Latin American Women On/In Stages (review)

In this book, Margo Milleret takes on the daunting task of surveying plays written by women from all over Latin America in the latter half of the twentieth century. Perhaps the book's field of inquiry is broad because so little scholarship has been produced about most Latin American female playwrights and their plays. She focuses specifically on middle- to upper-class women writing in urban centers and cites feminist politics as common to these playwrights. However, Milleret does not provide sufficient context for the significant differences among cultures, national histories, languages, and social norms in the seven countries featured in the plays she discusses. Her analysis tends to falsely assume that all Latinas share a somewhat homogenous cultural context, rather than pointing toward the specific social constructions and historical events in each playwright's country of origin, which might better explain some of the commonalities the author finds among the texts. Despite the lack of contextualizing information, the strength of this project lies in the fact that Milleret documents the work of eighteen playwrights and describes twenty-four plays, all the while closely reading the ways in which gender roles function in the texts.

The introduction, titled "Domesticating Drama," asserts that the word "domesticate" resonates in two important ways in Milleret's analysis of women in Latin American theatre: "The first definition implicates the theater as a site for the domestication or subjugation of women, while the second definition describes the actions of female dramatists to domesticate the theater, that is, to make it more accommodating to women" (1). Throughout the book, she describes plays by women as making feminist critiques of traditional gender roles in Latin America, but her arguments about the interventions made by these plays seem weakened by being cast in the patriarchal paradigm of "domesticating" the theatre for use by women. She mentions several times in the introduction that plays written by women open up opportunities for female spectators to feel more at home as audience members, but the main chapters of the book do not address audience response at all. The introduction's most valuable contribution to the book as a whole rests in its broad overview of the history of Latin American women writing plays in the twentieth century.

Each of the three main chapters includes an analyses of eight different plays, arranged thematically rather than chronologically or geographically. Chapter 1, "Reclaiming the Home," addresses heterosexual marriages, sexual politics, and gender-bending. The first four plays she discusses portray patriarchal marriages, and the last four plays experiment with gender roles and power dynamics between the sexes. Her most insightful commentary appears when she engages in a comparative analysis of the thematic similarities of the plays seen throughout the chapter: "[H]ome is the site where the values of autonomy and equality intersect with the values of sexual difference and division" (29). She describes the home as a malleable site where these playwrights depict a variety of ways to negotiate relationships between men and women. Although the examples of heterosexual relationships vary broadly, women's identities and sexuality are always discussed in relation to men and never in a homosocial space.

The following two chapters shift the focus away from discussing women as counterparts to male characters present on the stage, but maintain the focus on heteronormative constructions of womanhood. In chapter 2, "Questioning Motherhood," Milleret sets up two categories of mother–daughter relationships: "Patriarchal Mothers and Rebellious Daughters" and "Negotiating Mothers and Independent Daughters." Milleret uses these paradigms for intergenerational female relationships as a means to examine how mothers and daughters replicate or resist patriarchy in these plays. Chapter 3, "Staging Age and Sexuality," further explores how female characters break out of traditional gender roles by examining depictions of mature women's sexuality in a progression from middle age through menopause and into elder years. The aging women in these plays defy the societal expectations placed upon them...