Crossing the mirror into maternal waters: the ethics and aesthetics of Becoming-other in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018)
Crossing the mirror into maternal waters: the ethics and aesthetics of Becoming-other in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018)
The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its “economy” and “forms” of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray’s “the female imaginary”, Deleuze’s “becoming-other”, Cixous’s “écriture feminine”, Lyotard’s “the figural” and Derrida’s “chora”.
Ella Hickson's The Writer, ethics and aesthetics of becoming-other, female imaginary and feminine writing, queering gender and genre
787-820
Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza
01a37fed-90cb-4b0c-a72e-32276e951e5f
18 August 2022
Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza
01a37fed-90cb-4b0c-a72e-32276e951e5f
Fakhrkonandeh, Alireza
(2022)
Crossing the mirror into maternal waters: the ethics and aesthetics of Becoming-other in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018).
English Studies, 103 (6), .
(doi:10.1080/0013838X.2022.2047336).
Abstract
The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its “economy” and “forms” of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray’s “the female imaginary”, Deleuze’s “becoming-other”, Cixous’s “écriture feminine”, Lyotard’s “the figural” and Derrida’s “chora”.
Text
post-proof Dr Fakhrkonandeh NEST2047336_snapshotElla Hickson The Writer
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 29 January 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 14 March 2022
Published date: 18 August 2022
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
I would like to express my profuse thanks to Dr Yigit Sumbul for his meticulous perusal of earlier drafts of the article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor-in-chief for their insightful hints and helpful comments which considerably contributed to the refinement of the article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords:
Ella Hickson's The Writer, ethics and aesthetics of becoming-other, female imaginary and feminine writing, queering gender and genre
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Local EPrints ID: 455896
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/455896
ISSN: 1744-4217
PURE UUID: 367459bd-2534-4d55-85bd-471348aecae9
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Date deposited: 07 Apr 2022 16:50
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 07:11
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