Abstract
Fitzpatrick explores the representation of rape and sexual violence in women’s dramatic writing since the beginning of the feminist theatre movement. The authors’ and theatre-makers’ strategies for representing violence tends to reflect specific cultural circumstances, both in the nature of the violence and in the techniques used to write and stage it. In general these place the female character’s experience at the centre of the dramatic conflict, while seeking to avoid certain pitfalls of staging rape—such exposing the female body to the scopophilic gaze of the spectators. Fitzpatrick examines these strategies, some of which are explicitly feminist, while others draw upon conventions of naturalistic and realistic dramaturgy and performance.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the best-known and most controversial examples of this is Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, in which a First Nations woman is raped with a crucifix. While the expression of colonial oppression is very clear and apparent in that image, many within the First Nations community objected to the use, yet again, of women’s bodies and experiences as metaphor. See for example Susan Billingham, ‘The Configurations of Gender in Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing’. Modern Drama 46:3 (2003): 358–380; Alan Filewod, ‘Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity’. Theatre Journal 46:3 (1994): 363–373; Jennifer Preston, ‘Weesageechak Begins to Dance: Native Earth Performing Arts Inc’. TDR 36:1 (1992): 135–159; Marie Annharte Baker, ‘Angry Enough to Spit, but with Dry Lips It Hurts More than You Know’. Canadian Theatre Review 68 (1991): 88–89.
- 2.
For these companies, the aesthetic of group creation (as well as their feminist politics) likely mitigated against their publication, as the work has no single author’s name attached to it and the texts were written to be adaptable for different audiences and spaces during the run of performance. However, three are published in Michelene Wandor’s Strike While the Iron is Hot including the title play by Red Ladder, and The Women’s Theatre Group educational play for young audiences, My Mother Said I Never Should. Although the mode of representation and the simplicity of the arguments, and some of the characterization and dialogue, date the work, many of the issues persist as part of the fabric of women’s lives: the characters debate the merits of married women working outside the home, men contributing the childrearing and housework, and equal pay for equal work (Strike While the Iron is Hot, 1974). Equal pay is still some distance away for many women; but the male character’s blunt refusal to do ‘women’s work’ is startling for a contemporary reader, and the loving but unequal domestic relationships would be written as abusive in a contemporary play, suggesting that second-wave feminism had a very considerable effect on social attitudes and behaviours.
- 3.
This is a perennial problem. Laura Bates’s blog everydaysexism.com allows women to record everyday experiences of street harassment. Bates has recently published a book by the same title that explores the banal and ordinary harassment of women in public spaces and public life. See https://everydaysexism.com.
- 4.
The female characters’ inability to discuss their experience in Ficky Stingers is reminiscent of an exchange in Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, a Northern Irish play about the experiences of women over three generations in a Protestant, Unionist family. In one humorous but poignant scene, the central character’s mother attempts to explain menstruation: ‘It happens once a month … you know where you go to the toilet … down there’, and following this with the confusing warning not to let boys ‘do anything that’s not nice’ (1989, 28–29). Although Reid’s mother and daughter share an affectionate relationship and the play is not concerned with sexual violence, the secrecy, the lack of a familiar language to discuss female biology, and the anxiety about sexuality and sin disempower the female characters and render them semi-articulate.
- 5.
A recent example that illustrates this attitude is the Rochdale case in England, where girls in their early teens were groomed, sexually abused, and prostituted by a group of men. The men supplied the girls with soft drugs and alcohol. Because the girls came from troubled backgrounds, police and social workers ignored evidence of abuse over a period of years. The Serious Case Review carried out after a court case in which the men were convicted and imprisoned, found that ‘Action that was taken was often focused on addressing the immediate presenting concerns such as offending behaviour, drugs and alcohol misuse and sexual activity, rather than identifying and addressing the underlying reasons why the young person were presenting as they were. Their behaviour was often justified or excused as “their choice” and as “adolescent behaviour”, and was not considered to be a reaction to longer term deeper issues or current abusive relationships’ (Boxall and Wonnacott 2013, online).
- 6.
Thanks to the Druid archive at the National University of Ireland, Galway for access to early drafts of On Raftery’s Hill.
- 7.
For an exploration and analysis of performance work that responds to these revelations, see Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 8.
This comes from the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 422–674.
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Fitzpatrick, L. (2018). Women Playwrights: Subverting Representational Strategies. In: Rape on the Contemporary Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4_3
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