A New Feminist Absurd?: Women’s Protest, Fury, and Futility in Contemporary American Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Absurdism has long been associated with existentialist white male writers like the ones Martin Esslin analysed in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which coined the term that came to define a lasting dramatic genre. More recently, however, several female playwrights have begun to reinvent this movement with an uncanny brand of feminist absurdism in their intimate domestic tragicomedies. In this essay, a close reading of Sheila Callaghan’s Women Laughing Alone with Salad (2015) serves as a touchstone for analysing performances of ludic feminist futility in plays by diverse writers including Ruby Rae Spiegel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Alice Birch, and others. In their festive moments of anti-structural and non-linear oscillation between rage and glee, these plays mark the messy implosion of an outdated feminist political project, first anticipating and later reflecting the political tensions and crises evidenced in women’s voting, activism, and protest practices since the 2016 US presidential election. Often confining their characters within domestic or interior feminized spaces like kitchens, bedrooms, hidden supermarket aisles, or girls’ locker rooms, these playwrights celebrate failure and madness in the lives and labour of their female characters. By transforming historically feminized sites into dynamic spaces of resistance as well as spectacular failure, these performances of excess, from dieting to devouring, precarity to privilege, force audiences to confront cultural blind spots and failed or incomplete work toward efficacious feminist intersectionality. Furthermore, by bridging contemporary women’s anger research with whiteness and affect studies, this essay identifies a nascent trend in US theatre with a growing international profile that engages an updated absurdist rubric within a larger feminist praxis of political revolt.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".