The Fluidity of Gender Oppression in Postcolonial Drama

New Theatre Quarterly, 2002

2021

The present paper focuses on Irish drama written and staged before and after independence from the perspective of the binary opposition of traditional gendered representations of colony and colonizer. From A. Gregory and W.B. Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907) and O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy (1923-26) to Teresa Deevy's The King of Spain's Daughter (1935) and Katie Roche (1936), and SeánO'Faolain's She Had to Do Something (1937), the paper underscores how these plays present women who only apparently contradict traditional and externally imposed strictures. In the light of Maria Lugones' theories on the coloniality of gender – as regards the intersection between gender, race and sexuality – the paper investigates the extent to which Irish playwrights challenged the traditional image of women and the role religion, politics and the examples of other European countries had in helping, or hindering, the const...

Abstract: In the present era in the post-colonial literature woman has become the centre of discussion, not only in India but also in western countries. Amartya Sen in his “more than 100 million women are missing” mentions two main reasons for gender inequality, first thing is the cultural bias and discrimination while providing nutritious food and general medical treatment. Cultural biases always keep the male domination at the top. Silvia wallaby in her “theorizing patriarch” depicts patriarchy as a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate oppress and exploit women

2001

This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre. This anthology encompasses both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts, all dealing with imperialism and its aftermath. It includes work from Canada, the Caribbean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand and Australia. A general introduction outlines major themes in postcolonial plays. Introductions to individual plays include information on authors as well as overviews of cultural contexts, major ideas and performance history. Dramaturgical techniques in the plays draw on Western theatre as well as local performance traditions and include agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry. The plays dramatize diverse issues, such as: *globalization * political corruption * race and class relations *slavery *gender and sexuality *media representation *nationalism

This special issue explores 21st-century articulations of gender, nation, and colonialism.

Is this a Culture of Trauma? Eds. Bick, M. and Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Oxford, U.K.: Inter-Disciplinary Press. ebook., 2012

In this paper I argue that the radical textual practice in Barbara Baynton"s (1857-1929) novel, Human Toll (1907, foreshadows contemporary feminine appropriation and subversion of the Bildungsroman genre which testifies to traumatic experience; specifically the creative emergence from the traumatic inheritance of feminine embodiment, demonstrated by concern with feminine subjectivity and signified by the colonised female (body). What Baynton argues for in Human Toll is an autonomous place for feminine expression, for écriture feminine, in the symbolic world. In a perturbation of genres, Baynton combines melodrama-the genre par excellence in which women have agency by default; romance; and the Bildungsroman, to create an impression of how fraught access to creative agency is for women in the context of trauma, and the cultural constraints on women at the cusp of Federation in the Australian Bush. As her heroine emerges from the feminine traumatic paradigm, her encounters with many aspects of the phallocentric world provoke traumatic repetition. For Baynton no masculine edifice is sacrosanct: Catholicism, property law, marriage, sex, education, wealth, and class are all found to be wanting in relation to the feminine. Experiences of opposition and denial serve to spur the protagonist into a fervent conviction of her desire for agency, and to find creative and cathartic expression in writing. In doing so, as Suzette Henke contends, the female author initiates an enabling discourse of testimony and self-revelation. In audaciously reinscribing the claims of feminine desire into the texts of a traditionally patriarchal culture, this écriture feminine attempts to reframe embodied experience through experimentation of assumptions around signifying practices, interrogating the outcome for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity.

University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 2021

African drama and theatre discourse on gender relations often address some cultural issues as salient factors that undermine the female quest to transcend marginal and debilitating spaces through self-emancipation and education. This paper examines these peculiarities and discusses the underpinnings of patriarchy and the female ordeal, particularly as this relates to the girl-child such as sexual abuse, underage marriage, female genital mutilation, sextrafficking and other constraints manifest against her will to survive in a patriarchal society. This paper is inspired by the fact that the female child still struggles to grapple with numerous challenges in a hegemonic culture. Using the descriptive method of analysis, the paper adopts the feminist approach to analyze this dilemma head-on. It makes a critical contribution to the girl-child and explores the dominant cultural milieu prevalent in the African rural society that appears to have fostered the course of her numerous predicaments. The paper submits that the African female and the girl-child in rural settings can successfully break through such hegemonic and disconcerting yokes by sheer resilience.