Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics

Women in Asian Performance offers a vital re-examination of women’s contributions to Asian performance traditions, focusing on their specific cultural, historical and performative contexts.

Arya Madhavan brings together essays from leading scholars across the globe to make an exciting intervention into current aesthetic, political and cultural debates. Chapter-by-chapter, this volume looks afresh at the often centuries-old aesthetic theories and acting conventions which inform ideas of femininity and female representation onstage.

Divided into three parts, Women in Asian Performance addresses:

• 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