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Miss Julie Self Reflects: An Essay

Note

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I wrote this piece as the final 'paper' for a class called "Theater Texts and Theory."​ It was a required course to receive my Theater Arts minor. It was also the most upsetting, grueling class I took in college. Despite claiming to be an overview of all theater texts and theory from 1800 to the present, the curriculum consisted solely of writing by white men. Like, literally. When I questioned the curriculum during our first class, I was told that we were studying these texts because they were the theater cannon, seminal works. My response, that canonized works only remain valuable if we place value in them by studying them, and that we must reformulate the canon to include the historically marginalized, went unheeded. I survived the class by doing something deeply out of character: not listening. Sexism and white supremacy dominated the professor's discourse, and his pedagogical practices, if there had ever been any, had long since faded. Miss Julie Self Reflects: An Essay is my response to that class, that professor, and the elitism and exclusionism of the Western canon. 

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Genre

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Monologue; meta; theoretical; comedic; dramatic

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Characters

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Miss Julie: from the Strindberg play, but self-possessing; femme; any ethnicity; 20s

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Content Advisory

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Mature themes and language including: reflections on gendered violence, bad pedagogy, cultural elitism and erasure

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Production History

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Unproduced.

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