2 - Gender and Performance
from Part I - Performing Gender
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
A feminist approach to anything means paying attention to women. It means paying attention when women appear as characters and noticing when they do not. It means making some ‘invisible’ mechanisms visible and pointing out, when necessary, that while the emperor has no clothes, the empress has no body. It means paying attention to women as writers and as readers or audience members. It means taking nothing for granted because the things we take for granted are usually those that were constructed from the most powerful point of view in the culture and that is not the point of view of women.
Gayle Austin draws attention to many of the factors that are involved in assessing the place of women within any period of dramatic production. Her strategies have evolved in order to combat several methodological problems that exist when studying women's place in dramatic history. The largest of these is of course that theatre is a temporal form. Although surviving texts make mention of female characters, it is difficult to ascertain how active women were within medieval culture. Fragments of records show that they were present on the medieval ‘stage’, though these appearances are commonly in folk plays, local festive customs, itinerant performance, and in dances and parades held for parish or civic occasions. Because of the paucity of records the extent of women's performance remains open to speculation.
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- Gender and Medieval Drama , pp. 35 - 54Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006