Location: Zoom Room B / Salle Zoom B

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5324702280?pwd=yuo077u9YJNihv59FvXxbosHNeVpvv.1

• Michelle MacArthur, “Making a Stink: Feminist Killjoy Criticism and the Case of Women Against Sexist Humour”

In April 1977, just a week into Tamahnous Theatre’s Vancouver run of Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, local area feminists raised a stink. Protesting the play’s stereotypical representation of women, including its association of women’s genitalia with fish, the anonymous collective Women Against Sexist Humour (WASH) rose from the audience during the second act and unleashed stink bombs. The show went on, with most but not all spectators enduring the smell until curtain call. Director Larry Lillo, interviewed in multiple outlets, stressed that while he welcomed dissent, WASH had crossed a line and revealed themselves to “have no humourous perspective” (Wyman). In response, WASH countered Lillo’s characterization by underlining how both humour and humourlessness are weaponized against women. 

Through an examination of the archival remains of this production, including the public debate incited by the stink bombs, this paper theorizes WASH’s disruptive action as a form of killjoy criticism in that it gets in the way (Ahmed) of the audience’s enjoyment of the play’s purported humour. Yet, it argues, the stink bombs are not humourless but rather humourous, a response to Eunuchs’ commentary on women’s bodies and an extension of the production’s own assault on spectators’ senses. The stink bomb action can be productively read within a history of embodied feminist criticism, wherein women have overcome their limited access to mainstream modes of criticism like print journalism by responding to performance both on their own terms and according to its own terms—fighting fire with fire, or stink with stink.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).” The Scholar & Feminist Online,
vol. 8, no. 3, 2010, https://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-killjoys-and-otherwillful-subjects/2/.

Wyman, Max. “Play Bombed. Irate Feminists Create Stink.” Vancouver Sun, n.d.

• Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta and Tara Morris, “Tracing Interiority of Voices on Stage: Indigenous Theatre Festival”

On September 2025 the University of Victoria, BC, Canada will host the second Indigenous Theatre Festival, featuring works presented in multiple Indigenous languages. The festival has been designed to respond to the needs of Indigenous artists to gather and address the isolating aspects of creating work with a goal of language transmission. The festival will include workshops and panels on designing plays, addressing the unique challenge of performing for audience members who mostly do not understand the language. By bringing stories to life in dramatic performances that will hold the interest of language speakers, language learners, and the general public, these talented performers will showcase their languages and their cultural traditions. Resources developed by this project will be made available to communities who seek to integrate drama into their language programs.

Morris and Sadeghi-Yekta are both organizers of this festival and they will be discussing the complexities of language loss and how events such as this festival could improve the social, spiritual, and cultural well-being of the Indigenous participants by grounding them in their identity, heritage, and traditional knowledge. The plays include important life lessons about building one’s confidence, persisting, overcoming adversity, and helping others. They bring out messages of sorrow and reconciliation, loss and hope

Biographies

Michelle MacArthur

Dr. Michelle MacArthur is an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor’s School of Dramatic Art. Her SSHRC-funded research examines three main, intersecting areas: feminist theatre, contemporary Canadian theatre, and the theory and practice of theatre reviewing.  

Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta

Kirsten is an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at the University of Victoria. She is currently working on a SSHRC Insight Grant focussing on global ways we can integrate theatre as a tool for languages and language reawakening in primary schools.

Tara Morris

Tara Morris is a PhD student at the University of Victoria, focusing on theatre, Hul’q’umi’num’ language, and linguistics. She holds a Master’s in Linguistics of a First Nations Language from Simon Fraser University and a Bachelor’s of Education from the University of British Columbia.
She co-organizes the Indigenous Theatre Festival, which explores theatre as a tool for language reawakening.