Excerpts from Dr. Marlene Moser's Ph.D Thesis, 1998. (Link to full essay and bibliography included)

The following material is taken from:

POSTMODERN FEMINIST READINGS OF IDENTITY IN SELECTED WORKS OF JUDITH THOMPSON, MARGARET HOLLINGSWORTH AND PATRICIA GRUBEN

Ph.D. Thesis, 1998.

Graduate Centre for Study of Drama

University of Toronto

By

Marlene Cecilia Moser

The author has granted a nonexclusive license allowing the National Library of Canada to reproduce, loan, distribute or sell copies of this thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats.

The author retains ownership of the copyright in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise

reproduced without the author's permission.

Please note that in the following excerpt, the bibliography is not included. If needed, it may be accessed in the same way that the full thesis may be accessed at:

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/12443

Excerpt compiled for presentations honouring Dr. Marlene Moser

Canadian Theatre – DART 2P97 – 2011

Brock University, Saint-Catharines, Ontario.

This dissertation uses a strain of postmodernist thought, informed by discourse theory and inflected by feminism, to explore the articulation of identity in selected plays of Judith Thompson and Margaret Hollingsworth and selected films of Patricia Gruben. In these works, identity is configured as a process, an accumulation of temporary points of coherence. This dissertation demonstrates how identity is contingent on fluctuating relations of power. The notion of mastery in the relations of power is critiqued through the serialization of identity, through images of the body, and through the interruption and destabilization of narrative structure. As a result of the conflictual representation of identity, the spectator experiences a destabilized subject position; identification is both engaged and thwarted as several different possibilities for seeing the action are activated. (1)

From Chapter Two:

The image of the abyss is similar to what Butler calls the “constitutive outside." The abyss is an image which recurs in Thompson's work and is most often a space of extreme ambiguity. She describes it variously as "death" ("Judith Thompson Interview" 95) and as a "nightmare" (In

Now n.p.). The abyss is frightening and destabilizing:

The abyss is death. It's what you don't know . . . . You see an abyss when you're falling, in that dream where you're falling and falling and there's no bottom. ("Judith Thompson Interview" 95)

The abyss is a place where a different kind of repetition is possible. (43)

Despite the extreme and horrible circumstances in the plays of

Judith Thompson, there are suggestions of other possible ways of being. (58)

Thompson's comments on her plays consistently refer to the “abyss" which her characters confront, the same term Elizabeth Gross uses to describe the abject: "the unspoken of a stable speaking position, an abyss at the very borders of the subject's identity, a hole into which the subject may fall (87). It is this state which the subject must negotiate in order to speak. Thompson speaks of her playwriting process in very similar terms. She relates her gift of playwriting to fear, a fear comparable to the feeling she has during epileptic seizures and that fear induced by her phobia of snakes:

Every once in a while . . . I feel I am falling again down the terrible hole, with nothing to hold on to. And I believe this falling, this "identity panic," is a result of my using the very essence of myself to create character in dramatic work. (Epilepsy & the Snake" 6)(58)

Thompson's remarks regarding this fear, this induction of "identity panic" can be related to similar fears her characters undergo or confront. In the negotiation of different positions as subjects within particular cultural and historical matrixes … (59)

(Moser indicates that some characters yield…) to the power of the ideological state apparatus (Althusser 143-45), that which functions to contain and perpetuate ideology without force, but through systems and institutions. (61)

This replaying of identity destabilizes its unity. This repetition of identity is a device which occurs in a later play, Lion in the Streets. Identity is not coherent and consistent; it is fluid and found through engagement with others. (62)

The tornado in this play is what Judith Thompson calls the abyss. It is a place of "identity panic." (63)

An ambiguous space of neithe/nor, where distinctions between the outer and inner worlds collapse, the abyss is too frightening (63) a realm to remain in. It is a contradictory space of transition, a space which can also be considered as an image of a post-modem configuration of being, where these binaries are combined in an uneasy tension. (64)

