Browsing by Author "Distiller, Natasha"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    The ambiguous female voice : recovering female subjectivity in Elizabeth Cary's The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry
    (2008) Broumels, Monique Juliette; Distiller, Natasha
    The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (circ) 1604 deals with the difficulties of a woman to express herself in a society that enjoins women to silence and to the private realm of the home. In the play Cary debates the actions of several female characters, presenting the reader with the understanding that they are wilful subjects who act to push the boundaries of the patriarchal confines of the royal household in which they find themselves. But Cary does not unequivocally endorse these women's actions. The main protagonist of the play is Mariam whose public voice and failure to comply with her husband forms the central drama of the play. Drawing on the ambiguity that is evident in Cary's play, I explore female subjectivity in the play with regards to two of the most influential ideologies in early modern England: those of marriage and religion. Every woman in early modern England, as with all the women in Cary's play, were either married, to be married or had been married. Protestant ideology became the ambiguous space where women were for the first time considered as spiritually equal. But the family and marriage were social and gendered constructions that drew on Christian discourse in order to reinstate the notions of gender difference and ensure the submission of women in the home and in the family.
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    Assuming the female part : a critique of discourses of bodily normalcy
    (2006) Lever, Carla; Distiller, Natasha
    In this thesis, I examine the concept that discourses which utilise a stable notion of womanhood inevitably exclude some by the very boundedness of their definitions. Such definitions are premised by a notion of gendered normativity, and are often implicit and unconsciously evoked. Principally, I addess the reductive conflation of womanhood with specific biological parts, a common rhetorical strategy I identify as a particularly problematic form of synecdoche. Although feminisms are often highly attuned to questions of social difference amongst women, I argue that, too often, this awareness is not extended to deconstructing notions of 'natural' physical female identity. This can, in part, be traced to an historical feminist need to argue a distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender, in the face of partiarchal oppression. This separation has done much to forge a space for the legitimation of women's rights, as it diminished the centrality of the body to the issue of identity construction. However, is associating the acquired effects of culture solely with gendered identity, the concept of 'the female body' has unavoidably become regulative, singular and naturalised. I use poststructuralist theory to demonstrate that, even when authors explicitly seek to address feminist issues of women's exclusion and marginalisation within patriarchal discourse, their recouse to an identifiable 'woman' paradoxically ends up re-inscribing these very issues for some women. Indeed, this is because the notion of a universally identifiable, stable 'woman' is a fiction.
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    Beyond the "Baartman Trope": representations of black women's bodies from early South African proto-nationalisms to postapartheid nationalisms
    (2018) Van der Schyff, Karlien; Young, Sandra; Distiller, Natasha
    In this thesis, I interrogate the discourses through which colonial stereotypes of race, gender and sexuality are uncritically invoked to serve new purposes, particularly in the service of postapartheid nationalist narratives. I argue not only that contemporary South African nationalism is imagined through gendered tropes, but also that the intersecting tropes of gender, race and sexuality which underlie postapartheid nation-building discourses propagate many of the same stereotypes about black women’s sexuality first entrenched through colonial representations. More specifically, I argue that these tropes are repeatedly invoked through an uncritical deployment of what I term the “Baartman trope”. With this term, I aim to signal the problematic discourses and systems of representation that have reduced Sara Baartman’s embodied specificity to that of a generalised, stereotypical symbol, either as the archetypal hypersexualised victim of colonial exploitation and humiliation, or as the symbolic mother of the “new” South African nation. Throughout this thesis, I not only offer a critique of the “Baartman trope” itself, but also aim to disrupt the decidedly reductive mode of representation which makes an essentialist stereotype such as the “Baartman trope” possible. To this end, I draw on performativity theory and the representational category of intimacy as ethical scholarly approaches to the politics of representation. I interrogate a wide range of literary texts, as well as a number of different scenes of representation that simultaneously challenge, perpetuate, refute and complicate essentialist and stereotypical representations of the black female body. Ranging from early South African proto-nationalist narratives to current postapartheid nationalist discourses, these different scenes of representation show that the same problematic tropes underlying colonial representations of gendered, racialised and sexualised black female bodies are more often than not re-imagined and reconstituted in the postcolonial imaginary. Furthermore, the fact that colonial systems of signification still underpin and influence postcolonial representations, albeit in new ways and to different purposes, highlights the inevitably ambiguous, unstable and hybridised nature of representing race, gender and sexuality in the South African postcolony.
