Gender Performing In Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer

Tennessee Williams(1911-1983)is one of the most important playwrights in the twentieth century.His works concern about the fate of marginal figures,manifesting Williams' humanistic concern for them.Written in 1958,Suddenly Last Summer is a sensational melodrama with dreadful cannibalism,religion,homosexuality,sex and violence which is barely seen in the American dramatic history.Suddenly Last Summer tells a story that a lady called Mrs Venable tries to persuade a doctor to do the lobotomy operation on her niece Catharine in order to stop her from telling the truth of Sebastian's death.Based on Judith Butler's gender performativity,this thesis explores Sebastian Venable's gender performativity through analyzing how he compulsorily performs his own masculinity,then he experiences ambiguous identity,and finally,he acts as an independent subject,which reflects the constraint and oppression of social factors on the protagonist and reveals Sebastian's subversion towards the social norms.It also expresses Sebastian's yearning for reconstructing pluralistic identities,providing a living possibility for gender others.Both Williams and Butler focus on the living state of marginal figures especially homosexuals.Butler's performativity theory also provides an explanation of possible living for the homosexual character Sebastian.The introduction includes the comprehensive literature review both at abroad and home,Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity,the research significance and the thesis statement.The body can be divided into three parts.Chapter one discusses Sebastian compulsorily performs his own masculinity under the constraint from the Oedipus complex and the compulsory heterosexual hegemony society.Chapter two makes an analysis on his ambiguous identity owing to the conflicts of self-cognition.Chapter three expatiates on his attempts to subvert the social norms in order to perform an independent subject.Sebastian's performativity explains that the construction and identification of subjects are constrained by social factors,nevertheless,subjects still can break the regulations and norms by gender performativity to construct independent identities.