REIMAGINING THE OTHER: SELF-OTHER CONTINUITY THROUGH THE SHAPESHIFTER

Abstract

Humanity has long recognised an Other. The state of being Other is ascribed based on difference, which is traditionally conceptualised in essentialist thinking as a fundamentally uncloseable space between entities separated by hard ontological boundaries. It is also because of these assumed boundaries that shapeshifter figures in myth and fiction have been considered a source of anxiety, at once embodying Otherness in being identified with difference and possessing in their changeability of form the ability to defy the ontological boundaries marking them as different. This thesis identifies in the boundary-crossing shapeshifter a means through which to reconceptualise the Other in a way that has eluded scholarship, namely through a temporal structure as a function of change and continuity, rather than an embodiment of spatialised difference. Using Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, the thesis will illustrate how the artist can be seen firstly to understand the shapeshifter as a mirror of the constructed Other, and, consequently, to reconceptualise Otherness as transtemporal iteration from similarity. All this is to the end of uncovering a renewed and more robust mode of self-actualisation, impossible within a traditional conceptualisation of the Other.