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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
City University of New York (CUNY)
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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Clowning with Identity examines the comedic performance of characters. The enjoyment of a character feels easy to accept uncritically, but these performances work because they deploy stereotypes and the cultural meanings surrounding them, often through acts of appropriation, as the performer makes the choice to embody an identity separate from their own. This project connects theory on drag and gender performance and its ideas about identity-remixing to rhetorical theory on comedy and clowning practices, sketching the ways American practices of drag, clown, and comedic character work are all deeply linked through their historical development. I theorize the productive ways that …
Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie
Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project investigates the later works of the celebrated New York–based lesbian-feminist performance troupe Split Britches made up of founding members Peggy Shaw (b. 1944) and Lois Weaver (b. 1949). Revealing how the duo consciously interlaces aspects of aging and age-based identity into the very fabric of their later performances in both form and content, this project analyzes how Shaw and Weaver integrate an explicitly anti-ageist and overtly queer representation of aging on the experimental stage. Their later performances serve to challenge narratives of decline and debilitation that come with (hetero)normative representations of old age and the life course in …