Reproductive Rights as Theatrical Counterculture in Women's Drama
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2015-04-27
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Abstract
This dissertation engages with a critically neglected subgenre of dramas by women on reproductive rights, which emerged during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and resurfaced towards the end of the same century. Since these plays also intersected with the rise of feminist movements, women playwrights created feminist spaces of performance for their work, which had been thus far marginalized from canonical discourse. The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on the plays of British birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, and on dramatic texts by African American playwrights Mary Burrill and Angelina Grimké, which appeared in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. These amateur works introduced scientific, eugenic, and racial concerns into dramatic representations of feminist issues. The third chapter features professional playwright Susan Glaspell’s reproductive rights dramas, Chains of Dew (1921) and The Verge (1922), both written for the last season of the Provincetown Players. Glaspell introduced Brechtian theatrical innovations into the birth control rhetoric reinforcing a growing foundation of women’s activist theatre. The second half of the research centers on a similar confluence of feminist rights and reproductive rights, which appeared with the rise of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), such as in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and cloning. These contemporary and recent plays pushed back against the use of artificial gestational procedures which sometimes effaced women from their central roles in natural, biological reproduction. Thus, Michelene Wandor’s AID Thy Neighbour (1978) and Lisa Loomer’s Expecting Isabel (2005) offer feminist counterpoints to man-made in-vitro fertilization policies. Wendy Lill’s Chimera (2007) and Cassandra Medley’s Relativity (2006) in turn tackle stem cell research issues from a matriarchal standpoint while also echoing some of the eugenic and racial concerns raised by the birth control plays. The last chapter takes the critical discussion to the frontiers of reproductive rights technology and ethics through Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002) and Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice (2003). Churchill’s drama produced and reproduced a feminist science rhetoric that became a blueprint for female dramatic agency, while Lochhead’s work reasserted women’s standing as figures of scientific and literary authority. In summary, this dissertation traces how women playwrights deployed control of biological reproduction as a dramatic theme to revision and reassert women’s often overlooked contributions to canonical theatre. By focusing on reproductive rights drama, women playwrights created a counterculture of independent, continuous, and retroactive feminist theatre.
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Arciniega, M. (2015). Reproductive Rights as Theatrical Counterculture in Women's Drama (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27637