A Good Night Out for the Girls ― Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance

Timely, innovative and engaging, A Good Night Out for the Girls (now available in paperback) looks beyond the confines of the paradigms for political theatre that have long been the mainstay of theatre scholarship, embracing cutting edge thinking on the relationship between politics and aesthetics. In a departure from the many feminist theorists and philosophers who over last two to three decades have sought to define the sort of ideal feminism 'we need', this book looks to the field of theatre and performance to investigate the sort of flawed, sometimes confused and contradictory, but nonetheless lived feminisms that a significant number of women have actually got. Spanning 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, the study offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance.

Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris are theatre professors based at Lancaster University, UK. Elaine's publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003) and Caryl Churchill (3rd edition, 2010). Geraldine's publications include Staging Femininities (1999) and Beyond Representation: The Politics and Aesthetics of Television Drama (2006). Together they have co-edited Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (2006) and co-authored Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary [Women] Practitioners (2008).