Drama 582 – Analysis of Dramatic Texts

This course explores how three major twentieth-century discourses about the body—feminism, queer theory, and disability theory—have informed western performance practice and scholarship. While we will review the history of these three discourses, we will mostly focus on how they have evolved in the last decade and on their relevance to present-day performance scholars. We will also examine how, as the theoretical questions changed, different types of sources became important to scholarly discussions: text-based drama, non-dramatic theatrical performance, and non-theatrical social performance practices. We will place our conversation in the larger context of western intellectual history, including events such as the linguistic turn and the affective turn.