Race,Gender And The Politics Of The Body:A Study Of J.M.Coetzee’s South African Novels

Focusing on the political and discirsive power exerted on the body,this dissertation analyzes the raeialized and gendered politics of the body Coetzee explores in his South African novels which have been criticized for either prioritizing the inner world of the characters at the cost of social context or being engaged in theoretical meditation on the fictionality or discursivity of history while neglecting the materiality of colonialism and apartheid.It contends that Coetzee’s deep concern with the suffering body renders his works substantially connected to the apartheid reality.The body in Coetzee,s novels is a site of political,eultural,racial and gender battles.It is stereotypically perceived,incarcerated,starved,tortured,disciplined and tormented by diseases.The material existence of these works frequented by the suffering bodies attests to Coetzee’s aesthetic concern with the violence and oppression brought about by the policies of colonialism and apartheid.This study adopts the Foucauldian approach to the body,taking the body not simply as a physical entity but as constructed by and existing in the discourse.Besides,ideas from the post-colonialist critics such as Frantz Fanon,Edward Said and feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray will be frequently drawn upon to support the argumentation.Owing to the unsymmetrical power relations,the body of the racial other is ontologically of a shadowy existence,and its corporeal schema is framed in the Western intellectual schemas despite its physical facticity.Parodying the meticulous production process of the colonial texts,Coetzee critiques various intellectual schemas that have framed and debased the body of the racial other,including the Cartesian mind-body dualism,the Christian conception of the body,the Western notion of cultural progress,and the pseudoscience of ethnography.Being restricted in the fralework of sameness,the natives’ corporeal features different from the whites are amplified and denigrated in the colonial texts which justify the colonizers’ resource exploitation and cultural colonization.Coetzee also explores how torture and discipline,as two power technologies,are applied by the dominant social group to punish and regulate the body of the racial other.Torture is an efficient method to produce "barbarians".The natives are tortured because they are labeled as aggressive bodies that pose a threat to the"civilization," and the corporeal response of the natives under torture,in turn,valorizes the stereotypical perception of the civilized.In comparison with torture,discipline is a more benign method employed by the state to produce docile and useful bodies.Through "efficiently" regulating the organization of space,time and bodily activity,apartheid South Africa aims to train the black,to enhance their productivity,and to reduce their existence to a laboring body.The essence of the apartheid system is to control the presence and absence of the black bodies through fences and roadblocks,to make them present when their labor is needed and block them out of sight when their labor is superfluous.In the colonial context where normal gender relations are distorted by racism,women can hardly be the masters of their own bodies which are constantly appropriated by men and debased to being either the instrument of reproduction or the object of cross-race sexual abuse in the complicated racial struggle.During the period of colonial expansion,in order to increase the bio-power of the white colonialists,fertility and purity were set up as female bodily norms.Any woman who failed to live up to or transgressed the norms would be reduced to an abject being,unable to be counted as a subject.During de-colonization,women were once again targeted to shoulder the cost of social transformation.While the reconfiguration of racial power required men to make psychological adjustments as a result of their newly gained/lost social position as well as material accommodations due to the redistribution of land resources,such reconfigurations were made through appropriating the female body.With his self-conscious examination,in the form of parody and allusion,of the discursive debasement of the female body as the "abject" by the bodily norms of the state,and in his critique of the theoretical construction of the female body as a "lack",the scrutiny of the rhetoric traditionally employed by men to explain away the sexual violation of the female body,Coetzee explores the discursive power that serves as the foundation for the gendered bodily norms.Writing the diseased and mutilated body is Coetzee’s unique way of engaging and bearing witness to the traumatic history of colonization and apartheid.The marks left on the body are a living witness to colonial oppression and its economic exploitation.In addition,the inscribed body functions as a text,allegorically indicating the diseases and deficiencies with the social body.The cancerous body of the mother is a hint that the apartheid system is at its terminal stage.The mutilated and silenced body of the black slave metaphorically refers to the extent to which the slaves have been deprived of their articulateness and,consequently,the way their traumatic history has been forgotten.The suffering body in Coetzee’s South African novels also bears ethical power.The pain that constantly reminds the subject of his/her embodiedness and the corporeal vulnerability may generate in the subject an ethical awareness for the body of the other.Therefore,we may conclude that the suffering body is highlighted in Coetzee’s oeuvre to awaken the subject’s ethical responsibility so that an ethical bond between embodied subjects in a face-to-face contact may be established.Since the body constitutes the link between daily practices of the individual and the large scale organization of the power of the state,it provides Coetzee with a literary trope to explore both the external forces that have impacted it and the internal consciousness as a response to the power.With his painstaking exploration of the body that is simultaneously inscribed by the power and resisting the inscription,Coetzee creates his narrative aesthetics of embodiment wherein meaning and thoughts are made carnal and the carnal consequently signifies in its own effective way.Coetzee’s consistent attention on the marks,both visible and invisible,inscribed on the body by the racialized and gendered politics of the body fleshes out his postmodernist corpus,having his indictment against colonization and apartheid in South Africa embodied in the suffering body.This gives concrete forms to his exploration of the abstract concepts such as power and discourse,and thus adds substantiality to his narratives that ostensibly focus on formal innovation.