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A good night out for the girls : popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance

This book arose, was conceived of and produced as a joint enterprise and authorship is 50/50. As explained in the introduction (and indicated at the start of each chapter by names in italics) partly because of our concern with ‘affect’, once we had agreed on overall aims, objectives and methodology some chapters were researched and written separately. I am responsible for chapters 3, 5 and 7, we wrote half of chapter 8 each (Aston on Khorsandi, Harris on Osho). The opening to this chapter and the introduction and conclusion were quite literally written together.

I have given papers related to material in this book at Theatre and Performance Research Association (2011), at Performance Studies international (PSI) in Toronto (2010), as Keynote Speaker at the Postgraduate Research Seminars Series, Exeter (2010) and at Central School of Speech and Drama London (2010). The PSI paper was given as part of a collaborative panel and we were subsequently asked by the editors to contribute a version of this/these presentations for a special issue of Performance Research published in April 2011.

The main focus of this book is on almost wholly overlooked female-authored and ‘women-centred’ works drawn from the popular mainstream and the commercial fringe but it also embraces experimental’ practice where relevant. Less concerned with re-marking genre boundaries it identifies and explores the sorts of concerns that appear to speak strongly to a large number of women across fields, forms, mediums, audiences and generations. In doing so it expands both the scope of the examples of practices and theoretical approaches that have been the mainstay of feminist theatre and performance criticism for at least a decade.