SPE(TA)CULAR REPRESENTATIONS: BIO-WRITING AND BIOPOLITICS IN WILLIAM YEATS

Abstract

The self-writings I call them bio-writings reveal about the performative constitution of gender, in that the author, when building himself biographically, constructs himself as a gendered subject in negotiation with the dictates of biopolitics. From this perspective, this work investigates, through bio-written records by William Butler Yeats, how the writers dilemmatic tension between heteronormativity and homoculture marked his personal and literary formation. Despite his obsession with identity stability, Yeats deconstructs the very sense of identity and, despite his efforts to ratify his heterosexuality, he ultimately disorient sexual orientation as he dismantles supposedly stable binary oppositions between masculinity and femininity, hetero and homosexuality by transiting between poles that culture assumes as ontologically opposed.