Looking Through Gender Post-1980 British and Irish Drama

This challenging and vital contribution to Theatre Studies explores the shaping and performing of gender identity in British and Irish theatres since the 1980s. It highlights contact zones, conflict areas and divergencies between the two contexts with detailed references to certain historic, socio-political, and cultural clusters. These range from Thatcherite Britain to the rise of the 'Celtic Tiger' in Ireland, to the rupture caused by the advent of queer theory and the current, global age. The study shifts between theoretical-academic discourses - feminist, post-colonial, and queer theories - and close communication with playwrights and practitioners for whom 'performance' is a daily activity, in and out of the theatre. A major attempt to read plays largely from a queer theory standpoint, the book does not celebrates difference. Rather, it provides readings of several pays which unmask exploiting mechanisms towards the establishment of a renewed notion of ethics based on sociality, shared spaces and bodies, as well as on a resistance to encapsulating notions of identity and gender itself