Performativity and its Discursive Reflection in the Narration of Mahmoud Dowlat Abadi's "The Man"

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
S. Mahdizadeh Khodayari 1
A. Nojoumian 2
1 Master of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2 Associate Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
This article examines the reproduction of gender identity in Dowlatabadi’s short story “The Man” in the light of Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. It investigates the cultural function of identity and the way language discursively reflects the role of the unestablished identity in the story. It also presents new outlooks towards language performativity of the male/female dichotomy. What this article focuses on is an individual's identity, and language, exploring the concept of gender performativity.

Butler asserts that performativity is a ritualized production and a constrained reiteration of cultural intelligibility under the compulsory prohibition pressed by the power regimes. The culturally-acquired gender is crafted based on the socially recognizable standards, which form the directionality of the self-representation. A Gender is an act that requires a repeated performance in ritual and social dramas. She declares that one is not born but rather becomes a subject whose gender is a discursive construction that defines his/her body. Moreover, the gendered subjects were subordinated to the language that interpellated them, so that each individual became a linguistically stylized occasion.

Dowlatabadi’s main character in this story undergoes transfiguration from childhood to adulthood affected by the social upheavals leading him towards his crafted and gendered identity formation. His father’s roles are resignified through the reiteration and imitation of the gendered and naturalized regulations. Surveying “The Man” elucidates that gender identity is an imitation, which leads the character to resignify and recontextualize the parodic gender reproductions. Therefore, the established discourses gave the agent the feasibility to establish his intelligible social existence.

Springing from the discussion about gender performativity of Dowlatabadi’s character, the article concluded that identity is a phantasmatic construction. What an individual performes is a non-intrinsic parody of the culturally constructed regulations. It can be concluded that identity is established by the power of language that interpellates the subjects.


Keywords

Subjects

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Language Related Research
Volume 11, Issue 2 - Serial Number 56
May and June 2020
Pages 151-175