Analysing Gender in Performance

Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.

“A pioneering compendium of critical encounters with a thrilling range of styles and contents, Analysing Gender in Performance reminds us that both gender and performance are generative and fluid terms, differently meaningful and analytically useful across historical moments and geographies. The acutely argued collected essays underline the terms’ critical necessity as vectors through which to understand how global culture is made, moved, and improved by performing and witnessing bodies in space and time.” (Professor Jill Dolan, Annan Professor, Princeton University, USA)

“A highly engaging collection that reveals the full scope of scholarship on gender and queer identities in contemporary and historical performance. From costuming to staging, the materiality of gendered performance is deftly explored for its intersections with race, class and important political ideas such as feminist ecologies. Significantly, the book also covers casting and production processes, and it has a strategically-placed section with artists discussing their work. A valuable reference source for artists, teachers and researchers.” (Professor Peta Tait FAHA, La Trobe University, Australia)

“Analysing Gender in Performance is a compelling and field-expanding collection, offering fresh readings of familiar figures and territories alongside illuminating case studies of new voices and perspectives. The editors’ careful attendance to intersectionality honours the complexities inherent in the volume’s interdisciplinary discourse, offering multiple pathways through the volume for the reader. This is a much-needed contribution to gender and performance studies in a twenty-first century global context that generates a provoking and inspiring “spacious creative network”.” (Dr. Aoife McGrath, Senior Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast, Ireland)

“In this fantastic new collection, J. Paul Halferty and Cathy Leeney have assembled a dynamic group of essays, interviews, and manifestos. Ranging in coverage from the 1970s to the 2020s, with chapters devoted to individual artists (Anna Deveare Smith, Caryl Churchill, Lazlo Pearlman, Nina Arsenault) and celebrated companies (Mabou Mines, Split Britches, Théâtre du Soleil, thisispopbaby), this volume offers fresh new approaches to analysing gender in performance and should appeal to students and scholars alike.” (Professor Marlis Schweitzer, Professor in the Department of Theatre, York University, Canada)

J. Paul Halferty is Assistant Professor in Drama Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. His research on queer theatre and performance in Canada and Ireland has been published in various journals and anthologies. 

Cathy Leeney is Research Active Assistant Professor in Drama Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. Teaching, research and publications are in Gender in Performance, Women in Irish Theatre, and Staging Practices.