Overview

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 performanceAnyone 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Nina Rapi ,  Maya Chowdhry ,  N. Rapi ,  M. Chowdhry
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Inc
Imprint:   Routledge
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.566kg
ISBN:  

9780789003706

ISBN 10:   0789003708
Pages:   268
Publication Date:   24 July 1998
Audience:   College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations 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

Reviews

Author Information

Rapi, Nina; Chowdhry, Maya

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions