Where am I? Who am I? (Abjection and Negotiating Identity in Carin Mannheimer's "Sista Dansen")

Abstract

Julia Kristeva’s lexicon of abjection, criticized by feminist philosophers for being trapped in a male/female polarity, is explored for its potential to generate analyses. What is meant by lexicon is the terminology, which is used with Kristeva’s definitions rather than definitions found in a common dictionary. This terminology, grounded in the Freudian and Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis and further developed by Kristeva, includes words for the mechanisms that describe the interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic in spoken language. Two characters from the playscript of Carin Mannheimer’s Sista dansen (2008) [The Last Dance] are analyzed in this paper. The perspectives of two scholars are applied: a perspective described by Ruth Y. Jenkins that identifies the dominant culture in a literary work, those excluded from the culture, and how they use recognition of exclusion to create an alternative identity, and Karen Shimakawa’s unifiying strategy that combines feminist theories with Kristeva’s theories. The two characters selected for analysis are Bogdan, a young, immigrant, male caregiver in a nursing home, and Harriet an elderly, frail, woman resident in the nursing home. The “Who am I?” in the title is an expression for a subject’s ongoing search for emancipation from a condition that he or she cannot endorse, and for one that gives the subject a sense of happiness. The “Where am I?” in the title is an expression for a state of being in a social situation, for example, that of an immigrant who intuits discrimination and exclusion. It is found that by examining linguistic articulation as containing signifiers that mark the borders to that which a speaking subject experiences as abject, the theories of Julia Kristeva are capable of revealing a multitude of issues, and consequently, bringing to the fore the richness of the social criticism in Mannheimer’s playscript.