#jill dolan

[heteroglossia]

[T]he schizophrenic breakdown of language "reorients the subject or speaker to a more literalizing attention to words." As meaning is lost, the materiality of words becomes obsessive. A signifier that has lot its signified has thereby been transformed into an image. Words become material signifiers without signifieds, and are turned into a literal image of themselves.

Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic

[adamsintheatre-blog]

To be queer is not who you 'are', it's what you 'do', it's your relation to dominant power, and your relation to marginality, as a place of empowerment. 'Queer' opens spaces for people who embrace all manner of sexual practices and identities, which gives old-fashioned gays and lesbians a lot more company on the political front lines, as well as in capital consumption, and, of course, in bed. That's the beauty and the flaw of 'queer' depending on how you look at it.

Jill Dolan at the Queer Theatre Conference at CUNY in 1995 (transcribed in 'The Queerest Art' edited by Minwalla and Solomon)

[danceismusic]

Gareiss described how the popular Irish dance form (marketed especially to tourists) interdicts the exchange of queer gazes by insisting that the male dancers look either at their female partners or out at the audience but never at one another. Gareiss demonstrated his queer resistance to these constraints, showing a clip of him dancing solo, accompanied by a male Irish fiddler, in which he seemed to be performing the step dance directly for his musical accompanist. The personal yet public performance exchange rewrote the more frontal and certainly more heterosexual conventions of the dance.

- Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator, February 22, 2012, Queer Dance at U of Michigan, available here

[justprincetonthings]

Women’s stories, along with stories about men and women of color, are still tokenized in American theater.

Jill Dolan, a professor of English and theater studies at Princeton, quoted in the New York Times

[therealculturebot]

Culturebot's Canadian Adventure

Culturebot’s Canadian Adventure

On Thursday February 20, 2014 I headed up to Brock University in St. Catharine’s Ontario for a colloquium on theater criticism as part of their Walker Cultural Leader Series where the featured guest was Jill Dolan, the Annan Professor of English and Professor of Theater at Princeton University and author of the Feminist Spectator blog.

I had been invited by Brock’s newly arrived theater professor 

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[cake-emu]

Your commentary on my bias piece is concise and smart (even though OF COURSE I would say that) and gave me a new book to hunt down and read. Thanks!

Ahh, thank you! As I understand it, the book is mostly a collection of reviews from Dolan’s blog, The Feminist Spectator, so you may find it worthwhile to check there first but it’s still nice to be able to walk around with a print copy to dip into :-)

(response to mehlsbells)

[justprincetonthings]

DOLAN: Kerry Washington as an entertainment pioneer

Jill Dolan is guest blogging this week on Symposium Magazine's blog. She marks Kerry Washington's Emmy nomination for her work on ABC's scandal by assessing her place in the entertainment world.

My colleagues and I see her as a role model for students who are intellectually as well as artistically talented, because she demonstrates that actors can be thoughtful and politically committed about their work while winning accolades for their performances.

[queeriesforqueerios]

Thexuality: Jill Dolan's Look at Queer Theatre

Book: Theatre & sexuality / Jill Dolan

In the short paperback Theatre & Sexuality, Jill Dolan makes a concise, accessible case for the connection between theatre performance and the LGBTQ community. Part of a series entitled Theatre &, the book means to delineate the ties that theatre has to identity and—in Dolan’s case—sexuality. Through the text, Dolan weaves a powerful argument for the visibility and recognition of queer-identified people with the advent of theatrical expression.

Dolan begins with an explanation of theatre as an art form and how, across the ages, it has been a place where people have come to express themselves without (so many) boundaries, specifically providing “refuge for people who deviate from heterosexual norms” (5). Focusing on the aspects of Queer theatre and Queering theatre, Dolan discusses renowned theatre artists and groups that they have either created or been a part of. A few examples of this are Tim Miller, co-founder of PS 122 in NYC and Highways in Santa Monica, Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, two-thirds of the Split Britches Company, and Joe Cino, the owner of a café that held a small stage, who forced his actors to perform even if it was just to an empty room.

Dolan provides an excellent overview of Western culture as it has seen the development of Queer theatre, also explaining how activist groups such as Queer Nation were “at least partially responsible for resignifying the word ‘queer’, changing its connotation from a derogatory slur against gay men and lesbians into a rallying label for people across non-normative sexual definitions and practices. ‘Queer’ allowed the LGBTQ movement to grow ever larger, as even heterosexuals whose sexual desires aren’t completely normative can affiliate under its purview” (10). Dolan’s explanation of the queer community as an ever-expanding space gives more of a foundation to the argument that the LGBTQ folk were, and still continue to find a place in the theatre from where they can be heard and seen by others who are interested in the struggles that they face.

Something I appreciated about Dolan’s argument is that while Dolan is aware of the strides that Queer theatre and performance have made, the writing still has the tone of skepticism when it comes to theatre by people of color or with other intersecting identities. In one quote, it is mentioned “Entertainer Ellen DeGeneres came out publicly as a lesbian in the mid-1990s, when the character she then played on television announced her lesbianism […] Numerous other public figures have followed her lead. While the closet remains a determining aspect of LGBTQ culture, the increase in public visibility, as least for white, upper-middle-class gay men and lesbians […] has begun to change attitudes” (12). The acknowledgement of privilege is critical in any argument involving intersecting identities, and while those with white privilege may be making waves in the theater world, it is important not to leave out those who have no voice because the majority silences them.