2017, Vol.30, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

This paper examines the ways in which Parks’s Venus critiques the dehumanizing colonial gaze that commodifies and fetishizes the black female body by representing The Venus Hottentot as a multivalent figure occupying multiple subject positions as spectacle, spectator, and performer. Shifting from an object of male specular desire to a desiring subject, The Venus subverts the male structure of the gaze founded on the male subject/female object binarism. The Venus thus reconstructs her relationship to the spectatorial gaze and in doing so reconstitutes her subjectivity as well. In the play-within-the-play, The Venus watches The Bride-To-Be masquerading “The Venus,” with her subjectivity split into spectator and spectacle. This in turn splits the audience’s gaze as well. In an ironic twist, she announces her own death in the overture and then proceeds to present her story in the following scenes. This suggests that “The Venus” is a theatrical construction, that what the spectator is about to see is a performative re-enactment of the history of Saartjie Baartman. Through this performance, the heroine is re-created. In a series of metatheatrical scenes, the contemporary spectators are implicated in the onstage voyeuristic objectification and racial oppression. In the mise-en-abyme of seeing, the theatergoers’ gaze is conflated with the onstage spectators’ gaze at freak shows and with the scientific gaze in the anatomical theatre. When addressing the spectators, The Venus as performer returns the spectators’ look and invites them to see that racial oppression is still going on and that something should be done about it. In this sense, Parks’s play stages a ritual remembering, not sexual objectification, of Baartman, calling for their ethical engagement.

Julia Cho’s Durango is unique because it is a bildungsroman style travelogue of three men who suffer from homosexuality, alienation and the lack of a wife/mother. The idiosyncrasy of the play also lies in its engagement of the mutants from the X-Men series, which highlights an analogy between minority narratives and superhero narratives. The heroes and villains in the X-Men series share the same origin: X factor which caused them to lose opportunities to be normal and to be alienated from the mainstream society of homo sapiens. The theme of loss and alienation echoes in the minority characters in Durango, Boo-Seong, Isaac, and Jimmy, who feel alienated because of their ethnicity and homosexuality. The heroic mutants differentiate themselves from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants by trying to build a mutually beneficial relationship with humankind and fighting against the villainous mutants. Their strifes represent their dualistic desire to keep their mutant identity and successfully assimilate into mainstream society. This paired ambition is visible in the Asian American men in Durango and their pursuit of the ambition unavoidably coincides with pain and confusion. Flaws and the pain subsequently caused actually make mutants human as well as super. It would enable them to realize their subjectivity for them to acknowledge their flaws and to accept pain as part of their identity. The same is true for the father and sons in Durango.

This research aims to find the new trend of post-racialism and cosmo-feminism which have been built among African American women in the 21st post-racial cosmopolitan world by focusing on The Help(2011). To escape from the white women’s racial discrimination, the black women in The Help start to build empathy among them and decide to defy social conventions as black women so that they can become liberal subjects out of the race, gender, and class-restricted world. While they try to make their own black community a hopeful space for their future they decide to publicize their agonies through a book and let their past stories known to the world. Their behavior caused by the spirit of black feminism not only leads the black women to enlightenment but also enables them to escape from the social system which treated them unfairly. Their acts of social resistance which started from black feminism and their pleasure of knowing bring about both a substantive change and a substantial leap in their lives. By doing so, the newly built knowledgeable African American female writers’ community traverses both racial and gender boundaries under the name of cosmofeminism and makes them reborn as cosmopolitan female subjects.