Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting

Aston, Elaine

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-27080-1_2

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…In her seminal Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism Jen Harvie concludes that 'the political context […] from around the advent of New Labour in the late 1990s to the Conservative-led coalition government of 2010 on -has grown and continues to grow increasingly neoliberal ' ( 2013 , p. 192). On the one hand, a critical sensing of this reactionary climate saw experimentalists such as Churchill or debbie tucker green form innovative dramaturgies dedicated to making audiences feel-see the damaging consequences of failing to address and redress capitalism's escalating 'progress' (see Aston 2010 ). On the other, it was this reactionary climate that arguably injected social energies into the (re)turn to the realist tradition of showing the world as it really is.…”

Section: Neoliberalism (Post)feminism and Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Twenty-First Century Drama

Adiseshiah

2016

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Section: Neoliberalism (Post)feminism and Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Twenty-First Century Drama

Adiseshiah

2016

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“…Performance too relies on various norms and structures. Rebecca Prichard, a long-term affiliate playwright of Clean Break says If you write really realistic stuff, that’s purely realistic and you stick to traditional structures, you give an expectation or pattern that fulfills itself, as if you are saying everything is doomed… If you do pure social realism, it feels to me as if you are kind of saying this is the way it is and all we can do is despair (cited in Aston, 2010: 585).…”

Section: Challenging Genres Resisting the Cagementioning

confidence: 99%

Staging women in prisons: Clean Break Theatre Company’s dramaturgy of the cage

Walsh

2016

Crime, Media, Culture

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The article explores the limitations of the dramaturgies of the cell through a close reading of several key play texts commissioned by the UK’s leading arts in criminal justice organisation working with women, Clean Break. The apparently humanist positioning of women in prison as just like everyone else erases the specificity of women’s backstories. Conversely, by adhering to the constructions of female prisoners as holding binary positions of either ‘monsters’ or ‘victims’ of the system, plays can re-inscribe morally unitary approaches to women’s deviance and resistance. Many plays about women in prison hold a claim for resisting stereotypes and are in opposition to the injustice of criminal justice processes, and yet, in the realist mode, the monster/ victim position seems to be an inescapable binary.

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“…7 This placement has been contested by feminist theatre critics, most notably Elaine Aston, who has demonstrated the complex relationship between twentiethcentury feminism and British women's drama of the 1990s, including Kane's. 8 In this essay, I try to give justice to Parks's and Kane's radical rethinking of blackness and whiteness by placing their works in yet another narrative: the history of formalism, the transnational avant-garde critical school to which we owe one of the most enduring definitions of whiteness. Proposing that formalism may illuminate a radical theatrical approach to race is, of course, counterintuitive.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Radical Formalism of Suzan-Lori Parks and Sarah Kane

Mihaylova¹

2015

Theat Surv

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When Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, about the displays of Saartjie Baartman in early nineteenth-century Europe, opened in 1996, the outrage it provoked by suggesting that its central, black character may have been complicit in her plight raised yet again one of the most inspiring and frustrating questions in modern US theatre history: how to stage the racial Other. Even the most sympathetic responses to the play revealed the difficulty of assuming a critical stance toward the racially marked body (especially the black female body) that is affectively fixed as a symbol of martyrdom and victimization. In fact, Shannon Jackson has proposed that the racially marked body's resistance to being reduced to a critical sign, free from affect, may be definitive of race as a social phenomenon. As US theatre history demonstrates, onstage this resistance is highly productive of controversy, much of which has focused on the question of which representational contracts may most accurately convey the experiences of racially marked people. In this sense, art critic Abiola Sinclair's reading of Parks's experimental aesthetic as a traitorous concession to a white theatrical tradition was unexceptional; it was a reminder of the historical efforts of African American artists to create distinctly black art.

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Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

Twenty-First Century Drama

Twenty-First Century Drama

Staging women in prisons: Clean Break Theatre Company’s dramaturgy of the cage

The Radical Formalism of Suzan-Lori Parks and Sarah Kane

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