School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/395

Filters

2000 - 2006 2
1 1
2
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Subject: gender × Subject: cultural studies ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    The I, the eye and the orifice: an interview with Catherine Millet
    RUTHERFORD, JENNIFER ( 2006)
    The position of a woman as the object at a male orgy has always been a presence signifying only as orifice; a site without subjectivity around which male pleasure is organised and virility enacted for the gaze of other men. But what happens if the focal point shifts? If in lieu of this psychasthenia the body of a woman in an orgy becomes the focal point around which space is organised? And what if the woman then gives voice to this focal point articulating both its gaze and its pleasures? Catherine Millet makes such a shift in her sexual autobiography The Sexual Life of Catherine M., but critical responses to the text have shown little interest in the books re-spatialisation of sexual relations.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Rethinking the performance of Brecht: lines of flight, becoming and the female subject
    VARNEY, DENISE ( 2000)
    This essay brings together a number of related but frequently separated discourses around the themes of performance, gender and Epic theatre within the frame of a feminist analysis of theatrical performance. It maps the possibilities of exchange across the borders of specific practices and their discourses in an effort to think about the productive value of border-crossing. I model this crossing-of-borders on a reading of the text and performance of Bertolt Brecht' s modernist classic, The Good Person of Sichuan, in which the theatrical notion of performance is examined through a feminist application of the Deleuzian concept of becoming. The Deleuzian analysis of Brecht adds a new dimension to performance analysis and helps to revise and historicise Brecht' s politics for a contemporary public. This task is an important one for Brecht is worth doing still. He returned to the Australian stage in 1998 and 1999 in two contrast ing productions - the true-to-Brecht Melbourne Theatre Company production of The Resistable Rise ofArturo Ui, directed by Simon Phillips and the 'renovated' Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney) production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Kantor - suggesting that a revival of interest in political theatre position s itself through a relation to Brechtian theatre. Finding a productive way forward for Brechtian theatre is crucial to the avoidance of the pitfalls that negate the cultural critique that the plays make possible.