Pornography Debate, Gaze and Spectatorship in Sarah Daniels’s Masterpieces

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska

doi:10.2478/texmat-2013-0032

Authors

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/texmat-2013-0032

Abstract

Masterpieces by Sarah Daniels has been described as a voice in the debate on pornography, expressing the anti-pornography position as opposed to the liberal feminist stance in this debate. Despite its ideological clarity reported by many reviewers and critics, the play has been commented upon as deficient or inadequate because of evoking conflicting interpretations and ambiguity. The paper argues that these deficiencies stem from the play’s concern with the distribution of agency and passivity along gender lines as well as the influence of generic and essentialist notions of genders on the perception of social and individual power relations particularly in the domain of eroticism and sexuality. One of the key issues of the play is the question to what extent and in what ways human perception is conditioned by the place of the subject in relation to the agency/passivity dichotomy and his or her viewing/reading position in relation to erotic and pornographic material.

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Author Biography

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska is a lecturer in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where she teaches British cultural studies and literature, gender in British drama and political theatre. She has published articles on experimental theatre, site and environment in theatre as well as gender and intertextuality in British feminist drama. She is currently working on a book about intertextual hauntings and revisions in British women’s drama. She is the author of The Hybrid in the Limen: British and Polish Environment-Oriented Theatre (Toruń, 2003) and the coeditor of Corporeal Inscriptions: Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and Practices (Toruń, 2005), Worlds in the Making: Constructivism and Postmodern Knowledge (Toruń, 2006), and Litteraria Copernicana: Cyborg (Toruń, 2011).

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