Abjection and Desire: A Feminist Reading of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra - Akiri Passer au contenu principal

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Abjection and Desire: A Feminist Reading of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra

Publication Date : 23/09/2026

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/akiri.v4i3.2


Auteur(s) :

Wandja Fatoumata TUO, Ouana Alassane SEKONGO.


Volume/Numéro :
Volume 15
,
Issue 1
(09 - 2026)



Résumé :

This article proposes a feminist reading of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996) and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), two dramatic texts that mobilise the abject as both formal strategy and thematic horizon. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982)), and Elaine Aston’s Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003), the article examines how both playwrights represent female desire as radically transgressive, for it moves beyond conventional, "passive" roles to become active, consuming man’s force. The paper also shows how male subjectivity is destabilised through its encounter with unregulated femininity, and how the theatrical staging of abjection constitutes a feminist critique of patriarchal symbolic order. The article concludes that these plays retain acute contemporary relevance, offering theatrical frameworks through which the persistent violence of normative gender structures may be diagnosed and contested. Keywords: Abjection, Desire, Feminist Dramaturgy, Gender, Patriarchal Order


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