Social Sciences and Humanities Open (Jan 2023)
Gendered body in the pursuit of equality: An Irigarayan reading of Sarah Kane
Abstract
Sarah Kane's plays expose the limits of our sight when it comes to the representation of a female body to identify what is missing from the contemporary stage and hence the world. In the plays of Sarah Kane, the women are not only defined in their relation to men and are subjected to aggression and violence when they try to occupy the same space for themselves, but also, they are lost because they fail to associate themselves with their own bodies as well as articulate their emotions and experiences. This article focuses on how the plays of Sarah Kane identify with Luce Irigaray's critique of equality between women and men in a gender-neutral multicultural rhetoric, which imposes the privileged masculine as the norm, hence reestablishes the power structures of a phallocentric world. Here the women remain devoid of a space where they can express themselves in their own feminine terms and freely communicate with others. Irigaray, thus, calls for the need of a feminine language, with an appropriate feminine syntax, metaphor and symbols, in order to create a feminine space such that the women can assert their feminine subjectivity and exist on similar terms with the other half, masculine, of the world. The article explores Kane's depiction of the conditions of the contemporary women, operating in a world which undermines them to the extent that they are unable to express the conditions of their subjectivity and are pushed into alienation and suffering.
