This edited volume, Corporeal Politics: Gender and the Performance of Identity, interrogates the body as a contested site where power, gender, and cultural inscription converge across literary and theatrical landscapes. Through diverse studies spanning medieval mysticism to contemporary migration narratives, contributors examine embodiment as both constraint and catalyst for resistance. The collection reveals how performance, whether on stage, in poetry, or through everyday gestures, transforms corporeal existence into a political statement while interrogating the female body under patriarchal and colonial pressures. The volume demonstrates how shame, silence, and bodily displacement function not as passive symptoms but as active forms of refusal within oppressive structures. These scholarly investigations collectively argue that corporeal experience remains central to understanding power dynamics in both historical and contemporary contexts. Ultimately, Volume VIII: Corporeal Politics: Gender and the Performance of Identity affirms that how we inhabit, represent, and resist through our bodies continues to shape possibilities for justice and transformation.
Table of Contents
A Timid Experiment: The Dissolution of Patriarchy in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal
Yutaka Okuhata
Beyond the Archetypal Heroine: Postcolonial and Postmodern Intersections in Contemporary Women’s Narrative Identity
Shweta K. Kapoor
Technologies of Desire: Takarazuka Revue’s Continuous Catharsis of Progress
Maria Grajdian
Margery Kempe and the Performance of Resistance: A Medieval Mystic’s Legacy in Contemporary Feminist Activism
Peggy Bloomer
Breaking Silence, Building Rooms: Feminist Voices of Undocumented Poetics
Marzia Dessi
Jealousy as a Destructive Force: A Comparative Analysis of Surah Yusuf and Macbeth
Amal Taha Aldmour
Across Generations: Women’s Survival Strategies in Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Yang Yuqi
Virgin, Mother, Whore: Euripides’ Violent Women
Anj Baker
Nackte Sprache – Nacktes Sein: Scham, Entfremdung und Identität in Herta Müllers Reisende auf einem Bein (1989)
Sarah Sosinski
Leib Kvitko: A Vessel of Soviet Jewry
Nadia Ertz
Body, War, and Resistance: Ethical (im)Potentiality and Dramatic Form in Edward Bond and Howard Barker
Zeliha Kuruducu
Blaming the Victim: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading of In the Blood by Suzan Lori Parks
Syeda Aimen Saghir & Abdul Serdar Öztürk
The Corporeal Symptom: Politics of Embodiment, Trauma, and Exodus in Wu Ying’s Fiction
Liu Sanyang
