Articles |
The Author |
Abstract |
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Anna Furse (Goldsmith College, London, UK)
Art of A.R.T.
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Anna Furse is an award-winning director, writer and
movement researcher who teaches full time in the Drama Department of Goldsmiths where she runs the
MA in Performance. Training includes the Royal Ballet Schools, Grotowski in Poland, Brook in Paris and
she was a founder member of Chisenhale and on the editorial collective of New Dance Magazine. She has
been artistic director of several companies including Paines Plough and her own new company Athletes of
the Heart with whom she produced YERMA'S EGGS in 2003. Her practice based research into training and
productions has focused - though not exclusively - on women's bodies: hysteria, eating disorders
and body image, prostitution, disability and infertility. Two of her plays AUGUSTINE (BIG HYSTERIA) and
GORGEOUS have been published and produced in the USA, Canada, Denmark and the
Czech Republic. |
"I have sought ways since to write and
create dialogues and debates, images and performance poetics that reflect the interior landscape of the
involuntarily childless. Such a voice as mine, that of a sub-fertile woman's perspective, tends to
appear last, if it appears at all, in media reportage of any hotly topical IVF related case. These
are too often sensationalised so as to feed into the popular notion of fertility experts 'playing God'
whilst the sub-fertile are portrayed as selfish heathens or pathetic victims.[...] Aptly, I think, the
acronym for Assisted Reproduction Tech-nologies is A.R.T.[...]. My play Yerma's Eggs, though not a didactic
work, aimed to bring the audience close-up to the infertile experience and bio-ethics in an immediate,
emotional and interactive way as only live theatre can do. I wanted to explore how to get under
the skin of the infertile subject, represent different cultural and sexual-choice perspectives and
bring the bio-ethical debate on A.R.T. into a theatrical space, emotionally and deliberately
in-conclusively." |
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Andrea Gutenberg (University of Cologne, Germany)
"Know that I do not suffer, unlike you..." -
Visual and Verbal Codings of Pain in Body and Performance Art" |
Andrea Gutenberg teaches English literature at the University of Cologne
and is currently working on a research project on English modernism and the degeneration debate. She
has written a PhD thesis on possible worlds theory and female-centered plot patterns in the British
novel and is preparing her habilitation on narcissism as a scientific and poetological concept
(c. 1850-1950).
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"This paper sets out to analyse the
status of pain and its visual and verbal representations in body art with regard to gender difference.
Apart from potentially gender-related intertextual/ intermedial references to cultural codes such as
religion (Christian iconography, sacrifice, rituals of initiation), references to pathological
spectacles such as hysteria and cultural practices such as cosmetic surgery, the analysis will
include: subject-object relations during the performance itself, the scenarios of narcissism and
voyeurism implied by it, gender-specific forms of pain-processing and programmatic statements or
manifestoes formulated by the artists themselves." |
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Samantha Hume (University of Cologne, Germany)
The narrative of male violence on women's bodies
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Sam Hume lectures in
English language and literature at the University of Cologne with a focus on German/English translation.
She studied in Canterbury and Nottingham and is also a professional translator. Her research interests
are feminist theory and especially contemporary women's writing. She is currently working on a PhD on
feminist interpretations of contemporary British detective fiction.
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"The term narrative, according to the
New Oxford English Dictionary means a 'written account of connected
events.' With reference to male violence against women's bodies, it seems to me to be clear that women's
bodies are the surface upon which male violence writes its narrative. While this is not an entirely new
concept in the realms of feminist studies, it appears to have lost some of its force in the abstraction
of much theoretical work and the notion that women allegedly have gained the equality second wave
feminism focussed on. In order to deconstruct the many instances of violence against women's bodies,
one needs to survey both the superficial level i.e. the one which we see clearly on a day to day basis,
but also the more profound invisible structures that perpetuate male violence and leave the integrity of
women's bodies constantly in danger of being violated." |
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Andrea Birk and Tina Wald (University of Cologne, Germany)
"One of my missions as a playwright is to let the witches and the
magic back in."
An interview with Diane Samuels
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Tina Wald has studied English and German Literature, Drama, TV and Film Studies at the University
of Cologne. She is currently working for gender forum. Apart from writing her PhD thesis on Gender and
Madness in Contemporary English Drama she teaches at the English department of the University of
Cologne.
Andrea Birk studies English and German Literature at the
University of Cologne and plans her master thesis on A.S. Byatt.
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"I see British theatre as being the exact equivalent of the church of England. And it's run by priests
and vicars, artistic directors, et cetera. And the source of theatre in the old sense is healers,
storytellers, it fits in with medicine men, rituals, wise women, and priestesses. And that's all being
hoisted and taken away by particular structures and particular ways of doing things, quite limited
patriarchal models. It's about trying to bring that female emotional energy alive in theatre and to
infiltrate theatre. I will continue to do this through the rest of my life. And if I do not get produced
because of it, that's not going to stop me. I've got a real mission here."
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Reviews |
Abstract |
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Review: Griffin, Gabriele, ed. Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian Writing.
London: Routledge, 2002.
(Reviewed by Isabel Karremann, University of Erlangen, Germany).
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"Far from establishing a separate and
separatist gay and lesbian canon (as the title might indicate) Griffin thus aims at imploding the notion
of a "high-brow" canon itself by juxtaposing homosexual and heterosexual writers, ancient and very
contemporary ones, texts from "high" and popular culture (xi). [...] What makes the Who's Who interesting
for all already working in the field of GLQ studies, or looking for an introduction to it, is precisely
that it offers informative, well researched articles on gay and lesbian writing of the twentieth
century, and especially on contemporary writers. |
View this book's entry in the
gender Inn database |
Review: Ikas, Karin Rosa. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. Reno & Las Vegas:
University of Nevada Press, 2002.
(Reviewed by Claudia Leitner, University of Vienna, Austria).
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With an exclusive focus on women
writers, Ikas sets out to counter prevailing homogenized versions of ethnic identity, organized around
a paradigmatic male Chicano subject. As these writers reflect upon their lives and works, stereotypical
images of the self-sacrificing, devout, submissive and inarticulate Mexican (American) woman fade.
What emerges instead is a rich panorama of articulate and indeed very literate women 'daring to speak
out and tackle the multiple forms of discrimination within Mexican American culture and society in
general' (XIV)." |
View this book's entry in the
gender Inn database |
Review: Hughes, Christina. Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research. London: Sage Publications, 2002.
(Reviewed by Miriam Wallraven, University of Tübingen, Germany).
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"The main purpose of Christina Hughes' Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research is
to introduce a "conceptual literacy" for social science students. Hughes' differentiated explorations
of equality, difference, choice, care, time and experience, which are key concepts in feminist theory,
and her balanced overview of sociological and connected studies are based on topical postmodernist
and poststructuralist approaches. [...] As a whole, Key Concepts is a very useful handbook,
which is at once accessible for beginners and complex enough to account for the multidimensionality
of poststructuralism. It is certainly always topical and is thus an invaluable guide through the
jungle of gender theory in the social sciences."
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View this book's entry in the
gender Inn database |
