여성·성·사랑: 캐롤 앤 더피의 ‘젠더 트라블’

Abstract

Woman·Sexuality·Love: Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Gender Trouble’ Abstract JooyoungPark This paper aims to explore how Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry actively envisions lesbian desire and love, a social and cultural taboo under the Thatcherite government. Duffy refuses the prevailing view of sexual normalcy; all desire is presumed to be heterosexual and masculine. She views Adrienne Rich’s term “lesbian existence” as a reality and a source of knowledge and power available to women, resisting the patriarchal ideology of “compulsory heterosexuality.” Her love poems, “Girlfriends” and “Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer” describe luxurious female orgasmic pleasure through lesbian tropes. Duffy stresses that the speaker’s sexual pleasure arises from acknowledging her lesbian identity. Furthermore, this paper examines how Duffy’s poems question the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Through “from Mrs. Tiresias,” Duffy suggests that all gender is, as Judith Butler argues, “an act” and “a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established.” Drawing a parallel between the two women(‘Tiresis’‘s masquerading femininity versus ’Mrs. Tiresis’s lesbian lover), Duffy shatters the fixed notion of gender identity in order to criticize Thatcherite conservatism about sexuality, emphasizing that gender identity is not dependent on anatomy, but rather on “the notion of an interior essence.”