The Problematic of Identity and Language in David Hare’s Skylight and Pravda

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 MA in English Language and Literature and Ph.D. Candidate, Department of International Relations, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This article presents new outlooks toward gender transfiguration in David Hare’s Skylight and Pravda in the light of Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. It examines whether the linguistic performance of Hare's characters is an innate feature or a hallucinatory effect of their naturalized and gendered bodies. Butler asserts that performativity is a ritualized production and a constrained reiteration of cultural intelligibility under the prohibition pressed by power regimes. Surveying Skylight and Pravda elucidates that gender identity is an imitation, which leads Hare’s characters to resignify and recontextualize the parodic gender reproductions. Moreover, the gendered subjects were subordinated to the language that interpellated them, so that each individual became a linguistically stylized occasion. Therefore, the ever-shifting identities of Hare’s characters were established by the power of the injurious language that interpellated the subjects. Springing from the discussion about gender performativity of Hare’s characters, the article concluded that identity is a phantasmatic construction, and what an individual performs is a non-intrinsic parody of the culturally constructed regulations. As a result, the culturally acquired gender is crafted based on the socially recognizable standards, which shape the directionality of the self-representation.

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Critical Literary Studies
Volume 8, Issue 1 - Serial Number 15
October 2025
Pages 111-134

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History

  • Receive Date: 11 February 2025
  • Revise Date: 28 June 2025
  • Accept Date: 17 August 2025

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