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Transformed Feminist Spaces And Identity Construction: Women Pandwani Performers In Indian Folk Theater, Shalini Attri

Journal of International Women's Studies

Theater proposes an alternative reality and different possible identities offering a framework of how representation works in performances, and it further provides an understanding of the transformative potential of enactment. The attempt to retrieve and re-write women’s histories through performances develops a culture of reconstructive capacities that resists absorption into the dominant culture. In theater, women have asserted their own vision and exercised their own viewpoints, expanding feminist space and communicating with spectators by employing publicly encoded signs. The folk theater of India, in particular, provides a public space to the (silenced) subaltern to assert agency and question the modalities …