There is always an uncertain, ambiguous, tangential end to the plays of Judith Thompson. Just as language is not "transparent," so the metaphors cannot be read easily. (71)

In these images, there is a figural visceral quality in which logical, binary order is broken down (72)

(In pages 72-77) We have seen how characters are subjects of and to discourses. The conflictual nature of the discourses renders the subjects themselves unstable. In this section, we have seen how the articulation of the self is also paradoxically dependent on, yet constantly rejected by the other. An ideal relationship where 'I'' and ‘You" form a symbiotic whole is desired, but always proves impossible. The result in Thompson's plays is an emphasis on this state of being between. Perhaps

it is in embracing that very territory that the only kind of liberation can come. (77)

Over and over in Thompson's plays, women are the central figures, struggling within patriarchal constraints. As Thompson says, most of her female characters have been "successfully brainwashed by the patriarchal society in which they live" or they are "in a fight to the death with themselves because of if' ("One Twelfth" 264).

It is this imaginative holding together of possible worlds which becomes an important part of Thompson's dramaturgy. Here there is the simultaneous entertaining of several possibilities which characterizes a postmodern feminism. Although Thompson uses strategies of realism, she also interrogates these very same strategies, by involving a dream sequence or a fantastical moment. These moments are not qualified or explained by the narrative; they have equal substance and authority as the other scenes in the play. In this way, Thompson is suggesting several possible narratives. (78)

Lion in the Street: the fictive unity of identity in narrative.

What I am Yours suggests in many of its dream-like scenes, Lion in the Streets realizes in its overtly non-narrative impulse. Scenes are connected by the characters who pass through them; the play is structured as a kind of "relay" (Knowles, The Achievernent" 34). The way in which the play takes shape appears to be accidental; the audience is encouraged to make connections only by the character who moves from one scene to the next. Similarly, the formation of identity is shown to be contingent. Characters become subjects according to their particular narratives. (79) Their identity is dependent on shifting relations of power within these narratives. The characters are several and are not maintained throughout the play. They appear briefly, in a series of emotionally charged scenes. Their crises cluster about Isobel, often reflecting or resonating with Isobel's character objective (Harvie, 'Constructing Fictions" 84). Although Isobel is the only character

whose progress we may chart throughout the play, and the only character who seems to sustain a transformation, she also occupies a liminal territory. The identity of Isobel proves to be fluid as she crosses boundaries of fictions and challenges borders.

Subjects in Crisis

Most of the characters in the play are show in oppressive circumstances and in turn use desperate, aggressive measures against those who threaten them. Shifts in power are highlighted. Characters switch allegiance from narrative to narrative. Sue, for example, proves to be Isobel's first helper. She rescues Isobel from the attacks by the other children and comforts Isobel by telling her a similar story from her childhood. In this example, storytelling and the confirmation of identity are linked. But Sue's identity is not secure. It is tenuously held together, a precarious linkage of her positions as subject. Jennifer Harvie enumerates the number of positions which are constructed for Sue in her poststructuralist reading of the play and describes them in Julia Kristeva's terms as "'slogans' which help characters to make sense of or contain only provisionally the 'lion' of a chaotic or threatening experience" ("Constructing Fictions" 88). Sue appears as Isobel's helper, but Isobel loses faith in her when she sees her lose her power. Sue finds out that her husband Bill is having an affair. She attempts to seduce him; she performs a striptease for him, but he rejects her. Sue in this way is presented in a series of positions as subject. Her changeability from one position to another undermines a coherence in identity.

The discursive foundation for subjectivity is exposed as being vulnerable. Sue has been living on trust in a vow:

SUE. YOU TOOK A VOW! In a CHURCH in front of a priest and my mother and your mother and your father and you swore to LOVE and honour and cherish till DEATH US DO PART till DEATH US DO PART, BILL, it's YOUR WORD your WORD.

BILL. I am breaking my word. (22)

The words and story in which Sue believes are unstable. Both the marriage contract and its dissolution, in this case, in the public display of Sue's humiliation, are socially determined. Word, language, narrative--that which seemed to be so reliable and indispensable--are shown to be as fickle as the people who employ them.

As Ric Knowles points out, the narratives of the characters in this play are conflicting:

Several sequences . . . can be seen as "dueling narratives," as the characters construct equally compelling but mutually exclusive biographies and autobiographies that involve one another in pivotal but conflicting roles in their own narrative strategies. ('The Achievement" 34)

Thompson foregrounds the instability of narrative throughout. Coherence is arbitrary and temporary. The pain of the characters is in the floundering they experience as they are caught between these places of coherence. One of the most forceful examples of the power of narrative

and the construction of subjects occurs near the end of the play. Isobel follows Sherry, sure that she will lead him to the lion: "She ... I see, I smell the spray, the Lion's spray" (55). By this it is clear that Isobel has had a similar experience to Sherry. What ensues is a very painful scene between Sherry and her boyfriend Edward. Edward threatens to cancel their wedding unless Sherry tells him what he wants to hear: that she's been dreaming about the rape that happened to her six years ago. (58) …

He badgers her until she agrees with him and retells the story, "Come on, tell the truth, the truth, truth, truth: (59), he says. The stage directions make it clear that Sherry is disgusted at what she is saying, but she agrees to his narrative, and as lines alternate, she relates a story which is at first his, and then ambivalently hers, and could be interpreted either way. These narratives do indeed "duel" until Edward's wins out (see page 61-62). The power of these larger cultural narratives is exposed in this moment, as Thompson demonstrates the domination and subordination inherent in the subjects the narratives create. In the story that Thompson creates in Lion in the Streets, she also offers a different construction of identity which can also undermine such power structures as well.

One of the most arresting sequences of the play is the scene between Scarlett and Christine. Here there is an overt conflict in the narratives which construct the characters. Beneath the sanitized, formulaic words of the journalist, Thompson shows repressed violence. Despite the surface shock of her vocabulary and imaginative sex scenes, Scarlett desperately needs to fit into a larger social situation. Christine quizzes Scarlett for a story, creating an identity for her. On one level, Scarlett, a woman with cerebral palsy, effectively disrupts the smooth patina of Christine's journalistic enquiry:

CHRISTINE. Scarlett, do you have any hobbies; that is, what do you do between volunteers, do you have favourite soap operas or game shows, or-

SCARLETT. I screw my brains out. (46)

Scarlett tells her story when Christine cautiously admits, "I think everybody deserves to - have a happy sex life" (46). At first it seems as though Scarlett wins. As she describes her 'midnight man" who comes into her room at night, Scarlett physically enacts it:

SCARLETT. He come every time there isn't no moon, in like a big cat sit on the bed, and me, like a big piece of fruit,

[Dance music starts. SCARLETT gets up] exploding in the heat, exploding up and out the whole night, I can MOVE when

my boy comes, [she twirls] I am movin, I know I am, I am turning and swishin and holdin,

[A MAN enters. He and SCARLETT dance romantically around the set. He leaves her back in the chair, immobile, and exits] (47)

This fantastical moment is liberatory for Scarlett; again, it is not explained as a dream sequence, but stands within the experience of Scarlett. And yet, this mastery is temporary. The power reverts to Christine when she says that she is going to print the story regardless of her promise of secrecy. Scarlett panics. Because of other social circumstances, this story cannot be told:

SCARLETT. PLEASE!! PLEASE!! Please, Christine, my old lady and old man, they're old, my mum's had a stroke, my dad's got MS, this'd kill em, please!!

CHRISTINE. That is not my business, Scarlett, Scarlett, let go of me, LET GO!

