CFP: Women in Contemporary French & Francophone Theatre

Women in Contemporary French and Francophone Theatre

42nd Annual NeMLA Convention

April 7-10, 2011

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Areas: French Theatre, Women’s and Gender Studies

Since the post-war period, female voices in French and Francophone theatre have begun to develop and mature. Earlier intentions of female dramatists frequently challenged voyeuristic traditions and freed female subjects from patriarchal representations and masculine structures. However, mapping the feminine voice within recent decades of French language theatre, contemporary female authors disrupt theatre’s hegemony, stimulating investigation of cultural and social constructions that dictate the ideologies affecting both genders.

This panel hopes to address the new theatrical forms created by French and Francophone female playwrights. These women have begun addressing crucial questions of theatre’s coercive nature of conventional representations and their implications for subjectivity. Rupturing theatre’s immutable truths and ideologies, their theatre complicates relations between language and character, audience and actor, self and other. Across a plurality of writing styles and of socio-cultural contexts of contemporary society, how do these French and Francophone female playwrights signal a range of new possibilities for the voice of women on stage? 

Possible female playwrights or directors this panel might investigate (but are not limited to) are as follows: 

Simone Benmussa, Ariane Mnouchkine,  Carole Fréchette, Catherine Anne, Suzanne Lebeau, Nathalie Sarraute, Noëlle Renaude, Denise Bonal, Yasmina Reza, Marguerite Duras, Fatima Gallaire, Fanny Mentré, Hélène Cixous, Denise Chalem, Louise Doutreligne, Lorraine Lévy, Marie NDiaye.

Please submit a 300-word abstract in English or French to Elizabeth Lindley, el261@cam.ac.ukby October 1^st, 2010.

Conference proceedings may lead to publications.

Dr. Elizabeth Lindley, el261@cam.ac.uk, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 9BB