Women in Asian Performance

Book excerpt: Women in Asian Performance offers a vital re-assessment of women's contributions to Asian performance traditions, focusing for the first time on their specific historical, cultural and performative contexts. Arya Madhavan brings together leading scholars from across the globe to make an exciting intervention into current debates around femininity and female representation on stage. This collection looks afresh at the often centuries-old aesthetic theories and acting conventions that have informed ideas of gender in Asian performance. It is divided into three parts: erasure – the history of the presence and absence of female bodies on Asian stages; intervention – the politics of female intervention into patriarchal performance genres; reconstruction – the strategies and methods adopted by women in redefining their performance practice. Establishing a radical, culturally specific approach to addressing female performance-making, Women in Asian Performance is a must-read for scholars and students across Asian Studies and Performance Studies.