SCARLETT. Reverend Pete and everybody down the church, they'd think I was a slut, they'd send me to the freakhouse. (48)

This story that Christine wants to introduce to the newspaper would have untenable social ramifications for Scarlett. Despite the inability to transcend the restrictions of her physical circumstances, Scarlett's imagination transcends what Christine has. Scarlett negotiates several different identities dependent on context. Power repeatedly shifts in this sequence. Christine attacks Scarlett, viciously beating her in an explosion of her repressed anger. This scene also bridges reality and fantasy; but most importantly it triggers Christine to admit what her loss is: belonging. Scarlett has something which she does not:

CHRISTINE. . . . You shouldn't have made me do that Scarlett. You

shouldn't have made me kick you like that. The way you, you you talked to me like that. Like, like, like you belong. In the world. As if you belong. Where did you get that feeling? I want it. I need it. (49)

The imaginative possibilities of Scarlett release her from a stultifying constriction as a subject constructed in a singular fashion. Played out on her body, her cerebral palsy, like the epilepsy in Tornado, gives her a coveted ability: to go to the other side, to belong differently and severally.

Isobel's Story

Thompson's emphasis on the body is again realized in the portraya1 of Isobel. Isobel is the ghost of a young Portuguese girl who was murdered seventeen years ago. She is the audience touchstone for the play: she is constant throughout and either participates in or observes all the scenes. Other characters are changeable and seen only briefly, in extreme situations which demand extreme measures. Change is found in stepping outside the cycle of structures which are based on a dynamic of mastery. Isobel presents the journey of a different kind of identity formation. Mastery is critiqued in the presentation of her story as a destabilized, ironized and interrupted narrative.

As Ric Knowles points out, the form of the play itself has ironic resonances with a more traditional dramatic structure: this is not a subversion, but rather a perversion of the Aristotelian and modernist structures of containment ('The Dramaturgy" 226). With reference to the scene between David and the priest, Knowles illustrates how “the identities of the characters seem to be contingent on the changing stories they tell of themselves and one another" (228). Knowles points

out the series of reversals that occurs in this scene and how this relates to Thompson's discontinuous structure in the play. This perversion is contingent on Isobel's reading and action in the play itself. The exposition of the play, for example, is a self-conscious address to the audience by Isobel:

ISOBEL. Doan be scare. Doan be scare. [turns to audience] Doan be scare of this pickshur! This pickshur is niiiice, nice! I looove this pickshur, this pickshur is mine! [gesturing behind her] is my house, is my Street, is my park, is my people! You know me, you know me very hard! I live next house to you with my brother and sisters, Maria, Luig, Carla and Romeo we play, we play with your girl, your boy, you know me, you know me very hard. But ... when did tha be? Tha not be now! Tha not be today! I think tha be very long years ago. I think I be old. I think I be very old. Is my house but is not my house is my street but is not my Street my people is gone I am lost. I am lost. I AM LOOOOOOOOOST!! (15)

Things are and are not what they seen The exposition of the play sets the scene, by telling us that everything which we seem to think is certain is uncertain. Isobel's address indicates the stage, the 'pickshur" they are about to witness, but her dislocation is palpable. The play becomes a search for this home or identity which also involves a redefinition of what identity might mean. 'This pickshur is niiiice, nice!" Isobel declares. But what follows is anything but nice. The monologue is replete with contradictions. She speaks directly to the audience, telling them, as she tells herself not to be scared although the stage directions indicate she is terrified. She appears as a nine-year old child, yet part way through the monologue she acknowledges how old she feels. She assures us that this is her neighbourhood, but at the end of the monologue she screams her distress. She is determined to be known, to be recognized. She is both at home and not at home. Although she is the main character of the play, she is "dead” – her ability to affect and interact with others is limited. Already Isobel and the audience are in the precarious position of having to entertain two thoughts at once. The contradictions within this moment indicate again the paradoxes of the postmodern.

