Women have been largely invisible in crime discourse in South Africa; they have never been conceived of as either the primary authors or objects of the law. Yet according to the Republic of South Africa Department of Correctional Services (DCS), they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the prison population today. In the eight years following democratic elections in 1994, DCS reports that the number of women behind bars grew by over 31 percent. From 2008 to 2012 alone, the women's prison population rose by 10 percent while the number of men behind bars declined. These increases are not fully attributable to an escalation in women's illicit behavior. Instead, shifts in policing and sentencing policies now mandate longer sentences for crimes for which women are most likely to be convicted—both aggressive and non-violent, often poverty-related, offenses such as theft (shoplifting, robbery, burglary, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement), narcotics (trafficking, sale, distribution), and sex work.

Identified by Time Out New York as “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” and hailed by the New York Times as “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation,” Young Jean Lee (Fig. 1) is actively shaping the future of the American theatre. In 2003, she founded Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, through which she has written and directed ten productions. Her full-length plays, including The Shipment and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, have been published in four collections and performed worldwide. In 2013, she released her first short film, Here Come the Girls, and her debut album, We're Gonna Die. In the following interview, Young Jean Lee reflects on the role of humor in her plays, discusses her collaborative process, and reveals the two rules that she would never break in the theatre.

Actress Elizabeth Robins, encountering Ibsen's Doll's House for the first time in a Novelty Theatre performance in June 1889, was thrilled by both the boldness of the play's ideology and the emotional power of the characters and the acting. The one element with which she found fault in the production, however, was Nora's tarantella, which she described nearly forty years later as “a piece of theatricalism, Ibsen's one concession to the effect-hunting that he had come to deliver us from.” William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker concurred with Robins's assessment, criticizing Nora's dance as the play's “flawed streak,” as “a theatrical effect, of an obvious, unmistakable kind” and “Ibsen's last concession to … the theatrical orthodoxy of his earlier years.” The tarantella, they agreed, was an embarrassing irrelevance, a crowd-pleasing distraction from the play's serious brainwork, simply an opportunity for the lead actress to display her agility and her well-shaped legs.

When Paper magazine attempted in 2014 to “break the Internet” (as its cover declared) by publishing French artist Jean-Paul Goude's photos of reality star Kim Kardashian brazenly displaying her infamous derriere, the public reprimands to Kardashian from fellow celebrities quickly zeroed in on an even more essentializing aspect of her identity. As actress Naya Rivera posted, “You're someone's mother.” Singer Lorde articulated Kardashian's transgression even more simply, retweeting the photos along with a single word that served as a hex: “mom.” The judgment of her female peers seemed to be that Kardashian, who gave birth to daughter North West in June 2013, should have known better than to flaunt her sexuality on the public stage now that she was a mother. Meanwhile, in a related realm, an American celebrity tabloid such as Us Weekly can generate annual advertising revenues of $403 million (that magazine's 2013 figure) with a profit model based on spectacularizing celebrity mothers and appraising their so-called “baby bumps.” Former US Weekly editor-in-chief Janice Min coined the term “Frankenmom” in a now-notorious 2012 New York Times article about the pressure she felt to regain her pre-pregnancy body after the birth of her third child. In that article, she paid penance for “our ideal of this near-emaciated, sexy and well-dressed Frankenmom” that she had helped create through celebrity journalism. (Kardashian's decision to pose nude in Paper was later explained by celebrity outlet TMZ as a gesture “to show the world how she bounced back after giving birth to North West.”) Despite the personal pressure she experienced as a mother, Min boasted that because of her magazine's focus on maternal bodies during her time as editor (2003–9), American novelist “Tom Wolfe once remarked, ‘the one thing that Us Weekly has done that's a great boost to the nation is, they've probably increased the birthrate.’”

Although many artists have used food in performance, few are as famously or firmly associated with it as Karen Finley. At the start of Finley's career, almost all of her work was marked by unusual uses of food. Examples include sugared yams dumped over her backside while describing ageist rape in I'm an Ass Man (1985) and the concoction of crushed raw eggs and confetti sponged over her body to analogize social oppression in A Constant State of Desire (1986). Finley intended to channel spectators' excessive emotional and sensual reactions to her extreme, sometimes nauseating uses of food into an indictment of abusive attitudes toward people of marginalized identities. In this sense, the excess of the medium and the excess of the message were intended to correspond, creating a synergistic effect on the spectator.

In this article, I trace the origins of the normalization of pornographic tropes as the new sexual ideal in contemporary visual culture to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publicity photos of actresses and monarchs by examining one prominent transatlantic actress's collection of publicity photos, the Elizabeth Robins Papers at the Fales Library at New York University. As I show, around the turn of the twentieth century, a new standard of idealized feminine beauty was produced by the combination of two contradictory images of celebrity: the distant decorum of the monarch and the perceived erotic sexuality of the actress. The mass production of publicity photographs, which took the form of cartes-de-visite in the 1860s and cabinet photos in the 1870s, broadened the spectrum of sexuality by positioning these two quintessential celebrity types—the actress and the monarch—in relation to the tableau vivant and to existing and emerging tropes of portraiture. The image of the actress existed in relation to several mutually dependent discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the rise of photography in relation to other art forms; the rise of theatrical spectacle in relation to advertising, consumerism, and fashion; the rise of women's public role in relation to sexuality, the body, and beauty culture; and the paradoxical democratization of celebrity culture as related to the monarchy. All of these factors center on a figure who lived so vividly in the public imaginary that she could be found in multiple spaces: on the stage, in stationers’ shops, on postcards, in newspapers, in photograph albums.