Writing Body and Boundary: Malady, Monstrosity and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake

• Main Authors: Chung-hao Ku, 辜崇豪
• Other Authors: Hsiu-chuan Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/11485411930103637781

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 93 === This thesis expounds the dialectic between self and other in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000) and Oryx and Crake (2003). Regarding the human body as the locus of social powers, it ventures on an investigation of bodily autonomy and bodily integrity in the age(s) of patriarchy and/or transgenics. By referring to Julia Kristeva's "abjection" theory, Helene Cixous's ecriture feminine, Donna J. Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," Chris Hables Gray's cyborg citizenship, Michel Foucault's critique of naturalism, as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "becoming," this thesis attempts to delve into the complexity of boundary discourses in order to reveal the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of subjectivity from the perspectives of female malady and human monstrosity. As The Blind Assassin brings to the fore the difficulty for women to retain their bodily boundaries against societal/patriarchal cannibalism, Oryx and Crake further questions the filmy boundary between humans and animals/monsters. There are four parts in this thesis. The Introduction briefly touches upon the correlation between body and boundary, tackling issues like body politics, gynecologic pathology, eating disorders and the impacts of bioengineering on human beings. Chapter One explicates women's emergence from the shade of abjection to the stage of subjectivity in The Blind Assassin. Where food-refusing and obsessive showers help women (re)claim their subjectivity by negatively drawing a line between self and other, female writing shapes up subjects that do not simply counter the other but negotiate with it. Chapter Two addresses the mutable construction of monstrosity in Oryx and Crake. While such bioengineered creatures as the pigoons and the Crakers prove that humanity is coupled with dominance whilst monstrosity is bound up with inferiority and marginality, the genographer Crake even attests to a monstrous form of homo faber (man, the maker, the tool user) when science colludes with capitalism. The Conclusion reiterates that subjectivity is not sustained through a detachment or a defense of the self from/against the other; instead, tolerance and respect are what account for the coexistence of humans and other species.