Project summary
This project will deliver the first dedicated guide to intersectionality and the American musical. The term “intersectionality”, first attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw, was coined to characterise the hyperspecific conditions faced by Black women in America’s legal system. However, its usage has evolved to describe how any, and all, identity characteristics can shape our lived experience.
The historical context for Black women and the American musical is particularly fraught. For example, no Black woman has ever won a Tony Award – the industry’s most well recognised accolade – in categories covering script, music, direction, choreography, or costume. At a time when scholars, students, and practitioners are especially aware of this environment, this project challenges a generalising approach to intersectionality and considers the impact of Crenshaw’s original application – radical scrutiny and disruption of how Blackness, womanhood, and class interact.
Project aims
- To demonstrate the importance of examining Blackness, womanhood, and class together in musical theatre research and training.
- To fundamentally reshape the application of intersectionality across disciplines
Intersectionality and the Musical will offer a published reference point celebrating Black women and American musicals. It rejects homogeneous approaches to Blackness, or one universal experience, by looking at musical theatre across a century. It uses a mixed methodology of archival research, textual analysis, reception studies, online data mining, and primary interviews to create a rich picture of the environment, presentation, and lived experience for Black women across this period. Overall, I argue that the obscuration of early Black female presence in the musical has facilitated narrowed contexts in casting and characterisation today.