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Sarah Kane's Cruelty: Subversive Performance and Gender

Dluback, Rebecca L.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1232751060

Abstract Details

2008, Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Sarah Kane uses cruelty in her plays Blasted and Cleansed to shock the audience out of their indifference, which will then allow Kane to subvert gender norms, through performed acts on stage, and the heterosexual patriarchal authority that creates the Other in society. Kane uses the theories of Antonin Artaud and Judith Butler to create a new style that melds these two theories while bringing a fresh take to the theater. Kane was twenty-three when her first play, Blasted, opened at the Royal Court Theater Upstairs on January 12, 1995. It was met with hostility by the critics when it first opened, but after the shock had quieted, there were many positive critiques on her plays. Kane used Artaud's manifesto on The Theater of Cruelty to bring the physicality and importance of the image back to the theater. The violence done in her plays is the central action that forces the audience to be a witness to cruelty. Kane shows blatant acts of cruelty on stage in Blasted, with the homosexual rape and the sucking out of Ian's eyes, and in Cleansed, with Carl and Grace being beaten, Rod and Robin's deaths, and the forced sex change. These actions are used to present gender as culturally constructed and open up the allowance of difference. The gender theory of Butler helps to interpret the way Kane uses gender through Butler's representation of gender as repeated acts performed daily that can be subverted through the repetition of difference. Kane uses the homosexual rape of Ian in Blasted and the homosexual love and incest in Cleansed to allow the audience to see difference and break down the binary that governs gender.
Jennifer Jeffers, PhD (Committee Chair)
Michael Geither, PhD (Committee Member)
James Marino, PhD (Committee Member)
35 p.
English literature
Sarah Kane; Theatre of Cruelty; Blasted; Cleansed

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dluback, R. L. (2008). Sarah Kane's Cruelty: Subversive Performance and Gender [Master's thesis, Cleveland State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1232751060

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dluback, Rebecca. Sarah Kane's Cruelty: Subversive Performance and Gender. 2008. Cleveland State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1232751060.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dluback, Rebecca. "Sarah Kane's Cruelty: Subversive Performance and Gender." Master's thesis, Cleveland State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1232751060

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

csu1232751060
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© 2008, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Cleveland State University and OhioLINK.