Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting
The woods parted to show a space of lawn, running level with branches that, in early summer, were white with flower. Dogwood blossom. Pennsylvania. Names are in people, people arc in names. Sylvania. I was born here. People ought to think before they call a place Sylvania. Pennsylvania. I am part of Sylvania. Trees. Trees. Trees. Dogwood, liliodendron with its green-yellow tulip blossoms. Trees are in people. People are in trees. Pennsylvania. (5) George does not prove to be the right man for a tree-woman. He "would never make a pear tree burst into blossom" (171), since he only desires a selfless Hermione, a kind of a generically gendered "Her" rather than this particular person: "He wanted Her, but he wanted a Her that he called decorative" (172). In this relationship conforming to the norms of "romantic thralldom" (see DuPlessis), the man fails to see the multiplicity and fluidity of Hermione's selfhood, or understand that the indeterminacy and instability of her gendering does in no way go counter to her own desire to assert her selfhood. However appealing at first, the "concentric intimacy" (164) of Her Gart and Fayne Rabb also proves to be a threat to Her's selfhood. At the end she frees herself from this bond too, only to find that she can now start to write her own text: "Her feet were pencils tracing a path through a forest" (223). Folding now, both in language and also in the woods, subject and object in an act of creativity, she starts to write her own text: "Now the creator was Her's feet, narrow black crayon across the winter whiteness" (223). Ungendered and sexually undifferentiated, she becomes text. This is the context where I would place Orshi Drozdik: among women artists who revised notions of the female subjectivity in ways unimaginable by their male contemporaries. They not only portrayed gender as constructed or performed, tying existing gender formations to heterosexual hegemony, but also pursued transgressions of categories of both gender and sexuality. They located realms of androgynous subjectivities that were undifferentiated both in terms of gender and sexuality. For if binary gender categories entail heterocentrism, which in turn is the locus of misogyny, then androgyny means the loving abandonment of both gender and sexual differentiation —bringing about, instead, multiple, transgressive, fluid, and unstable subjectivities in interaction. Ownership of the text is 118
