ABSTRACT
Rape and sexual violence are recurring themes in women’s dramatic writing. The variety of representations on stage suggests that sexual violence is a prominent concern across cultural borders though refracted differently through the specific cultural circumstances of different communities of women and other material conditions of women’s lives. Even within Anglo-American theatre, very different dramatic strategies emerge from British, Irish and African-American writing. For example, rape has been contextualized within a history of slavery and its contemporary legacy of racial oppression in African-American dramatic writing (Marcus, 1992; Gavey, 1995); there have been politically engaged, post-Brechtian representations from British feminist writers and practitioners (Reinelt, 1986); and there are the gothic families that populate the plays of Irish author Marina Carr. Lizbeth Goodman reads this recurrence as evidence ‘not only that women find these themes [of rape and sexual violence] interesting (if not necessary) to express, but also that these themes have been part of a developing feminist consciousness in the theatre’, with its concomitant aim of staging and representing women’s lived experience, often achieved by ‘experimenting with the representation of self and gender in a multiplicity of ways’ (1993: 206). Themes surrounding sexual violence are embedded in the dramatic practice of many women playwrights and in experimentation with representing gender onstage. This chapter devotes itself to the analysis of such themes including the issue of how to articulate lived experience, the danger of being exploitative in representing sexual violence on stage and the possibility of evading conventional rape scripts through re-enactment.
