A COMPARATIVE CULTURAL STUDY OF WOMEN IN PERFORMING ARTS

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Women's Liberation Movement in the 1960s to the 1970s in the United States spread beyond the national and racial boundaries concurrently in all the industrial world, and is called the second wave of feminism historically compared with the first wave around the turn of the century. Since the exaltation of the second wave of feminism, a number of women have been trying to challenge for new ways and styles in many fields. Along with the visible improvement in the status of women, we can read a voluminous work of writings on feminist thoughts, critical studies, and theories. Those works have brought some radical and fruitfull changes by establishing Women's Studies or Gender Studies in the regular curricula of colleges and universities.In the avant-garde little theater movement as well as in the commercial show business there used to be a hierarchical and patriarchal world in which men are dominant and centerd in acting, directing, playwriting, and producing. However, after the second wave … More of feminism, a certain amount of women have become very active in playwriting, directing, producing as well as in acting, and have brought their own aesthetics, perspectives, and analyzes on theater/performance arts. What I try to explore here is that what possibilities are open in terms of representation, especially when we see women's own cultural activities without separating their social and political movementsFirstly, I made a comparative study about American/British women's theater activities in the context of the first wave of feminism, especially the suffrage movement, the Japanese women's movement, their debate of "New Woman", and the birth of "actresses" in the Japanese new theater movement in its modernization. Secondly, in the context of the second wave of feminism, I made another comparative study of contemporary American/British women's theater activities and contemporary Japanese women's ones. They have a lot of common characteristics in deconstructing gender, the stereotypical representation of women, reading sexual politics, creating their own experimental theater. In the so-called postmodrn and post-colonial world, women are not afraid to be different from other women when they explore, define and redefine their own multicultural identities. Less