|
|
Tuan situates feminist infl uences on performance within both the women’s movement in Taiwan and the Anglo-American feminist movement. She archives street performances and performative interventions into official spaces as well as plays and dramaturgical techniques. Using theories of the male gaze, she illustrates how these practitioners aim to subvert the dominant viewing apparatus. Within this critique, the most hilarious and perhaps also the most critical stage device is the use of the infl atable sex doll in Déjà vu. The book engages with the most important strategies within feminist criticism, applying them to perversions of Shakespeare and the Chinese Opera, portrayals of leading women artists, such as Emily Dickinson, and, yes, the obstructions offered by infl atable sex toys. For those scholars working in the area of studies of feminism across cultures, this book brings together familiar strategies with new cultural forms and practices.
Tuan’s inclusion of lesbian work within a discussion of Taiwanese theater is perhaps the most welcome and risky section in the book. For various complex political and cultural reasons, this topic has never appeared in earlier works. This topic is important for both the practitioner and student in Taiwan and for the studies of global queer practices abroad. Each of the plays she discusses in this section reveal how lesbian visibility is constructed across cultures and yet is also specific to the local situation. For example, the transnational collective of people in I Want You Before Sunrise offers a model of how alter native desires and sexual practices both encompass cultural differences and evade the dominant heteronormative restrictions of their own home culture; while Le Testament de Montmartre based upon the true story of the Chiu Miao-Jin’s suicide, stages the painful pressure those same restrictions can apply to the socially isolated lesbian woman in exile. I think the field will welcome the knowledge of these authors and directors in Taiwan and feel competent to encounter their work because of the critical lens Tuan develops.
More familiar productions to scholars in the West are also included in the book. The Peony Pavilion has enjoyed several treatments that have toured the major cities.