About Me

Leah A. Woehr is a Ph.D Candidate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She is a scholar-artist specializing in performance studies and cultural studies. Her

research focuses on Chinese transnational adoption, exploring how citizenship, inter-

culturality, and familial identity are performed among Chinese adoptees.

Publications

"Bad Brecht: Restoring Mei Lanfang’s Personhood Within a Colonizer Discourse" by Leah A. Woehr

Published in Liminalities, A Journal of Performance Studies

Bertolt Brecht is heralded as one of the most important political theatre makers

and thinkers of the 20th century. Known for his politically engaged, deconstruc-

tionist theatre, Brecht is championed for peeling back the guise of realism in his

work. In this paper, I critique his canonization as a theatre maker in the Western

project by analyzing his misreading of the Chinese theatre as a way of legitimizing

his alienation effect. Furthermore, I demonstrate that this misinterpretation con-

tributed to the erasure of Mei Lanfang’s personhood and the performance politics

deeply rooted within it. I aim to restore his personhood by elaborating on Mei

Lanfang’s story and significance, and, in doing so, reveal a complicated web of the

colonizer-colonized relationship between China and the West.