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Territory, Gender, and Body Politics: Lynn Nottage's Ruined

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2013, 26(1), pp.179-206
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yon-hee Chun 1

1성신여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Ruined by Lynn Nottage, the second African American woman to winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, deals with physical and mental manifestations of trauma among Congolese women in the 21st century. Ruined was written based on the interviews in Uganda, Africa with Congolese refugee women who have been the victims of rape during Ituri conflict. Although Ruined has been compared to Mother Courage, a work that inspired Lynn to visit Africa to make a 21stcentury version of Mother Courage, the new play does not employ the original work’s false frame to deliver the plight of Congolese women. Lynn realized that Mother Courage had a false frame after she interviewed the Congolese refugee women. Ruined centers on the space of Mama Nadi, a woman who runs a bar in the marginal areas of the DRC during the civil war. The bar is the symbolic place to represent the political, social, and cultural positions of the women in the DRC. Mama’s place is not a place of deconstruction of political dichotomy but transcends the barriers of political ideology to the degree that victimizer and victims coexist there. At Mama’s bar exhausted soldiers and rebels find a place to gain recuperative powers and experience the warmth of motherhood. Nottage exposes how gender-based politics and the ideology of patriarchal rule affect the women’s bodies, symbols of the ravaged battleground of war. The relationships intensified by the motherhood and sisterhood at Mama’s place create dynamic social interaction and contribute to the formation of a subjective sense of identity virtually ruined by the gender politics of patriarchy. Mama’s firm resolution to protect the women in her space appears repeatedly, and her meticulous endeavors gradually influence the women she has taken care of to find their voice and new life. Nottage reveals the possibility of the recovery among traumatized women in this symbolic place where dialectic ideological tension exists by highlighting the power of women’s voices in a place where women had been silenced by the hegemony of patriarchy in a post colonial age. The women in “ruined” status decide that their bodies will no longer be battlegrounds for patriarchal ideology. Instead, they will use their physical capacities to speak out their positions on the socio-political contexts of their time and provide people with hope. This transformation also suggests the possibility of the construction of a new identity among abused women. Ruined confirms the power of theatre to enable us to expand the collective political consciousness and give every viewer the opportunity to think of other people as valuable human beings.

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