Review: Dimple Godiwala. Breaking the Bounds. Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream since c. 1980.

Abstract

Dimple Godiwala's aim is to give a detailed analysis of contemporary plays by feminist dramatists and to show how they have entered, and thus effectively changed, the British dramatic mainstream, or rather the "malestream" of English, male, white, heterosexual, middle-class, leftwing dramatic writing. Following Foucault's claim that one can never write outside the dominating discourse, Godiwala demonstrates how the five chosen feminist playwrights have managed to transform the patriarchal dramatic discourse from within, thus intervening in the mainstream theatre as "the last site of negotiation" (xiii) that feminism had to enter in the second half of the twentieth century.1 At one level she hence offers an analysis of the changes within dramatic discourse, on another level she undertakes a theoretical critique of Western patriarchy. Assuming an unbroken episteme of patriarchy, which as only in the twentieth century been ruptured by feminism, Godiwala contests Michel Foucault's analysis of epistemological breaks within Western discourse as developed in The Order of Things.