ABSTRACT
In this, the last essay in this three-part volume, Miki Flockemann brings together many of the themes and theoretical ideas addressed by other contributors. She looks carefully at a sample of theatre work produced in Cape Town in the three months following the elections (in April, 1994) and examines the shifts and developments which such work demonstrates, in terms of the politics of gender. Considering work which explores homophobia and AIDS, as well as ‘women’s issues’, Flockemann extends our focus from ‘plays by women’ to ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. She explores the political and representational shifts in the articulation of oppositional discourses emerging after the Soweto uprising*, and looks from there at the new discourses emerging in the 1990s. Flockemann wrote this essay in the months following the elections; the essence of her writing in a period of change has been left un-updated; the sense of immediacy is interesting, and in any case, it seemed pointless to ‘update’ when the answers to the questions Flockemann asks are still in the process of being ‘answered’ through politics and performance.