As Isobel is the only character who is consistently present throughout the play, we follow her viewing experience and chart the transformations that she undergoes. These come to her as she observes the story which is unfolding before her and creates her own role in it. The audience is put into a similar position of watching and potential transformation. Isobel in the first half of the play is searching for her helper, someone to take her home. By Act II she has undergone at least one "recognition:" she realizes she is a ghost, unlikely to find home or help, and she becomes an active pursuant of her murderer. Her search for Ben, however, ends with Isobel's forgiveness for him; she does not kill him as is her intention.

Knowles describes how the transformation of Isobel involves an exhortation to the audience to do as she has done, and take back their lives through an act of will. It is also important to consider the change in the way that Isobel acts. Early in the play she is involved by physically fighting the children, or invisibly shooting the adults in the daycare meeting. These actions and this status are relinquished as Isobel acknowledges her status as a picture. This change occurs in the scene where Joanne, a woman with cancer, describes the kind of death she wants:

ISOBEL. AAHHHHHHHHHHHH!! I am dead! I have been bones for seventeen years, missing, missing, my face in the TV and newspapers, posters, (86) everybody lookin for, nobody find, I am gone, I am dead, I AM DEADLY DEAD! Down! It was night, was a lion, roar!! with red eyes: he come closer [silent scream] come closer [silent scream] ROAR tear my throat out ROAR tear my eyes out ... ROAR I am kill! I am kull! I am no more!

[Music]

[to JOANNE] We are both pictures now. WHO WILL TAKE US? WHO

WILL TAKE US TO HEAVEN, HA? (36-37)

Isobel's journey is to a space of what others call redemption or moments of grace, or what I consider to be a configuration of a postmodern identity. Here Isobel's absence in this world is emphasized. She is “no more." Rather than a nihilistic state, this can be construed as a positive space of resolution: she learns to tell stories differently. Isobel's temporary resolution of her own story is one of the ways in which she achieves agency. Although the other characters seem to be still mired in a state of contradictory discourses and circumstances, Isobel comes to represent a different kind of identity; she overcomes the limitations of acting to dominate or control. Isobel achieves a certain status which is conveyed in the ironic iconography of a religious transcendence. This can appear as an ironic comment on a traditional dramatic structure in which the movement of the play is a journey to closure: where Isobel is finally able to take back her life, to quiet her speaking heart. She finally tells the story of her rape and murder by Ben at the end of the play. She is only able to come to some kind of closure when she is at ease with the contradictions of her being. She comes to see Ben in the graveyard, and tells the story of the day of her abduction. The exchange is an attempt to assert her reality:

BEN. I'm hallucinatin.

ISOBEL. I'm Isobel.

BEN. You're a picture.

ISOBEL. I'm Isabel. (63) (87)

She is able to “take back her life” not by killing him, but by forgiving him. In her last speech, the stage directions indicate she is an adult now (63). The tornados, the circles, the chaos of the other characters continue. It is only Isobel who is able to achieve an ironic catharsis by removing herself

from the stories, by acknowledging both her status as a picture, and her participation in others' stories. She is able to tell her story and give others hope by the sense she makes out of her own storytelling and by removing herself from the binarist configurations.

This reading of the character of Isobel may appear to be smoothing over contradictions, rather than highlighting them. The end of Lion in the Streets seems odd. Does Isobel forgive her killer, and therefore, as a good, self-sacrificing female, refuse to blame or to demand justice? Isobel clearly is working within the storytelling of Roman Catholic iconography; but as the stage directions say, Isobel ascends to heaven, "in her mind" (63). It is Isobel's specific story which defines her transformation.

"As-if" identities: the contingency of community

Isobel's imaginative ending to her story is one way to read her agency. In addition to the “as-if” enactment of the ending, Isobel's resolution comes in her association with Sherry's story. In Lion in the Streets the self/other split is displaced by a dynamic of identity and agency which is based within community. The imaginative incorporation and reworking of identity occurs in the ways in which actors transform from one character to another as subjectivity is at the same time unique and yet repeatable. Several times characters literally take up the experiences of other characters. Sometimes the transformation from one character to another happens on stage; it can even be integrated into the action. For example, when Laura brings up the story of Maria to her husband George and insists, "how could you forget?" George eventually responds by taking on

the role of Maria and repeating Laura's words:

[GEORGE grabs a tablecloth and wraps it around his head, like a shawl, speaking in a Portuguese accent.]

