상징적 폭력·무의식·여성성

Symbolic Violence·Unconsciousness·Femininity: Marge Piercy’s Rereading American Culture

This paper aims to explore how Marge Piercy’s poems reread American culture in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic violence and its effect on femininity. Bourdieu stresses symbolic violence as the capacity to impose the means for comprehending and adapting to the social world by representing economic and political power in disguised, taken for granted forms. Bourdieu argues how the dominated accept as legitimate their own condition of domination. Deploying the arguments, this paper notices how Piercy’s poetry pays attention to the situation of women in the male-dominated power of language. Piercy’s poems, “In the men’s room(s)” and “Concerning the mathematician,” tend to show the patriarchal men controlling the dialogue and belittling women. This paper argues that Piercy’s conversation poems reflect the symbolic violence towards women in American culture and society. Furthermore, through her well-known poem, “Barbie doll,” this paper examines how Piercy’s poetry grasps the cultural view of the role women play in a ‘must be beautiful’ society, and analyzes the symbolic violence that enacts in defining ‘beauty’ in women. This paper points out that Piercy uses Barbie doll to symbolize American society’s notions of what the perfect woman should aspire to be as an ultimate goal of femininity. Piercy’s poems throw a new critical insight on the commodity of female body envisioned by patriarchal society.