Gerry Harris

Bobby Baker is one of most widely acclaimed and popular performance artists working today. Over the course of a thirty-five-year career she has toured the globe with her wildly stimulating explorations of 'Daily Life' and has been extensively written about and studied. This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker's career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, 'How to Live' and 'Diary Drawings' – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners. It includes: - Bobby Baker's own 'Chronicle' of her work as artist and performer - illuminating critical writing about Baker's shows - transcripts of Baker's performances and other original materials reproduced here for the first time - significant new essays by Michele Barrett and Griselda Pollock - a new interview with Bobby Baker by Adrian Heathfield. Under the guiding editorial hand of distinguished cultural theorist Michèle Barrett, this volume is an essential text for students interested in performance, gender, and visual culture, and a hugely absorbing and accessible account of Baker's work.

This is a timely contribution to the debates regarding future possibilities for feminism, theater, and performance. An excellent, cross-generational mix of theater scholars (Sue-Ellen Case, Dee Heddon, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Janelle Reinelt, Joanne Tompkins) and practitioners (Anna Furse, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, SuAndi) engage in lively, cutting-edge critical debates on topics that include citizenship, autobiography, cultural heritage and political agency as circulating in contemporary feminism and performance.

Beyond representation poses the question as to whether over the last thirty years there have been signs of 'progress' or 'progressiveness' in the representation of 'marginalised' or subaltern identity categories within television drama in Britain and the US. In doing so, it interrogates some of the key assumptions concerning the relationship between aesthetics and the politics of identity that have influenced and informed television drama criticism during this period. This book can function as an introduction because it provides students with a clear and coherent pathway through complex, wide-reaching and highly influential interdisciplinary terrain. Chapters examine ideas circling around politics and aesthetics, which emerge from such theories as Marxist-socialism and postmodernism, feminism and postmodern feminism, anti-racism and postcolonialism, queer theory and theories of globalisation, and evaluates their impact on television criticism and on television as an institution. These discussions are consolidated through a number of case studies that offer analyses of a range of television drama texts including Ally McBeal, Supply and Demand, The Bill, Second Generation, Star Trek: Enterprise, Queer as Folk, Metrosexuality and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence.

"Innovative and engaging, "A Good Night Out for the Girls" looks beyond the confines of the political theatre paradigm that has been the mainstay of feminist theatre interests and theorising. In a departure from the many feminist theorists and philosophers in the last two to three decades who have sought to define and describe the sort of ideal, utopian feminism 'we need', this book looks to the field of theatre and performance to investigate the sort of flawed, sometimes confused and contradictory, but nonetheless lived feminisms that a significant number of women have actually got. Moving across the boundaries of mainstream and experimental circuits, from the affective pleasures of commercially successful shows such as"Calendar Girls" and "Mamma Mia!" to the feminist possibilities of new burlesque and stand-up, the book offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance."--