The Feminist Spectator as Critic

The Feminist Spectator as Critic broke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new introduction and up-to-the-moment bibliography, detailing the progress to date in gender equity in theater and the arts, and suggesting how far we have yet to go.

Jill Dolan is Annan Professor in English, Professor of Theater, and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University.  She received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her blog of the same name, The Feminist Spectator. Her other books include A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw (editor); Theatre & Sexuality; Utopia in Performance:  Finding Hope at the Theater; Geographies of Learning:  Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance; and Presence and Desire:  Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. The Feminist Spectator blog can be found at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com.

Praise / Awards

• ". . . theatre criticism at its best—daring in its theoretical application, exciting in its choice of subjects, and radical in its conclusions. Jill Dolan moves forcefully and gracefully through all the positions that theatre critics often propose in theory but rarely accomplish in practice."
  —Modern Drama