SILENT MEDUSA? EN-GENDERING KNOWLEDGE IN THE WEST: A CASE STUDY
SILENT MEDUSA? EN-GENDERING KNOWLEDGE IN THE WEST: A CASE STUDY

Summary/Abstract: This paper uses a recent retelling of the Medusa myth, Proper Job Theatre Company’s 2017 stage play Medusa (text Helen Mort; director James Beale), in order to broach the epistemic condition of western knowledge about women, garnered mostly from male-authored sources. Drawing on feminist theory by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Michèle Le Doeuff and Teresa de Lauretis, I examine one instance of the en-gendering of the silence–speech continuum in western culture, alongside strategies of mis/representation and/or obliteration of agency, visible as well as invisible (both the strategies and the agency). The case of Medusa suggests how patriarchy has imag(in)ed women’s voices and constructed their self-image (alongside their physical image). One crucial implication of such other-construal is knowledge – knowledge of self, of the other, and of the world, a triad investigated by Sandra Jovchelovitch (2007) – and thus the epistemic scaffold of western thinking.

• Details
• Contents