Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers
Author: Kate Davy
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2010
Genre: Lesbian theater
ISBN: 047207122X

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Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and unbridled eroticism at a women's theater space in the East Village

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers
Author: Kate Davy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Lesbian theater
ISBN: 9780472904099

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"Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular. The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed--a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work. This book provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined--importantly and powerfully--with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. The author's research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s."--Publisher

Critical Theory and Performance

Critical Theory and Performance
Author: Janelle G. Reinelt
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2007
Genre: Theater
ISBN: 9780472068869

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Updated and enlarged, this groundbreaking collection surveys the major critical currents and approaches in drama, theater, and performance

Murder Most Queer

Murder Most Queer
Author: Jordan Schildcrout
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2014-10-09
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0472052322

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The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy. Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance. These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships. Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

Acts of Gaiety

Acts of Gaiety
Author: Sara Warner
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2012-10-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472118536

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Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism by recovering earlier mirthful modes of political performance. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s–70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety—including camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside "legitimate theater”-- at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era. Juxtaposing figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists including Hothead Paisan, Bitch and Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers, Sara Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.

Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre

Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre
Author: Jimmy A. Noriega
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-09-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 100063888X

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Whether creating Broadway musicals, experimental dramas, or outrageous comedies, the performers, directors, playwrights, designers, and producers profiled in this collection have contributed to the representation of LGBTQ lives and culture in a variety of theatrical venues, both within the queer community and across the US theatrical landscape. Moving from the era of the Stonewall Riots to today, notable scholars in the field bring a wide variety of queer theatre artists into conversation with each other, exploring connections and differences in race, gender, physical ability, national origin, class, generation, aesthetic modes, and political goals, creating a diverse and inclusive study of 50 years of queer theatre. For readers seeking an introduction to or a deeper understanding of LGBTQ theatre, this volume offers thought-provoking analyses of theatre-makers both celebrated and lesser-known, mainstream and subversive, canonical and new.

Memories of the Revolution

Memories of the Revolution
Author: Jill Dolan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-11-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472121499

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The women’s experimental theater space called the WOW Café (Women’s One World) has been a vital part of New York’s downtown theater scene since 1980. Since that time, WOW has provided a place for feminist and particularly lesbian theater artists to create, perform, and witness a cultural revolution. Its renowned alumnae include playwright and actor Lisa Kron, performance artists Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana, the theater troupe the Five Lesbian Brothers, and actors/playwrights Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin, among others. Memories of the Revolution collects scripts, interviews, and commentary to trace the riotous first decade of WOW. While the histories of other experimental theater collectives have been well documented, WOW’s history has only begun to be told. The anthology also includes photographs of and reminiscences by Café veterans, capturing the history and artistic flowering of the first ten years of this countercultural haven.

Theatre and Sexuality

Theatre and Sexuality
Author: Jill S. Dolan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2010-06-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350316326

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Theatre & Sexuality explains the critical validity of using sexuality as a lens for examining theatre's creation and reception. The book offers clear introductions to sexual identity politics, ways of 'reading' sexuality on stage and a select history of LGBTQ theatre, including a reading of Split Britches/Bloolips' production Belle Reprieve.

Who Needs Gay Bars?

Who Needs Gay Bars?
Author: Greggor Mattson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2023-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503635872

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Gay bars have been closing by the hundreds. The story goes that increasing mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, plus dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, have rendered these spaces obsolete. Beyond that, rampant gentrification in big cities has pushed gay bars out of the neighborhoods they helped make hip. Who Needs Gay Bars? considers these narratives, accepting that the answer for some might be: maybe nobody. And yet... Jarred by the closing of his favorite local watering hole in Cleveland, Ohio, Greggor Mattson embarks on a journey across the country to paint a much more complex picture of the cultural significance of these spaces, inside "big four" gay cities, but also beyond them. No longer the only places for their patrons to socialize openly, Mattson finds in them instead a continuously evolving symbol; a physical place for feeling and challenging the beating pulse of sexual progress. From the historical archives of Seattle's Garden of Allah, to the outpost bars in Texas, Missouri or Florida that serve as community hubs for queer youth—these are places of celebration, where the next drag superstar from Alaska or Oklahoma may be discovered. They are also fraught grounds for confronting the racial and gender politics within and without the LGBTQ+ community. The question that frames this story is not asking whether these spaces are needed, but for whom, earnestly exploring the diversity of folks and purposes they serve today. Loosely informed by the Damron Guide, the so-called "Green Book" of gay travel, Mattson logged 10,000 miles on the road to all corners of the United States. His destinations are sometimes thriving, sometimes struggling, but all offering intimate views of the wide range of gay experience in America: POC, white, trans, cis; past, present, and future.

Beyond the Doctrine of Man

Beyond the Doctrine of Man
Author: Joseph Drexler-Dreis
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2019-12-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823285871

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Catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person, the essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man interrogate the problem of these definitions of the human person and take up the struggle to decolonize and unsettle such descriptions. Contributors: Rufus Burnett Jr., M. Shawn Copeland, Yomaira C. Figueroa, Patrice Haynes, Xhercis Méndez, Andrew Prevot, Mayra Rivera, Linn Marie Tonstad, Alexander G. Weheliye