Document Type : Original Research Article
Authors
1
Ph.D. Student, Department of International Relations, Faculty of Politics, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2
Full Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University
Abstract
Introduction: This article examines the role of gender transfiguration in David Hare’s My Zinc Bed, and A Map of the World in the light of Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. It investigates whether what Hare’s characters performed through their body and discourse were the internal features in them or the hallucinatory effects of their naturalized and gendered bodies. Butler asserts that performativity is a ritualized production and a constrained reiteration of cultural intelligibility under the compulsory prohibition pressed by the power regimes. Based on what Buttler asserts, the culture constructs gender, which is understood concerning a set of laws. It seems that gender is as fixed as the biology-is-destiny formulation in which culture, not biology becomes destiny, and the domain of gendered subjects is constituted by the body which is itself a construction.
Background of the Study: Works of the prolific writer, David Hare, have been studied by many researchers and critics from different points of view, yet, none of them has underlain the tenets of this research. Stephen Coates in his thesis “Alien Nation: David Hare’s History Plays” examines seven plays of Hare, among which Pravda exists. He considers the socio-historical background of Britain after the Second World War and capitalist-patriarchal system, which results in psychological damages mostly on the middle class. Coates challenges the political concepts of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Herbert Marcuse, relating them to the oppression of different social spheres. Coates studies the significant effects of media on the society as well as the tension that each member of the newspaper industry deal. The hypocrisy of the English press which propagates false news to the civilians is the main problem of Coates in his thesis.
Methodology: The theme of My Zinc Bed is faith to disillusionment in Thatcherian postwar as the title refers to an image of death. All significations happen in the circulation of the required form of repetition. Obedience is the primary principle in the discourse of AA meetings where both Paul and Elsa used to attend after they quit drinking. The performativity of such a discourse affected their body to the extent that caused both of them to betray Victor while what they experienced was not real love but the love of trouble. In A Map of the World, Stephen as an English journalist practices the social norms of his own culture when he stays in the same hotel with Mehta and Peggy in India. Their stylized bodies receive strict cultural laws based on the gender norms of the society. Hence, the bodily discourses gave the agents the feasibility to establish their intelligible social existence.
Conclusion: It can be concluded from My Zinc Bed and A Map of the World that the agent cannot be known feasible out of the practices of cultural discourse. The AA meetings in My Zinc Bed and the years of living in England in A Map of the World transfigured the bodily discourse of Elsa, Paul, and Mehta. Attending AA cults caused both Elsa and Paul to reiterate and perform a kind of discourse, which prohibited them from any kind of addiction. The passive medium of Peggy’s body in A Map of the World was materialized in the American cultural discourse. Affected by the English cultural discourse, Mehta performed the theatricality of English self-representation, which failed to conform to the Indian naturalized cultural hegemonies thus resulting in his unintelligibility. The socially forcible prohibitions create the discursive conditions in which an individual attempt to constitute a hallucination of naturally standard bodily interactions.
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