“완벽한 몸” - 사라 케인의 『정화』에 나타난 훈육, 욕망, 신체

“Body perfect”: Discipline, Desire, and the Body in Sarah Kane"s Cleansed

  This essay examines Sarah Kane"s Cleansed as a postmodern political play. While repeating the political engagement of playwrights like Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill who are committed to representing the social structures of violence, Kane demonstrates a postmodern sensibility informed by the ideological and moral uncertainty of the 1990s culture of "cool" detachment. Kane"s play follows Elinor Fuchs"s notion of "the death of character" and presents fluid and fragmentary characters who are constituted as subjects in power relations, in which they are subject to a variety of disciplinary technologies including imprisonment, surveillance, and torture. The "bodies in pain," however, become the locus of resistance when Carl and Rod"s love survives intensifying torture and when Grace/Graham"s polyvalent identities/bodies subvert the social order predicated on the dichotomy between reality and fantasy, man and woman, life and death. The characters" desire for love resists and survives Tinker"s disciplinary effort to eliminate it and to perpetuate the existing order. In dramatizing the relationship between disciplinary power and individual desire, Kane combines postmodern aesthetics and the poetics of violence and cruelty to produce a unique political play.