A New Look to the Manner of the Un/intelligible Female Gender Identity and Roles Construction in Selected Plays by Tennessee Williams

Document Type : علمی - پژوهشی

Authors

1 Department of English Literature, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

3 Department of English Literature, Roudehen Branch, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen, Iran

Abstract

Judith Butler efforts to highlight the significant role of the cultural heterosexism in the construction of female gender identity and roles by referring to repetitive acts through abjection, continuity among sex, gender, and sexual desire, interpellation, and exclusion of female gender . Tennessee Williams in his masterpieces depicts the method of gender constructedness years before Butler and beyond her theory. This research intends to study the nominated plays by Williams and Butler’s theory of female gender construction to reveal a better understanding of female characters and a more genuine understanding of the manner of cultural heteronormativity in such constructedness. Butler argues that parodic acts terminate in the binaries of man/woman, male/female, and masculine/feminine which reassures the bipolarity of the heterosexist cultures. In the plays, the concept of abjection can be traced, for both heterosexual and homosexual female gender identity and roles. According to Butler, the male gender subject is the only accountable case that are not the constituent part of cultural constituent in defining the inferior female gender identity. The situation of female subjects in these plays demonstrates that female gender individual has a share in the construction of heteronormativity. Some female identities receiving and doing the reiterative cultural acts, take the function of the hegemony of heterosexism and behave other female gender identities as the minor personalities who should be defined as the lower-rate gender identity and roles; besides, the identical female individual represents heteronormativity and restricts herself in the binaries to construct her own gender identity and roles.

Keywords

References

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Critical Language and Literary studies
Volume 18, Issue 27
February 2022
Pages 125-144

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