Performing emotions: gender, bodies, spaces, in Chekhov's drama and Stanislavski's theatre : a theoretical investigation of the performance of emotions and gender identity

In Performing Emotions, Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity.

Emotions are phenomena that are performable by bodies, which have cultural identities.

In turn, these create cultural spaces of emotions. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory.

With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the play's first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters.

Emotions exists as social relationships; they are imagined and embodied as gendered.

Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on social performances and vice versa.