stage? How can we transform the legacy of visual violence against women so prevalent in traditional stagings of the female body into a critical, ethical representation of that body? Is such a representation even possible?; My critical context for this investigation is feminist performance theory, including the work of Jose Feral, Elin Diamond, Barbara Freedman and many others. My primary critical text, however, is Judith Butler's landmark study of gender and identity, Gender Trouble. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)