Publication details
Gender in Czech theater and performance art
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | In socialist Czechoslovakia, feminism was regarded as an unnecessary bourgeois relic and back then, almost none of the female artists wanted to be associated with the term. Using recent findings from various feminist theories and queer studies, I would like to examine the mechanisms that have been shaping Czech performative culture from 1989 until today. With the post-revolutionary excitement about Western culture, feminism together with queer studies started to penetrate Czech academia and art, predominantly in fine arts and performance art. The contemporary theatrical and performance scene contains various forms of feminist and queer expression, both subtle and radical. This may include narrative changes in written drama, focus on the female/queer body in dance or physical theater, experimental performances and drag. The theoretical framework of this project relies mainly on feminist critiques drawing from poststructuralist philosophy (the concept of gender performativity by Judith Butler) and radical feminist theories of last decades (e.g., xenofeminism and glitch feminism). On several representative artworks, I aim to provide analysis of contemporary tendencies in theater and performance art under the lens of feminism and queer theory. I hope to deconstruct the relations and tensions between the private and the political, the body and society, and performance and everyday life. This way, my project should offer a reflection of complex performative phenomena as well as a possible revision of the Czech theoretical discourse. |
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