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    “My People all over the World”: Hip Hop, Gender, and Black Nationalism
    (2008) Distiller, Natasha
    T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (2007) and Charise L. Cheney’s Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (2005) both offer committed and informed analyses of the gender politics of a cultural movement with which their authors identify. Sharpley-Whiting’s personal story prefaces her investigation into how, why, and at what cost hip hop’s representations of young black women are perpetuated by these women. Cheney’s investment emerges most strongly at the end of her fascinating historical foray into the form of black nationalism that she finds emerging at a particular point in the development of rap music. She calls black nationalism’s true emancipatory potential into question, charging that it has failed even to ‘‘conceive [... of] a politics of liberation that is not dependent upon a masculinist discourse that incorporates a subordination of the feminine’’ (169). Both authors identify themselves as members of the hip hop nation they write about. What is at stake in their intellectual inquiries, then, is brought powerfully home, as each author engages with a tradition of which she is at once part, and by which she is interpolated.
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    "Power always goes on and on" : the limits of masculinity in Marabou Stork Nightmares and Fight Club
    (2009) Okes, Thomas Holt; Distiller, Natasha
    This study is an attempt to trace the construction and performance of violent masculinity. In this thesis I argue that a particular form of violent masculine identity emerges from within a hegemonic structure of gender relations. I employ two popular, contemporary novels, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1997) and Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares (1996), to examine a form of masculinity which is involved in these relations. I explore these novels with the aim of identifying the ways in which their characters engage with those around them in accordance with the system of power which encompasses them. In doing so, I hope to explain the restricting limits placed upon their bodies, and clarify the compulsions which drive their private demeanours and interpersonal behaviour. I argue that these characters perform a model of masculine identity which is founded upon an ideology of naturalised male authority and grounded in the social practice of violent dominance. Marabou Stork Nightmares depicts a male narrator who, in enacting a model of hegemonic masculinity, becomes implicated in the reproduction of hegemonic masculine domination. Fight Club examines the role of this model in restricting its members to structural and physical domination. Each of these novels is concerned with outlining the limitations of performance of masculine gender identity directed through violence. In different ways they convey the extent to which a hegemonic system of dominance generates decidedly difficult and unhappy experience. Overall, this thesis attempts these novels, and to account for the problematic experiences of their characters.
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    Ruth Miller and the poetics of literary maternity
    (2012) Warner, Sarah Jane; Driver, Dorothy; Young, Sandra; Distiller, Natasha
    Ruth Miller's poetry was written between 1940 and the year of her death in 1969, and is published in three volumes, Floating Island (1965), Selected Poems (1968), and Ruth Miller: Poems Prose Plays (1990). In this thesis, I modify the concept of literary maternity suggested by Joan Metelerkamp in her article, “Ruth Miller: Father's Law or Mother's Lore?” (1992). My approach is informed by a model of literary maternity that is not defined in terms of a female figure but in terms of a relation between the earliest parent and the child, or what is referred to in psychoanalytic terms as the preoedipal relation. My thesis is concerned to show how Miller's poetry and a theory on the maternal function of literature reinterpret each other; it includes a consideration of Miller's literary legacy, the critical literature describing her oeuvre, and the issues of continuity and authority that arise in the context of literary publication.
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    Shakespeare in South Africa : literary theory and practice
    (2003) Distiller, Natasha; Schalkwyk, David
    This thesis explores the development of a "South African Shakespeare". Relying on post-colonial theory as primary framework, it views colonised culture not as secondary and responsive, but as primary and creative. The main work of the thesis is to trace the role played by "Shakespeare", as a set of texts and as an icon, in a particular trajectory of writing in English in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century.
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    "This stage of woe" : the petrarchanism of Mary Wroth
    (1997) Distiller, Natasha; Schalkwyk, David
    Mary Wroth, the first Englishwoman to write a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, creates a counterdiscourse which comments on and contributes to English love poetry. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is addressed from a female lover to a male beloved, and this thesis discusses the implications of this unusual Petrarchan gender configuration .It explores the ways in which Wroth's Pamphilia encounters, is affected by, and alters, the poetics of English Petrarchanism, showing how English Petrarchanism had developed into a discourse that assumed a male poet and a female addressee. By paying attention to Wroth's socio-historical context, as well as her genre, I discuss how and why Pamphilia encounters elements of English Petrarchanism that do not easily allow for a female speaker. Illustrating that gendered subjectivities form the basis of English Petrarchan poetics, I show how this is relevant in terms of the gender climate of the Renaissance. By paying attention to common-sense assumptions about 'appropriate' female behaviour, and the dynamics of the public performance that (especially Petrarchan) writing entailed, I explore the implications for Pamphilia, and her responses. I show that a female poet had different access to many of the poetic and social assumptions of Petrarchanism and of Renaissance society, which affects what she can say, and how she can say it. I look at Pamphilia's interactions with the relentlessly public world of a courtly love poet, and explore how her gender complicates her position as a Petrarchan subject. I am concerned with poetic and political aspects typical of Petrarchanism. These include the role of the beloved; the lover's emotional isolation; the multifaceted nature of Petrarchan desire, both erotic and socio-political; the importance of the gaze and the symbol of the eye; and the drive within Petrachanism for the poet's of constitution selfhood.