Theatre Journal: Contemporary Women Playwrights

Theatre Journal
Call for Papers
Special Issue on "Contemporary Women Playwrights"

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." In 2008, however, 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 women’s writing for the theatre 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. For this special issue, the editors invite essays that center on issues relating to women playwrights who have been active within the past twenty years and that explore such topics as: the politics, economics, and material conditions of production and reception as they pertain to women playwrights; concerns and techniques in playwriting by women; innovative theoretical frameworks and critical methods for articulating the political and aesthetic affiliations and interventions of women playwrights; and the impact of such historical 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 as they have affected academic and scholarly engagements with women playwrights.

Please send inquiries about this special issue to Penny Farfan, Coeditor, Theatre Journal (farfan@ucalgary.ca), and Lesley Ferris, Guest Coeditor (ferris.36@osu.edu).

Submissions should be e-mailed to Bob Kowkabany, Managing Editor, at doriclay@aol.com by April 15, 2010.