The author’s focus upon the (re)embodied identity's discursive (de)construction and corporeal (de)formations, its patriarchal marginalization and subversively gender-bendingfeminist pleasures is particularly challenging.” – Prof. Kérchy’s monograph also contributes to contemporary critical debates on body and identity in their relation to textuality/sexuality, boundaries, difference and power. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner Universität Salzburg “Ms. Shedding light on textual ruptures, overwritings, palimpsestic strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres – “counter-performances,” as Kérchy calls them, this study forms an important re-evaluation of Carter’s final trilogy as an empowering feminist revision of “culturally ready-made” myths of femininity – standing within women’s literary tradition whilst subverting it internally and outlining “an alternative body- and identity-politics that starts out on the side of the othered freak.” - Prof. The connection between the freaks that structure her reading (Eve/lyn, Fevvers, Dora and Nora) and the process of “self-freaking” becomes obvious in the reading chapters.
Certainly, this nexus of phenomena and narrative strategies is the most original aspect of Kérchy’s interpretation of Carter’s trilogy. Reviews “Kérchy’s “body-text interpretive model” offers an innovative approach that manages to illustrate how a feminist body-text sounds like and why it sounds the way it does. Through a corporeal narratological method-a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body- it deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, ‘cultural’ body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material ‘reality’ (are) (de)compose(d by) the Carterian fiction’s destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres. "This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Two decades after Anakin/Vader’s embrace of Darkness, it is his patriarchal connection to his son Luke Skywalker – unencumbered by neither wife nor mother and therefore pure of female taint – that redeems Anakin, destroys the Sith, and restores democracy to the galaxy. Throughout the films, Anakin makes many fateful decisions based upon his possessive emotional attachments to his mother, his wife, and the sexually ambiguous Palpatine.
This paper explores how Lucas’s association of femininity with Darkness, deception and moral decay is dramatically expressed through the Anakin/Vader character and his problematic desires. This malign psychic energy, responsible for the demise of Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and his reincarnation into Sith Lord Darth Vader, the slaughter of the Jedi Order, and the collapse of galactic representative democracy, is both “feminized” and “feminizing.” It empowers the machinations of the Sith-Emperor Palpatine, the truest villain of the saga. Abstract of the Paper: Throughout his popular Star Wars films, writer-director George Lucas ideologically and symbolically links womanhood, femininity, and homoeroticism with the Dark Side of the Force.
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