A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance [Hardcover]

Moving across the boundaries of mainstream and experimental circuits, from the affective pleasures of commercially successful shows such as Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia! to the feminist possibilities of new burlesque and stand-up, this book offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance.Acknowledgements Introduction: 'A Good Night Out For the Girls' Jam and Jerusalem/ Sentimentality and Feminism: Calendar Girls Roaring Women and Class Acts: The Naked Truth and the Chippendales' Ultimate Girls Night Out Age Liberation: Susan Boyle, 'Grumpy Old Women' and Virginia Ironside's Monologues Once More with Feeling: Joanna Murray-Smith's The Female of the Species and Nic Green's Trilogy Work, Family, Romance and the Utopian Sensibilities of the Chick Megamusical Mamma Mia! The Ghosts of New Burlesque Entertaining Others: Shappi Khorsandi and Andi Osho 'Are We There Yet?'  Final Reflections & Marisa Carnesky's Ghost Train Bibliography Index

It offers very personal accounts from both Aston and Harris as to their own experiences both as feminist scholars and performance spectators, making this a valuable addition to the fields of feminist studies and performance studies. & The personal, woman-centred tone deftly reflects the complex nature of the theoretical positions, performances and audiences being discussed. (Cath Badham, Platform Postgraduate Journal of Theatre Arts, Vol. 10 (1), 2016) 

'Elaine Aston's and Geraldine Harris's A Good Night Out For the Girls offers timely and theoretically savvy explications of the feminist potential within a surprisingly eclectic array of traditionally mainstream performance genres...Their introduction is an account of the field of feminist performance scholarship, and a pointed assessment of the challenges inherent tothis historic moment when concrete definitions of feminism are elusive; it is indispensable to any study of feminist theatre.' - Chrl“-