A valuable, provoking, important addition to any theatre scholar or practitioner's library, especially since feminist theory is a relative newcomer to the world of theatre.

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide students with an overview of key developments in queer and trans feminist theories and their significance to the field of contemporary performance studies. It presents new insights highlighting the ways in which rigid or punishing notions of gender, sexuality and race continue to flourish in systems of knowledge, faith and power which are relevant to a new generation of queer and trans feminist performers today. The guiding question for the Handbook is: How do queer and trans feminist theories enhance our understanding of developments in feminist performance today, and will this discussion give rise to new ways of theorizing contemporary performance? As such, the volume will survey a new generation of performers and theorists, as well as senior scholars, who engage and redefine the limits of performance. The chapters will demonstrate how intersectional, queer and trans feminist theoretical tools support new analyses of performance with a global focus. The primary audience will be students of theatre/ performance studies as well as queer /gender studies. The volume’s contents suggest close links between the formation of queer feminist identities alongside recent key political developments with transnational resonances. Furthermore, the emergence of new queer and trans feminist epistemologies prompts a reorientation regarding performance and identities in a 21st-century context.

In a world where frontiers are militarised and classifications systems defining rights and belonging are reinforced, transnational feminist agendas are fundamental. We use the concept of ‘scholarships of hope’ to analyse the diversity of feminist struggles and imaginaries in diverse geopolitical locations. Dreaming Global Change, Doing Local Feminisms explores subversive practices of knowledge production that challenge Eurocentric scientific models and agendas. The book also explores the tensions and challenges of doing transnational feminist theory at the crossroads between feminist scholarship and feminist activism. In conjunction, these chapters provide a solid analysis framed by feminist methodologies opening complexities and contradictions of individual and collective feminist and trans identity struggles in Argentina, Belarus, Pakistan, Sweden, Taiwan and Turkey. These identities and struggles are rooted in transnational and local genealogies that go beyond the narratives of the West as the origin for democracy and human rights, providing powerful agendas for alternative futures.

This accessible introduction challenges fixed understandings of the geographical or conceptual "origins" of feminist performance, offering a fresh and open-ended guide to the moments and movements that have come to define this vital field. Designed for weekly use on performance studies courses, each of the book’s ten chapters highlights the key works of feminist performance, including performance art, live art, body art, activism, and theater. These milestones are all linked to acts of rupture and political reanimation, as artists broke with dominant understandings of gender, art, and value, that were taken to be insurmountable and static. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political, and artistic development of foundational subject areas.

This book questions how feminist beliefs are enacted within an artistic context. It critically examines the intersection of violence, gender, performance and power through contemporary interventionist performances. The volume explores a host of key themes like feminism and folk epic, community theatre, performance as radical cultural intervention, volatile bodies and celebratory protests. Through analysing performances of theatre stalwarts like Usha Ganguly, Maya Krishna Rao, Sanjoy Ganguly, Shilpi Marwaha and Teejan Bai, the volume discusses the complexities and contradictions of a feminist reading of contemporary performances. A major intervention in the field of feminism and performance, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gender studies, performance studies, theatre studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, sociology of gender and literature.

This is a landmark anthology of international feminist theatre research. A three-part structure orientates readers through Cartographies of feminist critical navigations of the global arena; the staging of feminist Interventions in a range of international contexts; and Manifestos for today's feminist practitioners, activists and academics.

The Nuyorican Poets Café has for the past forty years provided a space for multicultural artistic expression and a platform for the articulation of Puerto Rican and black cultural politics. The Café’s performances—poetry, music, hip hop, comedy, and drama—have been studied in detail, but until now, little attention has been paid to the voices of its women artists. Through archival research and interview, Nuyorican Feminist Performance examines the contributions of 1970s and ’80s performeras and how they challenged the Café’s gender politics. It also looks at recent artists who have built on that foundation with hip hop performances that speak to contemporary audiences. The book spotlights the work of foundational artists such as Sandra María Esteves, Martita Morales, Luz Rodríguez, and Amina Muñoz, before turning to contemporary artists La Bruja, Mariposa, Aya de León, and Nilaja Sun, who infuse their poetry and solo pieces with both Nuyorican and hip hop aesthetics.

This work is a unique collection of key articles on feminist theatre and performance form The Drama Review (TDR). Carol Martin juxtaposes theory and practice to provide an exceptionally comprehensive overview of the development of feminist theatre. This outstanding collection includes key texts by theorists such as Elin Diamond, Peggy Phelan and Lynda Hart and interviews with practitioners including Anna Deveare Smith and Robbie McCauley. It also contains full performances texts by two of the most influential and controversial practiitioners of feminist theatre: Dress Suits to Hire by Holly Hughes and The Constant State of Desire by Karen Finley. A Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance is an essential purchase for students of theatre studies, performance studies and women's theatre.

Feminism as a method, a movement, a critique, and an identity has been the subject of debates, contestations and revisions in recent years, yet contemporary global developments and political upheavals have again refocused feminism’s collective force. What is feminism now? How do scholars and activists employ contemporary feminism? What feminist traditions endure? Which are no longer relevant in addressing contemporary global conditions? In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars reflect on how contemporary feminism has shaped their thinking and their field as they interrogate its uses, limits, and reinventions. Organized as a set of questions over definition, everyday life, critical intervention, and political activism, the Handbook takes on a broad set of issues and points of view to consider what feminism is today and what current forces shape its future development. It also includes an extended conversation among major feminist thinkers about the future of feminist scholarship and activism. The scholars gathered here address a wide variety of topics and contexts: activism from post-Soviet collectives to the Arab spring, to the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment, feminist art, film and digital culture, education, technology, policy, sexual practices and gender identity. Indispensable for scholars undergraduate and postgraduate students in women, gender, and sexuality, the collection offers a multidimensional picture of the diversity and utility of feminist thought in an age of multiple uncertainties.

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.