"Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres makes an important contribution to gender and violence studies with a focus on theatrical representations of women not only as victims, but also as survivors and perpetrators of violent action. The book is comprehensive in its examination of the sociological, psychological, and feminist perspectives on "real-world" incidents of violence, wide-spread and mediated interpretation of these events often informed by stereotypical and essentialized notions of gender, and especially women who commit violent acts, and the power of theatre to disrupt and revise our preconceptions of gender and violent behavior with a multiplicity of motivations and contexts. Taylor Porter considers an impressive array of performative spaces with which to complicate and demystify both gender and violence: plays in various dramaturgical forms, using varying performance strategies, including stage combat; state-sponsored violence in the theatre of war; the boxing arena and street-fighting, and the private/public space of sexualized play." (Sharon Friedman, Associate Professor, the Gallatin School at New York University, USA)