PrintCall for Contributions: From ‘Minority’ to ‘Transnational’? Gender, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics in Polish Drama, Theatre, and Performance
Polish Theatre Perspectives
Vol. 3, No. 2 (autumn/winter 2012)
Guest Editors:
Halina Filipowicz (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
Elwira Grossman (University of Glasgow, UK)
Polish Theatre Perspectives, a refereed scholarly journal published in English by the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, invites contributions to its special issue: From ‘Minority’ to ‘Transnational’? Gender, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics in Polish Drama, Theatre, and Performance.
The starting point for this project is the fascinating convergence now taking place between the language of gender theory and the language of performance studies. At the same time that gender theorists are coming to speak of gender as a ‘style’, an ‘act’, or a ‘performance’ that is in some sense external to identity, so too are scholars of theatre and drama increasingly making use of conceptual frameworks and interpretive categories developed in performance studies.
However, while the performative dimensions of theatrical enactments have become a major focus of critical investigation, the poststructuralist idea of scripted drama as a performance in its own right has received far less attention. Moreover, the concept of gender as a ‘style’, an ‘act’, or a ‘performance’ raises the questions: doesn't this concept risk obscuring or even sidelining the lived, experiential dimensions of gender discrimination in society? If gender is a ‘style’, an ‘act’, or a ‘performance’, how can we account for the persistence of discrimination on the basis of gender?
The project also seeks to address yet another widely held notion: the assumption that it is only in the twentieth century that gender has been conceptualized as a flexible and contingent category. That is to say, this project proposes to historicize the problem of gender by recognizing that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constitute a paradigmatic moment of transition in the Euro-American conceptualization of gender and sexual difference, the moment when an older version of gender identity as flexible and contingent was being displaced by the modern notion of sexual identity as an immutable fact of nature. As Thomas Laqueur (in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud) and other scholars point out, the earlier relationship of sex (biology) to gender (culture) was inverted in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as identity was increasingly seen to be rooted in biological sexual difference as opposed to cultural practice.
Deadlines
Proposals (abstracts): 1 November 2010
Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2010
Deadline for submitting completed manuscripts: 1 August 2011
Publication date: 31 October 2012
Editorial enquiries should be directed to the Guest Editors at: hfilipow@wisc.edu and E.Grossman@slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
Proposals (abstracts) and completed manuscripts should be sent as MS Word or RTF attachments to: submissions@ptpjournal.com
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