Maggie Gale's West End Women uncovers groundbreaking material about women playwrights and the staging of their performances between the years 1918 and 1962.
It documents a dynamic era of social and theatrical history, analysing the transformations that occurred in the theatre and the lives of British women in relation to specific plays of the period. Focusing on the work of playwrights such as Dodie Smith, Clemence Dane, Gordon Daviot and Bridget Boland, Maggie Gale examines the cultural and political context within which they enjoyed commercial success and great notoriety.

As She Likes It is the first attempt to tackle the enduring question of how to perform those unruly women at the centre of Shakespeare's comedies. Unique among both Shakespearan and feminist studies, As She Likes It asks how gender politics affects the production of the comedies, and how gender is represented, both in the text and on the stage.

This study is a feminist counterpoint to the established area of Russian theatre populated by male artists such as Stanislavsky, Chekhov and Meyerhold. With access to newly-opened files in Russia, Catherine Schuler brings to light the actresses who impacted upon Russian modernist theatre. Schuler focuses upon the lives and work of eight Russian actresses who flourished on the stage between the late 18th and early 19th century.

This work traces the origins and variations of theatrical cross-dressing through the ages and across cultures. It examines: tribal rituals and shamanic practices in the Balkans and Chinese-Tibet; the gender-bending elements of Greek and early Christian religion; the sodomitic appeal of the boy actor on the traditional stage of China, Japan and England; and the origins of the dame comedian, the principal boy, the glamour drag artiste and the male impersonator.

This text offers an account of a North American study of contemporary female and male strip shows. It particularly focuses on the contradictory sex roles, cultural positions, and performance practices of straight strip shows during their second heyday in the early 1990s. Katherine Liepe-Levinson has spent three years researching heterosexual female and male striptease. Her travels took her to over 70 different strip bars, clubs, theatres and sex emporiums ranging from elaborate lap-dancing and couch-dancing gentlemen's clubs in New York, Houston, and San Francisco; to Peoria's unisex cabaret...