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Theatre and Feminism
Theatre & Feminism tells the story of the movement known as feminist performance theory. It explores key debates from its 40-year history, engages with the work of groundbreaking thinkers including Elin Diamond, Jill Dolan, Peggy Phelan and Elaine Aston, and includes case studies of recent performances by established and emerging feminist artists.
- GenresTheatreNonfiction
104 pages, Paperback
First published December 4, 2015
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About the author
Kim Solga
49 books5 followersKim Solga is an artist, writer, outdoors adventurer, art educator and arts ecommerce specialist. She writes handy how-to books on art and selling art and crafts online.
View Kim's watercolors at http://www.solga.com. Follow on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/KimSolgaArtw...
There's also a website for Selling Arts and Crafts Online at http://www.selingartsandcraftsonline.com.
View Kim's watercolors at http://www.solga.com. Follow on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/KimSolgaArtw...
There's also a website for Selling Arts and Crafts Online at http://www.selingartsandcraftsonline.com.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 21, 2025
Theatre & Feminism offers both a historical overview and a critical framework for understanding how feminist theory has shaped, and continues to shape theatrical practice. The book positions feminism not as a niche academic discourse but as a necessary lens for examining the ways gender is constructed, regulated, and contested on stage. Solga begins by addressing the persistent cultural ambivalence surrounding the term “feminism,” arguing for its continued relevance as a human- rights concept rather than a narrowly ideological one. As she writes:
“Feminism remains a contentious term, but for me it is the best and most accurate term to use when thinking about gendered experience from a human rights perspective. Any human being worried about discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation will have some affinity with the term, whether or not they realize it.”
From this foundation, Solga turns to the development of feminist performance theory, tracing how scholars and practitioners have interrogated the gendered dynamics of spectatorship. Drawing on cultural materialism and psychoanalytic theory, she outlines how the “male gaze” functions not merely as an individual act of looking but as a socially conditioned mode of perception embedded within theatrical space. The following passage encapsulates this synthesis:
“Cultural materialism refers to the study of the social, political and economic conditions that shape the choices made by individuals in specific real-world contexts, as well as by characters on stage; Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, meanwhile, examine how humans become subjects through the acts of looking, watching and desiring what they see. By blending both of these theories with feminist theatrical examples, writers like Dolan, Diamond and Phelan crafted feminist performance theory’s core understanding of the gendered nature of the spectator’s gaze at the theatre. Importantly, this ‘gaze’ does not simply refer to one individual’s act of looking at (or on) the stage; the gaze may be focused through individual viewers’ eyes, but it derives from those viewers’ unconscious commitment to shared social and cultural expectations about how men and women should each appear, act and speak, both on stage and in the world in a given place and time.”
Solga then situates this discussion within broader debates about gender performativity, drawing on Judith Butler’s influential argument that gender is not an innate essence but a repeated set of socially regulated acts. The book uses Butler’s theory to illuminate how theatrical representation both reflects and challenges the norms that govern gendered behavior:
“As Butler writes in Gender Trouble, ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’. Butler is arguing that we only seem to be ‘naturally’ (or, as Brecht would say, inevitably) men or women; really, we create our genders anew every time we choose how to act, what to wear, how to present ourselves in public. It’s important to realize that Butler is not arguing that human beings simply choose to ‘dress’ themselves in gender, like a costume, each day; she emphasizes that the ‘rigid’ codes of permissible gendered behaviour are ingrained in our cultures and learned at both conscious and unconscious levels from an extremely young age.”
