Inevitability of violence in David Mamet’s Oleanna Under the light of Judith Butler’s Gender Studies

Abstract: Since the second half of the 20th century the wave of feminism has witnessed a new movement which is known as Gender Studies. This new issue has attracted many critics to the subject of Gender. As a branch of feminism gender study highlights the basis of identification and differences of male and female according to the social and cultural conception of them. Judith Butler, (1956- ) a professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, is acclaimed as one of the outstanding pioneers of Marxist Feminism who helped the development of the idea of gender. Unlike the concept of sex which is purely of biological category, Butler’s notion of gender is a matter of culture, that is, it is a construction formed by discourses, either social or political, with its variable fluidity that changes within different contexts and time. Gender is not a noun , Butler (1999) argues, [but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be, … it is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed . Accordingly, gender is performative, and it is the acts that form the illusion of a stable gender identity. The present study tends to explore the constitution of power and its formative effects on David Mamet’s play, Oleanna, a very controversial work dealing with sexual harassment and political correctness. The important is going to be done applying views and results of Judith Butler’s notion of gender and identity trouble to the play first through explanation of related key concepts like difference, decentering, subject and language, and then utilizing them to analyze the roots of sudden, surprising transformations and role-reversals of the involved characters, John and Carol, through the three acts. Furthermore, it is tried to find out the causes of unavoidable violence within the contexts of the relations going between the characters.

کلیدواژه ها:

gender ، identity ، difference ، decentering ، performative ، power ، violence ، discourses ، language