THE FEMINA SACRA: A FEMININE BARE LIFE AND HER POTENTIAL FOR BIOPOLITICAL RESISTANCE

Abstract

The force behind the novels of Ludmila Ultiskaia’s The Kukotsky Enigma (2001) and Mo Yan’s Frog (2009) is the central concern with the biopolitical impact of authoritarian regimes on life. Through their enigmatic representation of maternal bodies, what emerges in these texts is the existence of a feminine bare life, a feminine correlative to Giorgio Agamben’s theorisation of the homo sacer in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. This thesis is thus an attempt to develop a theory of feminine bare life or the femina sacra that revisions the androgynous figure of the homo sacer in two ways: the first, through the existence of a distinctly gendered bare life as the direct production of a biopolitical structure predicated upon the control of feminine bodies and the space of the womb; secondly, by charting the possibility of bare life’s resistance against biopower. Through an engagement with the literary form of the novels, the femina sacra emerges as a figure that interrogates biopolitical forms of power at the same time as she challenges and revisions sovereign rule and the juridico-political structure. In this manner, this thesis hopes to contribute to the critique of bare life in the field of biopolitics, at the same time as it also provides a concerted attempt to bring the biopolitical into dialogue with the literary. Ultimately, this thesis is guided by the form of the novels and their rendering of life under biopolitical rule, which gives presence to otherwise occluded and excluded forms of life abandoned by the law.