Gender and sexuality in three British plays: "Cloud Nine" by Caryl Churchill, "My Beautiful Laundrette" by Hanif Kureishi, "The Invention of Love" by Tom Stoppard

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2009

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Albayrak, Gökhan

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This thesis analyzes how gender and sexual identities are discursively constructed through Churchill’s Cloud Nine, Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Stoppard’s The Invention of Love; it traces how the dominant discourse reduces the riddle of human sexuality to the binary frame; it also discusses that the bi-polar organization of sexuality does not suppress, but reproduces sexual dissidence. A male-female pair is envisaged by the prevailing discourse; Butler’s ideas of performativity and drag performance will be employed to indicate that gender and sexuality are not inborn, but culturally and historically determined, and to explore how deviant sexualities undermine the double columns of the masculine and the feminine, the homosexual and the heterosexual. An investigation into the homosexual/heterosexual split will demonstrate how power shifts between the points of the binary frame rather than being monopolized by the dominant discourse. The regulating discourse polarizes homosexuality and heterosexuality; it deploys the binary frame to overvalue the heterosexual and to disparage the homosexual; the established order seeks to fortify its authority through the binary thought. Yet, the binary logic is internally unstable; binary oppositions constantly threaten to collapse and fuse into one another; therefore, due to the inherent indeterminacy of the binary logic, homosexuality is not annihilated, but rejuvenated by heterosexuality; thus, power flows among the dominant and counter discourses. Queer theory, drawing on post-structuralism, subverts the binary frame, and glorifies the proliferation of sexual identities and practices beyond the dualistic understanding.

Subject Keywords

English., Theatre

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12610691/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/18611

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

G. Albayrak, “ Gender and sexuality in three British plays: “Cloud Nine” by Caryl Churchill, “My Beautiful Laundrette” by Hanif Kureishi, “The Invention of Love” by Tom Stoppard ,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2009.