Contenu du sommaire : Scènes théâtrales émancipatrices

Athenian women occupied a marginal place in theatrical festivals and ancient Attic comedy (480-380 BCE). While processions and audiences seem to have included female citizens and metics (resident aliens), all women were excluded from theatrical creation. Nevertheless, the plays included numerous comic heroines in various roles. Every kind of status of women was represented, from slaves to priestesses. The article explores the protagonists of these plays questioning the nature of female agency represented; it also presents elements of historical plausibility in terms of character and situation that may reveal real possibilities for action for Attic women in the fifth century BCE.

The article analyzes the absence of portraits of Italian actresses between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, despite their notable presence on stage. While some, like Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), had actively crafted their image, most of those who followed her remained anonymous or absent from any visual representations. This invisibility stemmed from a variety of reasons: religious (the Counter Reformation), social (misogyny), and artistic (a refusal to promote actresses as public figures). This analysis distinguishes between direct artistic sources (controlled by the artists or actresses themselves) and indirect ones (decorative objects, engravings), which tend to sexualize or freeze actresses in static poses. In the eighteenth century, despite literary documentation of the roles in which they appeared (especially in Goldoni's plays), no iconographic record survives. This absence of portraits highlights the paradox between actresses' visibility on stage and their erasure from visual culture. The suppressed image of the diva seems to contradict the expressive power of her performance, which engaged the full range of passions. The iconography of commedia dell'arte actresses misleadingly depicts a frozen theatre, whereas their repertoire had been initiated by Isabella Andreini's foundational madness scenes (La pazzia di Isabella, Florence, 1589).

This study focuses on the fourteen plays by female dramatists staged at the Comédie-Française between 1680 and 1760, in order to explore the emancipatory possibilities of creation in classical theatre during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After considering playwriting as an emancipation strategy for the female authors in the corpus, the article explores the rules governing official theatre that constrained the expression of emancipatory thought on stage. Finally, the plays are analyzed to reveal the characteristics of an emancipatory dramaturgy within classical theatre.

This article is based on the analysis of eighteen letters written by the actress Rose-Perrine Bellecour (1730–1799), preserved in her personal file at the Bibliothèque-musée of the Comédie-Française. The “petite Beauménard,” as she referred to herself at the outset of her career in fairground theatres, pursued a forty-two-year career on the stage of the most prestigious Parisian theatre. Renowned for her roles as a soubrette, known for her numerous lovers, and married to a fellow member of the troupe, she appears, at first glance, to exist primarily through the gaze of men. However, the letters she addressed to her colleagues, during the daily activity of the company, bear witness to a different reality. Her backstage writing practice demonstrates her centrality in the functioning of the theatrical institution. Bellecour displays considerable skill in negotiating programming decisions and facilitating administrative processes, never failing to safeguard her own financial interests, which were increasingly jeopardized by the French Revolution. This epistolary corpus thus reveals the complex relationship between a stage actress and a theatrical world undergoing profound transformation, and sheds light on the multifaceted and ambivalent means through which forms of emancipation could be pursued.

This article considers actresses' protests in the 1900s against the working conditions and exploitation prevailing in the world of show business. It is based on accounts that come from stars as well as unknown actresses which form a counterpoint to the anecdotes and backstage stories we are used to hearing. Other unpublished sources, such as those from artist trade unions offer insight into a new social and political history of the theatre and the conditions of actresses during the Belle Époque.

In 1979, Viviane Théophilidès, a leading figure among female directors of the 1980s, staged Une fille à brûler, the story of a Joan of Arc who makes her choices freely and prefers to die rather than abjure and submit herself to the authorities. In 1986, Gilberte Tsaï's Voyage en Chine intérieure brought together a group of non-professional Chinese actors and actresses, all of them marked by the Cultural Revolution and their migration experience in France. Between these two productions, both of them shown at the Avignon Festival, Jack Lang's new cultural policy in favor of theatre was implemented in 1982. Subsidies for a number of women's companies were doubled, enabling them to strengthen their artistic proposals in a sector dominated by all-powerful male stage directors around whom the history of theater has been written until now. The article examines the emergence of female directors, the reception of their work, and the lack of recognition of their initiatives.

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen has sparked debates and controversies since its premiere in 1879. The polemic has centered on the play's ending: Nora, the heroine, leaves her husband and children to claim her freedom. Nora's departure leaves open many questions about her future. On the palimpsest of Ibsen's play, countless other texts have been written – readings, rewritings, adaptations – which highlight or challenge the feminism of the play, its heroine, or the author himself. This article seeks to trace the reception of A Doll's House in Scandinavia then throughout Europe and the United States from its creation to today, in parallel with the history of women and feminism.

This article offers an analysis of four contemporary queer productions: Portraits détaillés by Lucien Fradin, Pédé·e·s – monologues amoureux by 114 Cie, Gaze.S by Marianne Chargois and Romy Alizée, and Ceci est mon corps by Agathe Charnet. Studied from a militant ‘transpédégouine' [trans/fag/dyke] perspective, these performances appear to be a meeting point between feminist and queer struggles. The artists in question are thus staging a political coalition between minorities, breaking down barriers between trans, lesbian and gay experiences and adopting an intersectional perspective. These contemporary queer theatrical productions are rethinking their alliance with feminism through transdisciplinary approaches, the fusion of bodies or the intersection of narratives, thereby reinventing shared political stances.

The present commentary focuses on two extracts from Philippe de Vigneulles' Chronicle of Metz. The selected passages offer two stories of actors, one female and one male, who achieved a higher social rank thanks to their talent. Each extract presents the case of a female saint's role played in Metz in the fifteenth century, one interpreted by a young woman and the other by a young man. The evidence suggests the absence of a prescribed dramatic practice. The casting choice seems to have been motivated not by the gender of the person playing the role but by his or her ability to master rhetorical devices. There was no gender ascription for roles left fluid by design.

Prosecuted in early modern France under the heading supposition de part, the simulation of pregnancy and childbirth was considered by jurists of the period, according to their writings, as essentially a woman's crime, with female simulators and midwives as the main protagonists. However, the deception was complex and its various phases unfolded over several months: first the pregnancy had to be visibly simulated in a convincing manner, then it was necessary to clandestinely obtain a newborn child and stage its arrival in the world to give it a new identity. Analysis of an eighteenth-century trial in Toulouse, the Ayral-Ruffat case, and comparison with similar cases reveal the multiple complicities that made this fraud possible, with the men and women involved playing specific gendered roles by counting on community surveillance of pregnant women and mobilizing rituals linked to gestation and birth.

This article examines gender relations in mobilizations for the Armenian cause in France during the years around 1968, several decades after the original arrival of Armenian migrants in France, following the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire. While feminism, which had emerged in the homeland at the late nineteenth century, certainly found support from Armenian women in the public arena in 1970s France, they make no reference to it in their defense of the Armenian question, to which they were committed. The article concludes that there are similarities with other contemporary forms of protest: a gendered division of labour, and the refusal to see these divisions, but also the emancipatory dimension of activism. It shows, as well, that since the genocide had been marked by gendered forms of violence, women were responsible for rebuilding the community; as a result, gender relations among Armenians were not shaped exclusively along contested gender frontiers.