GEORGE. How could I forget, how could I forget?

LAURA. George.

GEORGE. Looka this. Me? I donta forget nothing.

LAURA. George I'm going to bed. Molly gets up in two hours and it's always me that gets up with her of course.

[She walk around the circle]

GEORGE/MARIA. LAURA.

[Now he speaks as MARIA, ISOBEL'S mother. ISOBEL recognizes her]

LAURA. George! Come to bed.

GEORGE/MARIA. LAURA.

LAURA. Maria (25-26)

Scenes and characters blend one into the other, illustrating the permeability of both. Not only does the play bleed from one scene to the next, but subjects live according to the stories of others, mirroring them through action and word. The embeddedness of identity in the other is complex: George plays Maria who describes how she becomes her husband, Antonio. As she folds the laundry she senses his experience.

(See: page 27) …

In this scene both Isobel and her mother dramatize the story which is told to Laura. There is both an inscribing and an undermining of this event. Although Maria says that she experiences the fall on the tracks, it is Isobel who acts it out for the audience. The story is told by Maria, who is played by George. The effect is an odd resonance, for this is Antonio's story in the first place. There is a meta-theatrical tone to the story as well, as the style of her delivery according to the stage directions is meant to be operatic. The story and the sense of self is not fragmented in this particular scene so much as it is shared.

In this way, identity is not so much owned, as shared by a community. It comes through and is situated within a community, within discourse, within several bodies. Although Thompson may consider this a tapping into a universalism, it may surely be considered a universality only insofar as similar circumstances are found. These are often the stories of marginalized characters, of women, for example. Sue comforts Isobel early in the play by relating a similar story to Isobel's. Sue and her sisters were terrorized by boys on bicycles who shot arrows at them. The stones that are thrown in Isobel's interaction and the arrows in Sue's story recall the children's rhyme: "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me." Names and naming, however, are very important in this play, especially naming home, experience, and ultimately identity. We are subjects both through the sequence of positions which we find discursively and the ways in which we relate to them as real. We empathize and find ourselves through others, just as Sue and Isobel do in their story telling.

That accumulation of small stories contributes to an ironizing of the narrative at the level of the play as a whole. It is difficult, for example, to make connections between characters, to tell (89) any kind of story of the whole which makes sense. Individual scenes are quickly and deftly sketched, but the connections are seemingly arbitrary. Rather than a unifying story, there are several smaller stories within stories, in a Chinese box structure.

What the play involves, more than anything else, is a relinquishing of mastery. The result of such an involvement in the audience is striking. What is almost completely denied in Lion in the Streets is a specific implied singular viewing position. Isobel is always there; she guides us tangentially on her journey, and yet her resolution and ascension are almost so naive that they are unpalatable; it is impossible to configure the resolution as anything beyond a very specific narrative ending for Isobel herself. The other characters are left at loose ends, as is the audience, with resolution given to only one of the many we have seen. The options for a coherent sense of self may seem simplistic; the options for the postmodernist identity may seem overwhelming. “Take back your life," Isobel exhorts us, but this is only in the "as if” key of the telling stories (McHale 32). Stuart Hall also acknowledges the importance of coming to terms with the storytelling of one's identity:

They [identities] arise from the narrativization of the self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material or political effectivity, even if the belongingness, the ''suturing into the story” through which identities arise is, partly, in the imaginary (as weIl as the symbolic) and therefore, always, partly constructed in fantasy, or at least within a fantasmatic field. (Questions 4)

It is in this imaginary, fantasmatic realm where the plays of Thompson are most effective. The ending of Lion in the Streets is bittersweet: we are left to disentang1e the strands of right/wrong; (90) vengeance/forgiveness; good/evil; as we want the security of answers and yet also the pluralism of difference. It is again useful to return to the paradigm of postmodernism for a consideration of this plurality:

While many reject the modernist "view from nowhere," they question whether postmodernism would not lead us to the equally problematic "everywhere." Are coherent theory and politics possible within a postmodern position? (Nicholson, "Introduction" 9)

Defining difference is paramount. These viewing positions are in an either/or configuration. A different kind of specificity, however, is possible in a postmodern frame of reference, one which is temporary and contributes to an identity positioning which affords agency, and yet does not imply unproblematic cohesion.

