The University of Wisconsin Press


Autobiography / Theater / Women's Studies

 

Voices Made Flesh
Performing Women's Autobiography
Edited by Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor, and M. Heather Carver


Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography

"For women, the autobiographical voice is rarely singular, but instead exists in chorus with a cluster of other women's voices."—from the introduction

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed.

The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers—Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah—tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

"Voices Made Flesh does a better job of evoking the performed script than does any other collection of dramatic or performance art scripts I have seen."—Michael Bowman, Louisiana State University

Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography
William L. Andrews, Series Editor


Lynn C. Miller is associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Jacqueline Taylor is professor of Communication at DePaul University. M. Heather Carver is assistant professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia.


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June 2003
LC: 2002010200 PS
334 pp. 6 x 9
12 b/w photos

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Paper $26.95 x
ISBN 978-0-299-18424-7
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