(Dis)Arming a Genealogy: “Top Girls” and the Critique of Progression

Abstract

This study will attempt to approach the play Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill, to examine how, based on dramaturgical strategies, there is an amendment to the notion of progression that forms the basis of the story of capitalist emancipation in which a certain liberal or bourgeois feminism participates. Attention will be paid, above all, to the consequences of the presuppositions of this notion when outlining a genealogy, as well as to the elements that the playwright puts into circulation to highlight the issues of this model and the contradictions that sustain it. Finally, the study aims to show how a political critique can be undertaken from the field of formal innovations, focusing on the indissoluble link established between ethics and aesthetics.