Selected Poems Gender Performativity In Carol Duffy’s

The United Kingdom’s first female Laureate in the role’s 300-year long history, Carol Duffy and her works have always had a strong feminist edge. She is good at applying dramatic monologue in her poetry to express the thoughts of unvoiced people. Her poetry mainly signals a preoccupation with gender, oppression and marginalized people who struggle in modern society. Through a study of Duffy’s poetry from the perspective of gender performativity, this thesis finds that sex and gender are not fixed terms, instead, they are unstable and changeable in the context. Meanwhile, gender performativity is not just about speech acts, it is also about bodily acts. To take in more possibilities, the rethink and rework of the social norms are crucial for modern people.The thesis firstly focuses on bodily acts of gender performativity. In Duffy’s poems, sex and sexuality are a kind of performativity: sex and gender are not binary oppositions; sexuality is not just between a man and a woman anymore. Man and masculine may signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as a female one. The deconstruction of the gender binary exposes the restrictions of gender and offers more possibilities for us to rethink the norms of gender. Secondly, this thesis analyzes gender performativity from speech. For Butler, neither grammar nor style is politically neutral. Interpellation means that the unformed possibilities are hailed by governed language, through this people are formed into certain shape. The refusal of interpellation by dominant language is an essential idea of gender performativity. So, in Duffy’s poetry, characters often realize the truth that they are shaped by language and they try to present themselves in different forms. Duffy uses language to reveal how words shape our gender and trap us in certain forms. Thirdly, this thesis explores how people in Duffy’s poetry pursue their own gender identity by rethinking and reworking the norms. Moreover, women in Duffy’s poetry often act as explorer. As sexual minorities, they probe the truth of love, art, history and life.In Duffy’s poetry, she presents sexual minorities on a broad range in order to reveal the issue of human rights. It is a kind of challenge which is in the service of calling taken-for-granted truth into question. And, the taken for grantedness of those truth is indeed a kind of oppression. Her poetry rethinks and reworks the already existed norms and open more possibilities to those who are regarded as inhuman. And she enhances our understanding of gender in ideology and discursive practices.