Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance

Description

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists,... Read more

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book’s penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.

Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses:

the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society
how questions of purity, ‘authenticity,’and self-definition complicate the field of representation
the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible
several ‘new wave’performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money
the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body
what the term ‘lesbian playwright’means within contemporary culture
‘It’s Queer Up North’--a British National Arts Organization
the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performance

Anyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of ‘positive representation’--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

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Introductions
Representing the ‘Real’
Living Performance
Part One: The Monstrous Feminine: Lesbian Aesthetics in Process
Another Con-Text
Vanishing in Your Face: Embodiment and Representation in Lesbian Dance Performance
Shall We Dance? Identification Through Linguistic Tropes and Performance
Part Two: The Lesbian Body in Performance
Performing the Lesbian Body--The New Wave
Get Your Feminism Off My Floppy: Seedy ROMs and Technical Tales
Fleshing It Out
Part Three: From Margin to Center: Subversion or Assimilation?
Drama Queens: Ruling with a Rod of Irony
From Stage to Screen and Back: Tash Fairbanks’ Nocturne (ital) Shedding Some Light on Lesbian Representation and the Performance of Lesbian Desire
The Laugh That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Fo(u)r Women: The Art of Collaboration
It’s Queer Up North: Production Values: Sarah-Jane Interviews Tanja Farman
Part Four: Writing the Self in Performance: Femmes and Butches, Drag Queens and Kings, Vampires and Clowns
Performing Butch/Femme Theory
Coming Out at Night--Performing as the Lesbian Vampire Rosie Lugosi
Presentation of Self as Performance: The Birth of Queenie aka Valerie Mason-John
Angela de Castro: Clown in a Cold Country
Feminine and Masculine Personnas in Performance: Sade Huron: A Drag Queen with a Dick
Drag Kings and Subjects
Index

Author(s)

Biography

Rapi, Nina; Chowdhry, Maya

Acts of Passion Sexuality, Gender, and Performance

Description

Table of Contents

Author(s)

Biography

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