Craven Feminities: A Conversation with Shonni Enelow and Julie Jarcho

Shonni Enelow (Fordham) and Julia Jarcho (Brown) have a conversation about their two new books, both of which chart relationships between performance, gender, self-erasure and love. 

Enelow's Joanna Hogg (Contemporary Film Directors, University of Illinois Press, 2024) leverages the art-historical concept of absorption--a turning-away in relation to the viewer--to examine the ways British filmmaker Joanna Hogg restructures women's desire through her films. Jarcho's Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism attends to the theatrical structures devised by writers as conditions for elaborating violent fantasies, which are often fantasies about gender.

As close friends and frequent interlocutors, Enelow and Jarcho have developed their respective accounts of gender, performance, and desire through years of intimate conversations. Now that both books are being published, they come together to reflect on their own and each other's arguments, trying to understand what their projects reveal--separately and together--about the stagey sex lives of gender. 

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Sponsored by the Spencer Theodore Memorial Fund.

About Shonni Enelow

Shonni Enelow writes about theater, film, and performance across media. She is the author of Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama, (Northwestern University Press, 2015), which won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Her 2019 article “Sweating Tennessee Williams: Working Actors in A Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna” (Modern Drama, 2019) won the Modern Drama Prize and received an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Article from ATHE. Her film writing can be found in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and Criterion; other theater and performance scholarship has appeared in Theater, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics. With Una Chaudhuri, she is the co-author of Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her artist’s book with David Levine, Discourse on Method, was published in 2020 by 53rd State Press. She is currently at work on a monograph about the filmmaker Joanna Hogg.

About Julie Jarcho

Julia Jarcho is a playwright and director and a scholar of modern theater, literature, and critical theory. Her newest book is Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (September 2024, University of Chicago Press). Jarcho puts on plays with her NYC company, Minor Theater. Shows include Marie It's Time (HERE, 2022), Pathetic (Abrons Arts Center 2019), Grimly Handsome (Incubator 2013/ Royal Court Theatre 2017), The Terrifying (Abrons 2017), Every Angel is Brutal (Clubbed Thumb 2016), Nomads (Incubator 2014), Dreamless Land (New York City Players/Abrons 2011), and American Treasure (13P 2009). Awards include an OBIE for Best New American Play (Grimly Handsome) and a Doris Duke Impact Award. Her book Minor Theater: Three Plays is available from 53rd State and her critical writing has appeared in ELH, Textual Practice, Critical Inquiry, Modern Drama, and in her first book Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is the Head of Playwriting at Brown.