Securing a Place of Power: Reinventing the Role of Women in Theatrical Representation :: Research Papers

Securing a Place of Power: Reinventing the Role of Women in Theatrical Representation In The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Jill Dolan examines the current hegemony of the â€Å"white, heterosexual, middle-class male† (121) as the subject of representation in theater. She examines why feminist attempts to expose this bias and use it to change the objectification of the roles of women have failed, when this has even been attempted, and furnishes her hypothesis on how this failure can be prevented. In the dominant illusionist tradition of American theater, the individuality of the spectator is subsumed in the singular mass of the audience. The face most often given to this mass audience is that of the â€Å"white, heterosexual, middle-class male† (121). Women’s roles are objectified, and, in the process, the feminist spectator is alienated as her gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation have no relation to what is presented onstage. Feminism is a critique of the prevailing male-dominated social norm that seeks to change this norm and therefore is the platform from which to change its domination in theater. Dolan enumerates three segments of American feminism: liberal, cultural or radical, and materialist. She credits liberal feminism with the bolstering of female visibility and involvement in theater and acknowledges the women-affirming aspects of cultural feminism, but she finds them both flawed and unsuitable for an effective attack on the male domination of theater. Materialist feminism looks at women as a class, oppressed by material conditions and social relations. It considers gender as a social construct, in the service of the dominant culture’s ideology and accepted as normative by the less powerful, which is oppressive to both men and women. It rejects the universality of the mythical Woman and instead views women as historical subjects whose position in the social structures of the dominant culture is influenced by race, class, and sexual orientation. Materialist feminism sees as necessity the unmasking of the ideas of gender and power of the dominant culture and thus what most theater and performance represents. Materialist feminism does not aim to judge, but to examine the ways in which a performance delivers its ideological message, in order to formulate strategies for combating the oppressive cultural assumptions inherent in this message. Its goal is â€Å"to affect a larger cultural change in the ideological and material condition of women and men† (18), and it sees the necessity of politically analyzing the current condition and its representational