Section outline

      • Course info

        • Prof. Marissa Fenley

          mfenley@brynmawr.edu

          Goodhart Hall 

          Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30-4:30 (sign up here)

          "Fabulation, Erasure, and Distortion: Feminism on Stage"

          Tues/Thurs 4:10-5:30 PM

          Goodhart Hall, Classroom B

      • Course Description

        • This course asks students to take up feminism (and its numerous intersections) as a method for theatrical presentation and composition, rather than merely a question of representation. We will not only interrogate the criteria by which a performance is deemed “feminist” but will also identify, analyze, and put into practice specific strategies and techniques for staging feminist questions and provocations onstage. Such techniques may range from erasure, to saturation, to fabulation, to distortion—a list that we will build upon as throughout our course. We will apply critical texts across feminist philosophy, critical race studies, and queer theory (including Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, and Audre Lorde among others) and analyze how these approaches to feminism are taken up by playwrights, performance artists, and dancers (including Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Yoko Ono, and Narcissister among others).

      • Learning Objectives

          •      To develop a capacious understanding of “feminist dramaturgy” across theory and practice
          • To analyze key critical texts in feminist theory and philosophy and apply these methods when interpreting feminist performance 
          • To develop a writing-as-thinking practice alongside our theoretical and practical investigations
          • To identify core techniques for crafting feminist performance and put these core techniques into practice in a short, original, staging
          • To write an analytical paper that builds a conceptual bridge across feminist theory and practice

      • Note on Difficult Texts

        • We will encounter texts and visual materials that touch on difficult topics—topics to which you all will have individual relationships and responses. This particular course will also read and view sexually explicit material. I will do my best to flag sensitive topics where I am able, but I will not be able to anticipate every instance where they might appear. I welcome you to share your personal orientations to these works and topics and use these as points of entry into the material, as is comfortable for you. We will also hold a certain intellectual distance from these topics—we will contextualize, historicize, and analyze their wider social, historical, and cultural impacts beyond the personal. I expect each of you to navigate this dance to the best of your ability and be thoughtful and gentle in your approaches.