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School of English and Drama

Lucy Freedman

Lucy

Teaching Associate in English and Drama PhD candidate in Drama

Email: l.freedman@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

I am currently researching for a PhD in Drama at Queen Mary, supervised by Shane Boyle and Nick Ridout.

My PhD explores processes of criminalisation and subject formation in the bourgeois British state, looking to the criminal trial as a dramaturgical event. I am interested in ways in which participatory performance is used to aid these processes, and how care, carcerality and the erotic intersect within the reproduction of the bourgeois state.

I co-organised the Performance and State Violence conference at Queen Mary in June 2022

Teaching

Lucy has taught on the following modules at Queen Mary:

  • DRA120 Interventions
  • DRA114 London, Culture, Performance
  • DRA114 Theatre, Experiment and Revolution (convener)
  • DRA261 London, Performance, Now
  • ESH295 London, Walking in the City

Research

Research Interests:

  • Marxist and materialist feminisms
  • Abolitionist and anti-carceral theory
  • Marxist theories of law and the state
  • Radical pedagogy

Recent and On-Going Research

My PhD explores processes of criminalisation and subject formation in the bourgeois British state, looking to the criminal trial as a dramaturgical event. I am interested in ways in which participatory performance is used to aid these processes, and how care, carcerality and the erotic intersect within the reproduction of the bourgeois state.

Publications

Articles 

'A 'Beautiful Half Hour of Being a Mere Woman: The Feminist Subject and Temporary Solidarity' (2018), Historical Materialism, 26 (2). 

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: An Education Worker’s Reflections of the Carceralisation of Care’ (2020), Invert Journal, 1.

‘In Capitalism There Can be no Care Without Punitivity’

Book reviews:

 The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre, Ian Ward (2021) - Theatre Review (forthcoming)

I am also an editor of the marxist-feminist journal Invert.

Conference papers:

‘Forming Legal Subjects: The Policing of Children Amid Economic Crisis in Britain’ - Legal Form, University of Buffalo, June 24th-26th   2021

‘Staging subjection: theatricality and concealment in the bourgeois courtroom’ - Performance and State Violence, QMUL, June 15th-16th 2022

‘Critique at the edge: satire, taboo and eroticism in the plays of Lucy Beynon and Lisa Jeschke’ - 13th Annual Conference, The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), University of Califonia, Los Angeles, September 15th-18th 2022 

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