Abstract

RAYNER, Francesca. Written on the body: gender, violence and queer desire in Sarah Kane's Cleansed. Ex aequo [online]. 2009, n.20, pp.55-64. ISSN 0874-5560.

This article examines the 1998 play Cleansed, written by one of the most controversial and one of the most European of contemporary British playwrights, Sarah Kane. The three narratives within the play explore the permeability of gender and sexual identities through the central metaphor of violence. This violence is not only symptomatic of the violence involved in the assumption of any gendered or sexual identity, whether heterosexual or queer, male or female, it appears, according to Kane to also be central to processes of liberation from these norms. The article also examines Kane’s refusal to be judged either a feminist or queer writer in the light of the extreme mobility of bodily reconfiguration she promotes.

Keywords : Drama; violence; bodily reconfiguration; gender; queer desire.

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