죽어가는 여성의 몸의 수행성: 『위트』
Performativity of a Dying Female Body: W;t
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This essay aims to read Margaret Edson’s W;t as a new academic, medical, and feminist drama in the age of technoscience by focusing on the performativity of a female professor’s body dying of advanced ovarian cancer in a university hospital. In this technoscientific age, the issues of females, especially their disabled dying bodies, are taken up as things related not just to sexual politics but to technoscientific biopolitics. Thus, this paper explores subversive possibilities of the perfomativity of a medicalized female body under the control of technoscientific biopolitics in the institutional spaces of the hospital and the university. W;t foregrounds the dying woman Vivian Bearing’s dramatic performance of commenting ironically on the performativity of her body in her own language of literary “wit” to fight against the medical “wit” of Dr. Harvey Kelekian and his student Jason Posner and against the suffering and fear of her impending death. But gradually this play reveals that the witless nurse, Susie Monahan, the most marginalized character, i.e., a “minor” character, is the hero of the play. Susie is Vivian’s most needed company as she lies dying, and she can help Vivian find a line of flight from the closed system of biopolitical control over her dying body and a line of light towards redemption and grace. Thus W;t can be regarded as a new feminist academic medical drama, a minor literature.
Abstract
This essay aims to read Margaret Edson’s W;t as a new academic, medical, and feminist drama in the age of technoscience by focusing on the performativity of a female professor’s body dying of advanced ovarian cancer in a university hospital. In this technoscientific age, the issues of females, especially their disabled dying bodies, are taken up as things related not just to sexual politics but to technoscientific biopolitics. Thus, this paper explores subversive possibilities of the perfomativity of a medicalized female body under the control of technoscientific biopolitics in the institutional spaces of the hospital and the university. W;t foregrounds the dying woman Vivian Bearing’s dramatic performance of commenting ironically on the performativity of her body in her own language of literary “wit” to fight against the medical “wit” of Dr. Harvey Kelekian and his student Jason Posner and against the suffering and fear of her impending death. But gradually this play reveals that the witless nurse, Susie Monahan, the most marginalized character, i.e., a “minor” character, is the hero of the play. Susie is Vivian’s most needed company as she lies dying, and she can help Vivian find a line of flight from the closed system of biopolitical control over her dying body and a line of light towards redemption and grace. Thus W;t can be regarded as a new feminist academic medical drama, a minor literature.
참고문헌 (24)
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