Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
17th INTERNATIONAL IDEA CONFERENCE: STUDIES IN ENGLISH, Elazığ, Türkiye, 7 - 09 Mayıs 2025, ss.88, (Özet Bildiri)
In her award-winning novel Milkman (2018), Anna Burns addresses the tensions between society and the individual, the ruling power and the political subject, the superrace and the subraces, and finally patriarchy and women through the story of an 18-year-old girl who is not only otherized by her Irish nationalist community, which is also oppressed by the British state during the Troubles in the 1970s, but also harassed by a married high-ranking paramilitary named Milkman. In this gripping Northern Ireland picture, the unnamed female protagonist's quest to protect herself from her demanding community and Milkman illustrates Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theories of immunitas and communitas par excellence. While the Irish community has immunised itself against contamination of English rule and the male-dominated society against the disobedient woman, the protagonist, on the other hand, attempts to immunise her individuality and femininity against the threats of both her closed community and patriarchy. However, as Esposito contends, extreme immunisation may deprive life and lead to destruction through a kind of autoimmune reaction. In this sense, while depicting the prevailing tribalism, bigotry, hostility and polarisation that reduce individuals to bare lives; Milkman, reconceptualises otherness through a biopolitical standpoint reflecting on the incarceration, exclusion and dehumanisation of the non-conformist woman who rejects the in-group norms and male domination in her oppressive socio-political space. Burns' work thus highlights the need for an inclusive rhetoric against the pervasive singularising practises of the last fifty years that reduce individuals to subjects and erase the human.