Performing Gender Violence : Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists

Examines violence against women in contemporary American plays by female dramatists. Violence against women in playsbywomen has earned little mention. This revolutionary collection fills that gap, focusing on plays by American women dramatists, written in the last thirty years, that deal with different forms of gender violence. Each author discusses specific manifestations of violence in carefully selected plays: psychological, familial, war-time, and social injustice. This book encompasses the theatrical devices used to represent violence on the stage in an age of virtual, immediate reality as much as the problematics of gender violence in modern society Front Matter....Pages i-vi Introduction....Pages 1-14 Violence against Women: Forms and Responses....Pages 15-26 American Women Playwrights and Violence against Women....Pages 27-38 My Home, My Battleground: The Deconstruction of the American Family....Pages 39-60 The Role of Female Bonding on the Stage of Violence....Pages 61-78 A Stalker, a Serial Killer, and the Women Who Survived Them: Psychological Abuse as a Form of Gender Violence....Pages 79-95 The New Breast Cancer (Im)patient: Female Revolt against Biomedical Violence in US Drama....Pages 97-112 Survival Strategies in Recent Plays by African American Women Playwrights....Pages 113-129 Documenting War: Theatrical Interventions by Emily Mann and Heather Raffo....Pages 131-153 The Victim and the Audience’s Pleasure: An Exploration of Carson Kreitzer’s Self Defense and Stefanie Zadravec’s Honey Brown Eyes ....Pages 155-172 Back Matter....Pages 173-198