One of the book’s most compelling sections addresses what Solga calls the “contemporary afterlife” of feminist theatre. Here she examines the shift from second-wave activism toward a 21st-century landscape shaped by neoliberal affect, social media, and the commodification of “feeling.” Solga draws on Geraldine Harris and Elaine Aston to articulate how feminism has come to be experienced as a set of emotions—often negative or burdensome—rather than as a political project:
“For Aston, the paradigm I sketched out in this book – in which women living in democratic, post-industrialized nations today find themselves uneasy about the label ‘feminist’ – is first and foremost a felt experience. It is a sensation (rather than a firm understanding or a clear knowledge) that feminism’s work is ‘over,’ that women have already ‘won,’ and that feminism therefore cannot capture a contemporary woman’s experience of being in the world today. Neoliberal culture relentlessly privileges how each of us feels, using social media and soft political messaging to create blasts of good feeling despite the ugly reality of daily news cycles, and despite the less than ideal material conditions in which many of us objectively live our lives. In this context, Aston argues, feminism has come to be associated with negative and inauthentic feelings, and those feelings have a lot of power over us.”
Solga also devotes significant attention to the ways feminist artists across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom have resisted theatrical realism. She argues that these resistances—ranging from post-dramatic experimentation to documentary performance—opened pathways for LGBTQ+ and queer-centered work, which similarly challenges normative structures of representation. By mapping these regional differences, Solga highlights how feminist performance evolves in response to specific cultural and political conditions rather than following a single unified trajectory.
Another notable contribution of the book is its use of architectural metaphors to describe feminist interventions in theatrical space. Solga’s discussion of “cracks” in theatrical structures offers a vivid way of imagining how feminist performance disrupts patriarchal containment. These cracks represent both literal and conceptual ruptures—moments when the limits imposed on women’s bodies and voices become visible, and therefore open to reconfiguration.
This attention to visibility extends to Solga’s analysis of spectatorship. She argues that feminist performance can shift audiences from passive observers to active witnesses, particularly in works that address the “violently disappeared” female body. By foregrounding the mechanisms that erase or sanitize gendered violence, feminist theatre forces spectators to confront the structures that enable such erasure. This transformation of spectatorship is presented not as a moral imperative but as an aesthetic and political strategy.
In its final pages, Theatre & Feminism turns toward the project of decolonizing the stage. Solga urges scholars and practitioners to move beyond Western theatrical traditions and to adopt what she calls “contextualized listening”—an approach that attends to the specific histories, cultures, and power dynamics that shape performance practices around the world. This call for a more expansive, globally attuned feminist theatre studies underscores the book’s commitment to ongoing critical inquiry rather than fixed conclusions.
Taken as a whole, Theatre & Feminism provides a rigorous and accessible account of how feminist theory has reshaped the study and practice of theatre. Through its combination of historical overview, theoretical synthesis, and attention to contemporary debates, the book offers a valuable framework for understanding how performance can expose, challenge, and reimagine the structures that govern gendered experience.
“Feminism remains a contentious term, but for me it is the best and most accurate term to use when thinking about gendered experience from a human rights perspective. Any human being worried about discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation will have some affinity with the term, whether or not they realize it.”
From this foundation, Solga turns to the development of feminist performance theory, tracing how scholars and practitioners have interrogated the gendered dynamics of spectatorship. Drawing on cultural materialism and psychoanalytic theory, she outlines how the “male gaze” functions not merely as an individual act of looking but as a socially conditioned mode of perception embedded within theatrical space. The following passage encapsulates this synthesis:
“Cultural materialism refers to the study of the social, political and economic conditions that shape the choices made by individuals in specific real-world contexts, as well as by characters on stage; Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, meanwhile, examine how humans become subjects through the acts of looking, watching and desiring what they see. By blending both of these theories with feminist theatrical examples, writers like Dolan, Diamond and Phelan crafted feminist performance theory’s core understanding of the gendered nature of the spectator’s gaze at the theatre. Importantly, this ‘gaze’ does not simply refer to one individual’s act of looking at (or on) the stage; the gaze may be focused through individual viewers’ eyes, but it derives from those viewers’ unconscious commitment to shared social and cultural expectations about how men and women should each appear, act and speak, both on stage and in the world in a given place and time.”
