Patriarchy and feminist praxis: The dialectics of power and resistance in contemporary French women's theatre

Jaishree Venkatesan, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation examines the interplay between patriarchal power structures impinging on different aspects of women's existence and various responses offered to subvert them as exemplified in the dramatic works of three French women playwrights. Drawing critical insights from feminist and post-structuralist theories, I analyze Portrait de Dora by Helene Cixous, La Table by Michele Foucher, and Le Voyage sans fin by Monique Wittig to study three specific facets of women's oppression related to the body, language and gender. The theatre has traditionally been a male dominated genre, as evidenced by the paucity of female-authored representations of women on stage. Chapter one discusses the usefulness of applying feminist theories to the theatre in an effort to articulate new representational modes that would counter mimetic paradigms that simply reflect an essentially male view of women's experiences. Chapter two is an analytical exploration of the sexual and textual politics of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, whose theoretical approaches form the basis of and guide my subsequent investigations. In chapter three, I deconstruct power networks that operate in the guise of normalizing discursive technologies to arrive at the hysterization of the female body as evidenced in Portrait de Dora. La Table studied in chapter four, provides a critical inquiry into logocentric systems invested with dominant ideologies, which function on masculine, patrilinear laws of signification to ensure the continued subordination of women. The fifth chapter examines Le Voyage sans fin, in the ways in which it engages with the polemics of sex and gender configurations as cultural constructs erected by patriarchy to confine behavior, sexuality and desire within the proscribed limits of a heterosexual matrix. Playwrights Cixous, Foucher and Wittig reveal and devalue insidious power relationships which shape our thought processes and social gestures at all levels of society. Their experimental dramaturgy formulates and transforms conventional notions of "woman" and "femininity" into new possibilities of interpretation that envision the emergence of a female aesthetic. Their belief in the primacy of women as the source of meaning and endless possibilities stands testimony to the need for a woman-identified economy as a source of subversion and empowerment.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Pellissier, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Romance literature|Womens studies

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