Abstract
In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray proposes one of the most effective and interesting feminist strategies yet. She asserts, ‘there is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one “path”, the one historically assigned to the feminine, that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately’ (p. 76). In this chapter, I hope to demonstrate how the feminine characters in certain plays written by the American playwright, Edward Albee, correspond to Irigaray’s demand. These fictional women gradually learn to play their ‘feminine role deliberately’ and, from one play to another, manage to excel in the art of subversive mimicry.
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Bibliography
Albee, Edward, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Collected Plays of Edward Albee 1958–1965 (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007).
-, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Collected Plays of Edward Albee 1958–1965 (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007).
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Hall, Ann C., A Kind of Alaska: Women in the Plays of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).
Halsema, Annemie, ‘Phenomenology in the Feminine: Irigaray’s Relationship to Merleau-Ponty’, in Gail Weiss (ed.), Intertwining: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 63–83.
Irigaray, Luce, Speculum: Of the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
-, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
-, Sexes and Genealogies, tr. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
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© 2015 Mona Hoorvash
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Hoorvash, M. (2015). Femininity and Subversive Mimicry in Edward Albee’s Plays and Beyond. In: Irigaray, L., Marder, M. (eds) Building a New World. Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453020_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453020_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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