Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Challenging Literary and Cultural Practices, Now: Contemporary Approaches to the Humanities, Coimbra, Portekiz, 26 - 27 Mart 2026, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.23, (Özet Bildiri)
This
study analyses Ella Hickson’s The Writer through Michel Foucault’s
concept of discourse and power/knowledge to demonstrate how art functions as
activism, arguing that the play uses formal and narrative deviations to resist
patriarchal discourse and power. A young female writer clashes with a
domineering male director and, through a series of imagined scenes and ruptured
realities, struggles to assert control over her own story and creative vision. In
the play, the central conflict between the writer and the male director sheds
light on how theatrical institutions and performative arts become means of
discursive regimes that determine who may speak, how aesthetic value is
constructed, and which narratives are legitimized. Rather than depicting and
drawing attention to patriarchal oppression superficially, the play reveals the
subtle mechanisms that Foucault indicates—namely normalisation, surveillance,
and the shaping of representational norms—through the director’s close and
strict control over the writer’s creative voice. In this context, through the
rupture of conventional dramaturgy and representation, Hickson not only
transforms the form of the play into an act of resistance but also points to
the possibility of a woman-only space, created by this very act of resistance,
that is emancipated from patriarchal oppression and the discipline imposed on
the female body. Both the rupture of the traditional norms of dramaturgy and
the creation of the female realm within this very rupture operate as
counter-discourses, challenging the normalization of male authority over the
female body and the stage, which makes dramaturgy a reconfigured space of
creative agency. Within this Foucauldian framework, The Writer emerges
not merely as a performative instance of artivism that criticizes patriarchal
dominance in institutional power, but also as a deliberate destabilization of
established norms.