2. 考研
  3. A Feminist theatre is a genre that came to be widely recognized, theorized, studied and practiced in the wake of the seventies’

A Feminist theatre is a genre that came to be widely recognized, theorized, studied and practiced in the wake of the seventies’

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问题 A Feminist theatre is a genre that came to be widely recognized, theorized, studied and practiced in the wake of the seventies’ Women’s Liberation Movement; it has generally been understood as describing and encompassing diverse theatrical work motivated by the recognition of and resistance to women’s marginalization within social and cultural systems that accord male privilege and dominance. Observing this, however, it is important to remember that historically women have "acted" out their resistance to mainstream, male-dominated theatre cultures, and that, since the seventies, feminist-theatre scholarship has looked to recover the works and performances of neglected pioneering, women-in-theatre figures. For instance, such scholarship has served to uncover the dramatic texts of the tenth-century, plays by Restoration women playwrights and dramas by Edwardian women concerned with suffrage and the Woman Question.
B In the seventies, recognition that women’s cultural, social, sexual, economic and political lives had been oppressed by male domination was what fueled a climate of Western feminism. Women came together in consciousness-raising groups to share their personal discontents and political dissatisfactions. The inequalities of the workplace, the education system, the "institution" of motherhood and the objectification of women’s bodies were common grievances that served to shape the four political demands of the UK’s Women’s Liberation Movement: for equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries and free contraception and abortion on demand.
C As a profession, theatre was a microcosm of the discrimination and inequalities operating in society at large. In 1981, feminist playwright and critic, Michelene Wandor, published an analysis of theatre and sexual politics that made explicit women’s second-class, "understudy" status in a male-dominated theatre industry. The lived, professional experience of being consigned to the role of understudy is what, in turn, encouraged women practitioners to found their own feminist-theatre groups. Monstrous Regiment, along with the Women’s Theatre Group(both companies were founded in the mid-seventies), were seminal to the innovation of a feminist-theatre tradition and to creating a counter-cultural body of women’s plays and performances. Many more groups were to follow in their wake such as Clapperclaws(1977)and Mrs. Worthington’s Daughters(1979). These companies played not only small-scale touring venues but were networked into women’s communities that hosted shows in non-theatre spaces, such as schools, community halls or youth clubs. Both organizationally and creatively they operated democratically and collaboratively, rather than hierarchically and individualistically. Ensemble-based acting and presentational styles were widely adopted.
D With the outcrop of feminist groups came more opportunities for women playwrights, and by the mid to late seventies, Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems, and Louise Page were moving dramatic representations of women’s lives and experiences center-stage — this as a counter-cultural challenge and alternative to the " malestream," canonical tradition of theatre. Thereafter, women dramatists coming to prominence in the eighties included Sarah Daniels, April De Angelis, Winsome Pinnock and Timberlake Wertenbaker. As testimony to the emergence of a body of Women’s playwriting, much of which was influenced by Second Wave feminism, in 1982 Methuen Drama launched the Plays By Women series. The first of four plays to be published in volume one of the series was Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom: a play about witchcraft without any witches; a play where scenes locate in the seventeenth century, but songs intersperse and break up the action to insist that women’s oppression is not consigned to the historical past but is an urgent contemporary issue. Stylistically innovative and politically charged and premiered by Monstrous Regiment, Vinegar Tom along with other "women’s" plays by Churchill such as Cloud Nine or Top Girls, proved seminal to defining a feminist landscape in British theatre and were highly influential in terms of studying and theorizing feminist theatre, aesthetically and politically.
E Feminist theatre and performance that emerged from the Second Wave largely came to be defined , understood and analyzed in relation to three types of feminism: bourgeois/liberal, radical/ cultural and socialist/materialist. Listed in that order, the three feminisms were hierarchically conceived, with bourgeois/liberal feminism posited as the politically "weakest" given that it neither endorsed radical/cultural feminism’s desire to overthrow patriarchy in favor of women’s social, cultural and sexual empowerment, nor advocated the radical transformation of society’s economic, political and social structures as socialist/materialist feminism did. Each feminist dynamic also had its aesthetic counterpart: bourgeois/liberal feminism remained attached to conventional realistic forms, but sought to create more roles for women within the confines of traditional dramatic writing; radical/ cultural feminism became associated with and explored ideas and possibilities of a "women’s language" ; techniques and performance registers.
F However, the media backlash against feminism in the eighties, the widely promoted "top-girl Feminism"(as critiqued by Churchill in her play), and thereafter the individualistically styled " girl power" of the nineties and a younger, feminist Third Wave challenging the politics and values of Second Wave feminism, have all combined to make feminist theatre that much harder to generi-cally define and identify. Resistant voices in the nineties, such as Rebecca Pilchard and Judy Upton, picked up the complex feminist baton by dramatizing disenchanted and disadvantaged communities of young women. The iconoclast Sarah Kane, while distancing herself from the Second-Wave feminist tradition(notably by her rejection of the "woman" writer label), nonetheless reinvigorated structures of feminist feeling through her representations of gender wars and diseased masculinities, notably in her controversial debut play, Blasted.
G As a growing number of younger "women" playwrights make their debuts on contemporary British stages, it becomes increasingly clear that their diverse subjects—the financial crash of the American energy company Enron(Prebble, Enron), middle-class girls in trouble(Stenham, That Face)or "posh" boys behaving badly(Wade, Posh)—, challenge the gaze of the feminist critic that formerly looked to drama explicitly taking and playing the disenfranchised "woman’s part. " Indeed , in the theatre of Debbie Tucker Green, arguably one of the most exciting political voices to emerge on the British stage in the twenty-first century, feminism itself comes under scrutiny as, in her signature style of beautiful but brutal, black urban-speak, in plays such as Trade and Stoning Mary, Green interrogates the inability of women to achieve solidarity across social, cultural, economic and racial divides within a larger, epic landscape of a white Western world that singularly fails to care for disempowered "others. "
H In sum, feminist futures and the future of feminist theatre appear far less certain than in the defining moment of seventies activism and political theatre making. Yet, as "women" playwrights and practitioners dramatize epic questions of social injustices and inequalities in an increasingly globalized world, or evidence concern for what part feminism can play in terms of staging socially progressive , transformative possibilities and solutions, enduring questions of gender privilege and bias that formerly fueled the genre, surface as constant and significant reminders of the unfinished business of feminist theatre.
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1? On your Answer Sheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.
Before the seventies, there were some pioneering, women-in-theatre figures who create immortal works to fight against mainstream, male-dominated theatre cultures, but they and their efforts were neglected.
选项 A、YES
B、NO
C、NOT GIVEN
答案A
解析 (文章第一段第二句话指出，我们不应当忘记在历史上女性已经表现出她们对男性主导的主流戏剧文化的抵抗，并且从七十年代开始，女性主义戏剧学者期望恢复那些被忽略的具有开拓性的戏剧女性人物的作品和表演。由此可知，在七十年代前那些曾经反抗男性主导的主流戏剧文化的女性的作品和努力被忽视了。因此，本题的论述和文章内容相符。)
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