Sex, Class, and the Theatrical Archive

In Sex, Class and the Theatrical Archive: Erotic Economies, Alan Sikes explores the intersection of struggles over sex and class identities in politicized performances during key revolutionary moments in modern European history. The book includes discussions of sodomitical closet dramas from the decades surrounding the English Glorious Revolution of 1688; the performances of 'Tribades and Amazons', public women of the French Revolution; the 'homophilic elitism' in the early plays of Brecht and Hasenclever from the years just before and after the German Revolution that marked the founding of the short-lived Weimar Republic; and the utopian conception of a Soviet 'New Woman' set to take the stage after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Throughout, Sikes invokes the differences between past and present politicized performances in order to cast our own political imaginings into sharper and more critical relief.