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eBook details
- Title: Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats (Critical Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 87 KB
Description
In this article I analyze the performance of gender as espoused in the literature of the female Beats. It aims to demonstrate how the writers inscribed themselves into the Beat legacy from a unique perspective--the perspective of the marginalised feminine presence within the movement. If we perceive censorship as a mode which actively seeks to exclude some citizens (as opposed to passively legitimising boundaries of expression for all citizens), then we may suppose that "censorship is not primarily about speech, that it is exercised in the service of other kinds of social aims, and that the restriction of speech is instrumental to the achievements of other, often unstated, social and state goals" (Butler, Excitable Speech 132). One such unstated goal is "the insistence that certain kinds of historical events only be narrated one way" (Butler, Excitable Speech 132). In a way, the voice of the female Beat has been censored by historians, scholars and indeed the male Beat, perhaps to serve the larger goal of phallogocentrism. Thus, the purpose of this discussion is to assess how the poststructuralist conception of performative gender, an examination most often connected to the scholar Judith Butler, can be applied to literature of the female Beats. For the female Beats, this gender performance appears time and time again as a necessary performance, a performance of survival. At times it also presents itself as a notable deviation from the normative performance of the female gender, if we consider the familiar trope of the 1950s woman sacrificing her own ambitions in lieu of a secure marriage and lifestyle centred on the family. Conversely, the female Beats (Diane di Prima and Janine Pommy Vega for example) left a secure home and family in search of a poetic Renaissance with an air of camaraderie. Of course, it would be naive to assume that this trope is an entirely accurate reflection of a woman in post-war America, as William H. Young and Nancy K. Young have observed in The 1950s: American Popular Culture Throughout History--by referring to statistical data they present a counter-attack to the televised imagery of the stay-at-home, domestic goddess, adorned with a pearl necklace. The statistical evidence they offer describes how, contrary to popular belief, there were actually more women in employment throughout the 1950s than in World War II, where the normative assumption suggests that after the war, the majority of female employees once again took their place in the home (Young and Young 11). Nonetheless, it is the most pervasive representation of 1950s women and even subtly infiltrates today's culture, which still pays tribute to the elegance and sophistication of this historical stereotype, evident in cultural texts ranging from Fairy Liquid adverts to the burlesque dancer Dita von Teese. Thus, my aim is not to present a fictitious, polarised boundary between what we might call the Squares and the Beats, or the female bohemian author versus the 1950s housewife, or even the female Beat author versus the male Beat author, as this is a gross over-generalisation of the much more complex situation at hand. Instead, I intend to deconstruct the boundary between these (superficially) opposing poles of American culture and demonstrate the overlap and mutual dependence which exists between the periphery and the mainstream as a means of gauging the specifically female contribution to the multi-dimensional and sometimes contradictory literary aesthetics of the Beat authors themselves.