ASTR Working Session CFP: Contemporary Women Playwrights

[Penny Farfan]

*American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) 2009**
San Juan, Puerto Rico**
Condado Plaza Hotel and Casino**
November 12-15, 2009*

*Working Session **Call for Papers**: **CONTEMPORARY WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS**
Deadline for proposals: **Friday, May 15, 2009
Conveners: Anna Birch, Manchester Met University; Penny Farfan, 
University of Calgary; Lesley Ferris, Ohio State University*_
annabirch1 at mac.com <mailto:annabirch1 at mac.com>_; _farfan at ucalgary.ca 
<mailto:farfan at ucalgary.ca>_; ferris.36 at osu.edu <mailto:ferris.36 at osu.edu>

In her ground-breaking 1989 volume /Making A Spectacle: Feminist Essays 
on Contemporary Women's Theatre/, Lynda Hart remarked, "The latter half 
of the twentieth century has seen an emergence of women playwrights in 
numbers equal to the entire history of their dramatic foremothers." Hart 
regarded the book's contributors, as well as the playwrights themselves, 
as working "in defiance of the warning generally given to women to avoid 
having attention drawn to themselves, a prohibition against being 
publicly seen and heard." Like the playwrights, feminist critics were 
"appropriating the stage to assert [their] own images."

In 2008, nearly twenty years after Hart's volume signaled a kind of 
golden age of women's theatre writing, playwrights Sarah Schulman and 
Julia Jordan convened a "standing-room-only" town hall meeting in New 
York City to discuss a bias in the subsidized New York theatre that has 
male writers being produced four times more than women. Clearly, despite 
the ground-swell of feminist dramatic and critical writing that Hart 
captured in 1989, what she called "the last bastion of male hegemony in 
the literary arts" has, in the early twenty-first century, not yet been 
dismantled.

This working session will focus on contemporary playwriting by women, 
considering, but not limited to, the following questions:

- Who are some of the key voices in contemporary playwriting by women? 
What are some of the concerns and techniques that distinguish their 
work? How is the work of contemporary women "playwrights" being 
"written"? Are "playwright" and "playwriting" adequate terms for 
describing contemporary practices?

- What contextual research, theoretical frameworks, and critical methods 
are required to articulate the political and aesthetic affiliations and 
interventions of contemporary women playwrights?

- What work by contemporary women playwrights gets produced, where, why, 
how, and for whom? What work by contemporary women playwrights is not 
making it to production, and why?

- How have such developments as the critical turn to feminist 
performance in the 1990s, the move toward gender studies, the rise of 
queer theory, and the articulation of postcolonial criticism affected 
academic and scholarly engagements with contemporary women playwrights?

In her manifesto "Feminist Performance and Utopia," in Elaine Aston and 
Sue-Ellen Case's 2007 edited volume /Staging International Feminisms/, 
Jill Dolan recalls the feminist "academy-community synergy" that helped 
to circulate challenging work by women beyond its original performance 
venues in the 1980s. This working session aims to re-produce some of the 
synergy that vitalized 1980s feminist theatre writing, extending and 
updating that earlier conversation so as to continue to intervene into 
the 'default position' of producing the white male playwright.

*SESSION FORMAT AND GUIDELINES*
The working session will be a combined reading group/seminar. We invite 
proposals submitting 1) the title of a play written by a woman within 
the past twenty years (published or in manuscript); 2) an abstract (250 
words) indicating why it is important to consider this work; and 3) a 
biographical note about yourself (150 words).

A bibliography of selected plays will be circulated to those accepted 
into the session. Participants will read all plays (maximum 12) over the 
summer. By September 15, participants will circulate critical statements 
on their plays (1000 words). The plays and statements will serve as the 
basis for a pre-conference email discussion and the working session at 
the conference.

*Proposal Submissions: *Please submit proposed play titles (plus 
publication/manuscript information), abstracts, and bios by email to all 
three session leaders by Friday, May 15, 2009:

Anna Birch, Manchester Met University (annabirch1 at mac.com)
Penny Farfan, University of Calgary (farfan at ucalgary.ca)
Lesley Ferris, Ohio State University (ferris.36 at osu.edu 
<mailto:ferris.36 at osu.edu>)

All selected participants must become members of ASTR. For general 
guidelines for participants in ASTR working sessions, see 
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.aspx

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