Conclusion

In the plays of Judith Thompson, there is a different kind of dramaturgy at work, one which demands a different kind of engagement on the part of the audience, a kind of fearful play. In his formulation of the dramaturgy of the perverse, Ric Knowles describes how this kind of

playwriting provides emancipatory potential for its audience in the subject positions it offers ("The Dramaturgy" 234). Recognizing these positions as constructed, yet taking them up nonetheless, is, as Jennifer Harvie puts it, "a politics of the provisional" (Constructing Fictions" 91). What I am suggesting here is the way in which this provisionality and plurality of subjectivity are linked to a tension between mastery and non-mastery and how this can be of use to a feminist politics. The characters only temporarily attain agency by acquiescing to a discursive construction, but this proves limiting. It is an important part of Thompson's dramaturgy that her plays and her (92) characters are rooted in coherent concepts of the subject: part of their power is this ability to affect the audience so deeply. It is important, of course, that we see/witness the positions which the characters assume. The experiences of these characters on this level are affecting, even emotionally draining. This functions well and effectively, and is one way in which Thompson's

plays have profound effects of identification And yet this identification is also unsettled.

This unsettling occurs on many levels. The positions of the characters are changeable. Positions are relinquished as other opportunities arise, or as power valences shift. The serialization of these positions destabilizes any coherent sense of self. If these positions are many,

they are also transitory and achieve only temporary change. Furthermore, the abusive situations within these plays perpetuate the same kinds of subjects. The discursive construction of subjects is foregrounded, both by the discursive authorities which operate as touchstones for identification, and also by the seriality of the positions which are taken up. The serialization does not afford any fundamental change in the institutions and discourses which prove to be limiting and inextricably linked to a binarist right/wrong, dominant/subordinate form of interaction.

It is only in the reworking of the "constitutive outside" that substantial changes in articulations of being and of social interactions can take place. It is the very incompleteness of this formation of identity which lends it political effectiveness.

Figuring out desires, and articulating what one wants entails choices. By highlighting the exclusion and reworking of the "constitutive outside," Thompson suggests a different dynamic of identity formation which does not involve imperialism or colonization. Located at contradictory interstices, thwarted by the dependence of the "I" in "You" characters who most embody this state of ambiguity are caught in uncertain, transitional spaces; they are unable to articulate from a coherent space. There are recurring images in the plays of Judith Thompson, sites of ambivalence, where new ways of thinking about identity seem to be possible: characters who “sail over the cracks,'' circular images of tornados, the recurring image of the baby as a screaming into being of

the postmodern identity, the fractured beings of the abject. In particular, the ghost-like presence of Isobel demonstrates the different kind of reading and discursive negotiation which is necessary in order to achieve such an identity: she is able to find a story and a way of telling herself that allows her a negotiation of space in the world. The combined effect of the whirling contradictions of the post-modem terrain and the painful situatedness of the subject makes for a disturbing, often confusing viewing experience.

This is the territory, then, which this reading of the post-modem feminist identity negotiates. The where-do-I-stand and the what-do-I-do confusion which makes up the who-am-I in a post-modem world inevitably lives in a body, a gendered identity. Identity is perhaps best conceived as a 'mode of holding together the epistemological and the ontological" (Probyn 4), for indeed, the ontological is what has been left out of much postmodern theory. This articulation is (95) realized by the reintegration of the material within and through the discursive in the plays of Judith Thompson.