Speaker
Description
Suicide can be represented as the tragic outcome of an iterable performative malady that both resists and resignifies the prescribed and restrictive cultural norms. This paper dissects Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) as a dramatic embodiment of a profound social and psychological crisis, arguing that the play stages melancholia as a form of gendered vulnerability that culminates in the defying act of self-destruction. Through Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity the analysis looks at suicide in the play as a crisis response that stems from Portia’s unresolved grief over the suicide of her twin brother, Gabriel, fifteen years prior. Portia's loss produces a crisis of subjectivity that troubles the masculine/feminine binary and destabilizes its boundaries. Portia's suicide iterates her brother’s earlier suicide, drowning in the same spot of Belmont River, showing her yearning to return to the womb and exist as an undifferentiated being from Gabriel. Her fantasies and final act demonstrate her refusal of gendered subject positions and her desperate attempt to escape the crisis of living as a feminine subject within restrictive social structures. Carr’s dramaturgy generates a performative space in which unresolved grief embodies Portia’s vulnerability in resistance and psychic struggle to fight the demands of restrictive femininity and socially sanctioned motherhood identity in 1990s Ireland. Portia’s suicide functions as a ritualized crises transmitted across time and accumulated cultural force through repetition, demonstrating how resistance to restrictive identity categories paradoxically increases vulnerability while simultaneously exposing the violence of those categories. This interdisciplinary reading reveals how performative failure can intensify psychic suffering and culminate in catastrophic vulnerability of suicide while also generate subversive resistance.
Short Biography
Samindokht Ronaghzadeh holds both Master’s and PhD degrees in English Literature from Middle East Technical University. Her Master’s thesis focused on Derrida’s concepts of mourning and the deferral of meaning, exploring the intricate interplay between language, loss, and identity. Her PhD dissertation looks into Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, offering critical insights into contemporary dramatic expressions of identity and trauma. After a four-year break devoted to motherhood, she resumed her academic studies with postdoctoral research at METU. Her project, investigates subject/object symbiosis relationship in Marina Carr’s Post-Dramatic Theatre.
| Keywords | Marina Carr, Portia Coughlan, Melancholia, Performativity, Judith Butler, Suicide, Gender Crisis, Irish Theatre. |
|---|---|
| samindokht63@gmail.com |