Date of Award

6-6-2001

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Michael C. Beard

Abstract

There is a long history of critically interrogating the social and political inequalities informed by the frameworks of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This large oeuvre of writing provides a significant foundation for contemporary analyses of domination. With the frameworks of class oppression, patriarchy, and racism laid out before us, we are now able to begin inquiring into their similarities in an attempt to uncover a systemic, structural logic of oppression. What each of these frameworks share is a Self/Other relationship that furthers subjugation, such as the ramifications of inequality brought about by the cultural distinction between white/black, man/woman, bourgeois/proletariat. The problem is assessing what attribute of the Self/Other relationship ultimately results in domination. I address this problem by analyzing contemporary representations of the Self/Other framework in popular film and political texts. Since the distinction between “us” and “the enemy” easily charts how the Self/Other binary is employed to justify forms of aggression, the dissertation begins by looking at war films, like Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Sonneborn's Regret to Inform. I also explore how the American political and legal discourse on terrorism relies on the structure of Self/Other, as illustrated in the U.S. government's recent Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism. But those films which portray a blurring between the Self/Other allow us to observe the possibilities of non-dominating contexts as they arise in fluid subjectivities. Bigelow's Strange Days and Jonze's Being John Malkovich offer narratives that challenge the traditional distinctions between man/woman, public/private, and producer/consumer. Significantly, each grounds the blurring of identity in a politics of pleasure. In the final chapter I conclude that the attribute of the Self/Other binary that results in oppression is the humanist belief that the determinant location of agency and power is the individual. As such, the notion of power-sharing is compromised because the structure of the coherent Self, to which there is always an Other, assumes a fixed location of power at any one time. A non-dominating context, however, implies a discursive notion of agency and subjectivity, which breaks down the distinction between the Self and Other.

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