아이러니의 정치학

Politics of Irony: Gender and Race in Songs of Dragons Flying to Heaven as a Postdramatic, Postfeminist Performance

This paper revisits and reinterprets Young Jean Lee's Songs of Dragons Flying to Heaven as a postdramatic and postfeminist performance. For Lee, a 1.5 generation Korean-American playwright/ director/performer, the question of identity seems to be one of her top priority questions to tackle with to consequence a certain kind of negotiation between her Korean and American identities. In this performance she audaciously dashes at the question of race and gender identities ironically from post-identity and postfeminist perspectives. She intentionally maintains ambiguous positions in this endeavor. Namely, she engages herself in the claiming of the question, while at the same time she objectifies it keeping distance from and providing commentary on it. Rendered in short, fast-moving, episodic scenes, Lee makes most of 'irony' as her main dramaturgical strategy to present her political messages about racism, violence, feminism, patriarchy as well as christianity and republicans. She also plies self-depreciation strategy, in-yer-face style, quick reversal, etc. through which she successfully creates ironic, comedic affects for audience appeals. Notable is her sincere efforts to highlight the universality of practices of racism and patriarchy as non-specific to white people. In an open ending, Lee seems to ironically project a dream version of American Dream against all the identity positions context that she has constructed.