Dramaturgy of Sex on Stage in Contemporary Theatre

Kate Mulley is an internationally acclaimed playwright, librettist, lyricist, producer and dramaturg whose work explores gender, power, place and desire through a feminist, and often historical, lens. Her plays and musicals have been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and China.

• IntroductionKate MulleyPart I: Depicting Sexual Discovery and Identity1. (Still) Shopping and (Still) Fucking: The Stylistics of Queer Desire on StageGeorge Sampatakakis2. Respectable Queer Sex: Criteria for Permissible Representations in Contemporary Mainstream TheatreJoey Baseil Massa3. Depicting Queer Sexual Discovery in Contemporary British Fringe TheatreAlexander Millington4. All Tomorrow’s Parties: Structures of Feeling in Verbatim TheatreShane KinghornPart II: Depicting Stylized Sex5. Disability and Desire: Multimodal Exploration in Deaf West’s Spring AwakeningLindsey R. Barr6. Dancing on a Knife’s Edge: Performing Violent Co-Dependency in Bryony Lavery and Frantic Assembly’s StockholmKaren Morash7. A Dramaturgy of Precariousness: The Real, Realness, and Spectatorship of Sex in Dead Centre’s Good SexHuayu Yang8. Mette Ingvartsen’s “The Red Pieces” Series: Sex, Dance, Erasing Power Structures and Ungendered BodiesAnne LempickiPart III: Depicting Transactional Sex9. Commodification of Women’s Bodies: Staging the ConsequencesSophie Bastien10. Masculinity and Commercial Sex from the Perspective of Giuliana Musso’s SexmachineStefania Lodi RizziniPart IV: Depicting Female Desire11. Context, Cliche, and Other Considerations for Staging Female DesireCristina (Cha) Ramos and Claire Warden12. Monstrous Desires: Writings of Sexuality in Contemporary Feminist Dramatic Writings in FranceLeïla CassarPart V: Depicting Sexual Violence13. Patriarchy Structures and Depictions of Patriarchal Sex in Contemporary TheatreKate Mulley14. Interrogating Racialized Sexual Violence in Slave PlayJessica Ellison15. Sexual Assault and the Criminal Justice System: The Naked Female Body in Breach Theatre’s It’s True, It’s True, It’s TrueHannah Simpson16. Sex Between Macabre Lust and Clinical Dissection in Dea Loher’s DramaturgyYoun Le Guern-Herry17. Applications of Dramaturgy in the Physical Creation of Sexual Violence on StageMeron Langsner and Cristina (Cha) Ramos

"Through the lenses of many writers, the book covers a range of topics and genres from musicals to plays, verbatim theatre, fringe, and dance performances. The book magnifies power structures and exposes how they are maintained in theatre while providing a critical lens to queering and dismantling these structures onstage and off. [...] I would recommend this book to directors, intimacy coordinators, actors, artistic directors, educators and anyone in the development process and creation of theatre. I believe that this book is revolutionary and should be on the shelves of every university library. It provides an excellent scope of contemporary sexual theatre history and shares a lens for artists to transform the view of sex onstage in the future."Charlotte W. Roberts, Loyola Marymount University, USA, in Theatre Research International, 49(3)