The Subversive Sex
Women in Law and Theatre
Gender in Law, Culture, and Society Series

This book explores the intersection of law and gender in dramatic narratives and in legal narratives. This allows the reader to compare the stories told onstage with those told in court (another kind of stage) with respect to their representations of women, with a particular emphasis on the role of women, in both theatre and law, to act as catalysts of change. The book is organized around four topics illustrating different contexts in which women have acted as a destabilizing force: Speaking Truth to Power, The Dangerous Sex, Judging Women, and A Voice for the Voiceless. The first topic explores the stories of women who explicitly confront male power. The second topic examines the stories of women who defy gender stereotypes by their use of violence. The third looks at gender in relationship to professional status and economic class. The final unit focuses on two groups of women who have historically been under-represented, women of color and lesbians. In each instance, stories from theatre are compared and contrasted with analogous stories from law cases. Written in an accessible style, the volume presents a humanistic perspective, grounded in "the facts" of the play or the case, looking at the texts as case studies, from two different disciplines, of "subversive" women acting as agents of change.

Debora Threedy is a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. She writes on "outsider jurisprudence", looking at law critically from the perspective of marginalized social groups. She is also an actor and prize-winning playwright whose plays have been professionally produced.