| الوصف: |
The thesis sets out to re-read drama education via Luce Irigaray's rereading of western cultural discourse. Chapter Two outlines her feminist- philosophical project, detailing her critique of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis from the point of view of the cultural feminine, and setting her work alongside other feminist intersections with psychoanalytic theory. Irigaray reads Phallogocentrism as a manifestation of western metaphysics, a privileging of the Concept, the Idea, over the materiality on which they depend, a cultural dichotomization that is contiguous with sexual dimorphism. Looking at key philosophical figures with whom Irigaray's work interacts, the thesis outlines her challenge to dominant theories of ontology, epistemology and ethics, reconfiguring these according to interrelationality, fluidity and flow, rather than separation, individuation and stasis. In Chapter Three, the terms 'double syntax' and 'sensible-transcendental' become central to a discussion of knowledge, which, through Irigaray's re-reading of Kant re-illuminates discussions of the bifurcation of feeling and reason in the arts. Irigaray's 'placental economy' and 'fecundity of the caress' re-configure self-other relationality; these inform the discussion of pedagogy and creativity in Chapter Four. Chapter Five formulates an Irigarayan approach to key concerns and debates that are currently demarcating and defining drama education in the context of National Curriculum and the influence of postmodern thought. It also points out the obfuscation of embodied 'selves' throughout many of these discussions. Consideration of the embodied constitution of expression and meaning is developed in Chapter Six, which in turn feeds into a reading of drama education practice as radical epistemology. I conclude by asserting the affirmatory potential of this reading, which locates embodied performance as a development beyond confines of rational discursive thought. The 'beyond' of the title has an expansive and developmental connotation rather than one of dissociation. |