Solga then situates this discussion within broader debates about gender performativity, drawing on Judith Butler’s influential argument that gender is not an innate essence but a repeated set of socially regulated acts. The book uses Butler’s theory to illuminate how theatrical representation both reflects and challenges the norms that govern gendered behavior:
“As Butler writes in Gender Trouble, ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’. Butler is arguing that we only seem to be ‘naturally’ (or, as Brecht would say, inevitably) men or women; really, we create our genders anew every time we choose how to act, what to wear, how to present ourselves in public. It’s important to realize that Butler is not arguing that human beings simply choose to ‘dress’ themselves in gender, like a costume, each day; she emphasizes that the ‘rigid’ codes of permissible gendered behaviour are ingrained in our cultures and learned at both conscious and unconscious levels from an extremely young age.”
One of the book’s most compelling sections addresses what Solga calls the “contemporary afterlife” of feminist theatre. Here she examines the shift from second-wave activism toward a 21st-century landscape shaped by neoliberal affect, social media, and the commodification of “feeling.” Solga draws on Geraldine Harris and Elaine Aston to articulate how feminism has come to be experienced as a set of emotions—often negative or burdensome—rather than as a political project:
“For Aston, the paradigm I sketched out in this book – in which women living in democratic, post-industrialized nations today find themselves uneasy about the label ‘feminist’ – is first and foremost a felt experience. It is a sensation (rather than a firm understanding or a clear knowledge) that feminism’s work is ‘over,’ that women have already ‘won,’ and that feminism therefore cannot capture a contemporary woman’s experience of being in the world today. Neoliberal culture relentlessly privileges how each of us feels, using social media and soft political messaging to create blasts of good feeling despite the ugly reality of daily news cycles, and despite the less than ideal material conditions in which many of us objectively live our lives. In this context, Aston argues, feminism has come to be associated with negative and inauthentic feelings, and those feelings have a lot of power over us.”
Solga also devotes significant attention to the ways feminist artists across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom have resisted theatrical realism. She argues that these resistances—ranging from post-dramatic experimentation to documentary performance—opened pathways for LGBTQ+ and queer-centered work, which similarly challenges normative structures of representation. By mapping these regional differences, Solga highlights how feminist performance evolves in response to specific cultural and political conditions rather than following a single unified trajectory.
Another notable contribution of the book is its use of architectural metaphors to describe feminist interventions in theatrical space. Solga’s discussion of “cracks” in theatrical structures offers a vivid way of imagining how feminist performance disrupts patriarchal containment. These cracks represent both literal and conceptual ruptures—moments when the limits imposed on women’s bodies and voices become visible, and therefore open to reconfiguration.
This attention to visibility extends to Solga’s analysis of spectatorship. She argues that feminist performance can shift audiences from passive observers to active witnesses, particularly in works that address the “violently disappeared” female body. By foregrounding the mechanisms that erase or sanitize gendered violence, feminist theatre forces spectators to confront the structures that enable such erasure. This transformation of spectatorship is presented not as a moral imperative but as an aesthetic and political strategy.
In its final pages, Theatre & Feminism turns toward the project of decolonizing the stage. Solga urges scholars and practitioners to move beyond Western theatrical traditions and to adopt what she calls “contextualized listening”—an approach that attends to the specific histories, cultures, and power dynamics that shape performance practices around the world. This call for a more expansive, globally attuned feminist theatre studies underscores the book’s commitment to ongoing critical inquiry rather than fixed conclusions.
Taken as a whole, Theatre & Feminism provides a rigorous and accessible account of how feminist theory has reshaped the study and practice of theatre. Through its combination of historical overview, theoretical synthesis, and attention to contemporary debates, the book offers a valuable framework for understanding how performance can expose, challenge, and reimagine the structures that govern gendered experience.
July 6, 2016
An informative and thorough recap of the ideas and debates at the centre of feminist theatre and performance scholarship, offering an accessible introduction to complex feminist theory as well as some beautifully drawn and entertaining case studies. A lovely addition to anyone's feminist or theatre studies library.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews