A Feminist Documentary Play From Toronto: "Grace"

Margaret Atwood's novel, Alias Grace, can be read as a critique of the complex enterprise of narrative representation in relation to history and historical subjects. In this thesis I approach the text from a postmodern perspective to argue that the novel mobilises a historical event in order to challenge such traditional orthodoxies as the belief in an essential self and the transparent referentiality of language. Although set in nineteenth-century Upper Canada, the novel is primarily concerned with underlining and undermining realist forms and conventions from a late-twentieth-century perspective, to denaturalise the historical archive and to question whether we can know the "truth" about the past through its textual traces. Chapter

AAA-Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Volume 42, No 1

Grounded in a historical, socio-cultural consideration of Indigenous women's theatrical production, this dissertation examines representations of gendered violence in Canadian Indigenous women's drama. The female playwrights who are the focus of my thesis -Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan -counter colonial and occasionally postcolonial renditions of gendered and racialized violence by emphasizing female resistance and collective coalition. While these plays represent gendered violence as a real, material mechanism of colonial destruction, ultimately they work to promote messages of collective empowerment, recuperation, and survival. My thesis asks not only how a dramatic text might deploy a decolonizing aesthetic, but how it might redefine dramatic/literary and socio-cultural space for resistant and decolonial ends. Attentive to the great variance of subjective positions occupied by Indigenous women writers, I examine the historical context of theatrical reception, asking how the critic/spectator's engagement with and dissemination of knowledge concerning Indigenous theatre might enhance or impede this redefinition. Informed by Indigenous/feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives that address the production and dissemination of racialized regimes of representation, my study assesses the extent to which colonialist misrepresentations of Indigenous women have served to perpetuate demeaning stereotypes, justifying devaluation of and violence -especially sexual violence -against Indigenous women. Most significantly, my thesis considers how and to what degree resistant representations in Indigenous women's dramatic productions work against such representational and manifest violence.

This dissertation explores the place of musicals at the Stratford Festival of Canada—with specific attention focused on the function, and the value of an American art form in a classical theatre company devoted to the works of Shakespeare. I trace the history of music theatre at the Festival, including opera and operetta, and argue that the Festival’s commitment to music in its early history led to the organic inclusion of musicals in its seasons. I also give a more nuanced reading of the place of musicals at the Stratford Festival in analyzing the physical places where they are produced, and how they are valued within the company. Theatre critics commonly view musicals as money makers for the Festival to finance its real goal of producing Shakespeare and the classics. The economic value of musicals is undoubtedly important, and I examine it in detail, but it is only one facet of their purpose at Stratford. I problematize the role of musicals at Stratford, arguing that reducing the value of musicals to economic value alone is rooted in a historical construction of highbrow/lowbrow taste hierarchies that align musicals to bourgeois aesthetics and commercial theatre. I unpack the history of the way musicals have been trivialized as middlebrow entertainment within theatre communities and academia. I contend that their role cannot be fully understood by examining their economic value alone, but must be understood by analyzing their aesthetic value and entertainment value. Assessing the entertainment value of musicals means analyzing and valuing the pleasures that audience members derive from theatre that entertains them, even when its aesthetic value might be questionable. Musicals should also be assessed aesthetically, and that allows for the values—the tastes—of the critics to be heard. Studying the economic/commercial, aesthetic, entertainment value and socio-political factors present in musicals allows for a well-rounded analysis of the musicals and the many roles they fulfill at Stratford. It is an approach that attempts to balance text and context(s) by acknowledging the hierarchies of genre within the musical and theatrical worlds and highbrow/lowbrow considerations within the canon of musical theatre.

Theatre Research in Canada Recherches Theâtrales Au Canada, 2007

Theatre Survey, 2017

Gender, Place, and Culture, 2018

This article poses feminist biographical investigation as a dialectical approach to situated knowledge, and as a potential avenue for a feminist theorization of space and place. By exploring biography as a departure from canonical epistemological structures, the attempt here is to credit, contextualize and identify key places and people of origin in the evolution and production of theory and knowledge without such heavy dependency on the usual resources that legitimize theoretical and pedagogical contributions; such as academic publications, teaching contributions and references. The biographical focus of this article is the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs, an important contributor to urban studies whose theoretical and pedagogical contributions have gone largely unacknowledged by geographers and spatial thinkers. What can a biographical investigation teach us about feminist knowledge production relating to the production of space? What does feminist biography offer epistemologically to our understandings of space? These questions are examined here through the theoretical contributions of Grace Lee Boggs, a long-time resident of Detroit, second generation Chinese American, civil rights and feminist activist and working class philosopher, as a means of exploring biography as a feminist research methodology.

Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.

circle.ubc.ca, 2014

This critical ethnography investigates the pedagogical spaces constituted within a youth-led, participatory theatre production, Surviving in the Cracks (Wager et al., 2009). The popular theatre production documented the lived experiences of eight street-youth, including their struggles to survive in the face of cuts to public health resources in Vancouver. As an applied theatre study, this theatre project is defined as a messy and rich site of pedagogical inquiry that is examined through multiple theoretical and methodological frameworks. It draws on critical feminist pedagogy, critical youth studies and theatre and literacy research with the purpose of revealing how drama and theatre spaces provide “anomalous” (Ellsworth, 2005) learning places, or out-of-the-ordinary learning spaces, that youth and researchers collectively embodied during the applied drama and theatre process and production. Analysis of ethnographic data generated before, during, and after the theatrical production of Surviving in the Cracks suggests how drama and theatre with street youth opens up embodied pedagogical spaces. Two different methods of analysis bring multiple perspectives to this work through exploring how meaning was collectively constructed, how multimodal literacy practices were used in critical ways, how power was negotiated, how desire was manifested through imaginaries, and how safe spaces were generated by this community of youth within selected pedagogical moments of resistance during the theatre process. Specifically, the script is analyzed with a youth participant, followed by the analysis of particular moments of resistance during performance creation and production. This research advances knowledge of how informal learning spaces and youth resistances within education become crucial parts of pedagogy and should be considered as future foundations and expansions of education. Implications include using multiple methodological lenses in order to work alongside, for and with youth, as well as being able to reach larger audiences of youth, communities, educators, and scholars through different analytical perspectives. By examining how theatre provides a space for marginalized youth to engage in dialogues about complex social issues, this research contributes to the fields of critical and feminist pedagogy, language and literacy education, drama in education, critical youth studies, and collaborative methodological studies in qualitative research.