The Need For Interstitial Resistance To Normalizing Power. A Foucauldian And Laingian Reading Of Jennifer Dawson's Fiction Of The 1960s And 170s
Abstract
The thesis will show how Jennifer Dawson's fiction of the 1960s and `70s
explores the effects of the overlapping dialects of the normalizing discourse,
interlocking manifestations of constraint that consolidate themselves through
internalization on a continuum that underpins, generates, perpetuates and constitutes
perceptions of `the social. ' A Laingian reading of the scapegoating of perceived
dissenters, to invalidate or ideally to pre-empt implied dissent and to confirm in their
membership the members of `the group, ' will be applied to illuminate the response
provoked by Dawson's protagonists, semantically discredited by a continuum of
coercive structures that range from the psychiatric to the dynamic of individual
relationships. A Foucauldian analysis of the transition of the maintenance of the
status quo from identifiable applications of force to democratized formulations of
normalizing power to an internalization of the panoptic principle will further
contextualize the dilemmas and tensions of Dawson's protagonists, on whose
experience Procrustean identities are systematically if subtly imposed.
A Foucauldian perspective will be used to cast light on the feelings of
deadlock addressed in the novels, where the tendency of power to incite identification
makes a locus of authentic resistance elusive and hard to sustain. This perspective
will also inform how Dawson's fiction dramatizes the futility of resistance that fails
to engage at the level of form and which thus reinforces power's underlying
paradigm, even on the sites of its ostensible subversion. The thesis will demonstrate
how her novels increasingly reflect the Laingian concept of contextual intelligibility,
revealing how the targets and transmission wires of the normalizing drive are fully
enmeshed in power's dynamic structure.
Foucault's emphasis on the interstitial will be applied to show how, in her
fiction of the `70s, the mutual impact of individual lives is portrayed as not only
constraining but also as potentially inspiring. Her protagonists move towards a
conscious awareness of the need to forge and activate an interstitial perspective,
symbolized initially by music, from which to transcend collusion with the
normalizing drive. Only when `freedom' is understood to be not a destination but an
attitude of mind do her protagonists emerge from the impasse of complicity and
develop a receptiveness to genuine exchange and a view of themselves as more than
merely acted upon but as potential definers and inhabitants of their experience.
Authors
Davey, AlexandraCollections
- Theses [4209]