Reclaiming voices and disputing authority: a feminist dialogics approach in reading Kee Thuan Chye’s plays
Kee Thuan Chye in all four of his selected plays has appropriated and reimagined history by giving it a flair of contemporaneity in order to draw a parallel with the current socio-political climate. He is a firm believer of freedom of expression and racial equality. His plays become his didactic t...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM
2016
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/9711/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/9711/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/9711/1/10656-33904-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Kee Thuan Chye in all four of his selected plays has appropriated and reimagined history by giving it a flair of
contemporaneity in order to draw a parallel with the current socio-political climate. He is a firm believer of
freedom of expression and racial equality. His plays become his didactic tool to express his dismay and
frustration towards the folly and malfunctions in the society. He believes that everybody needs to rise and
eliminate their fear from speaking their minds regardless of race, status and gender. In all four of his plays, Kee
has featured and centralised his female characters by empowering them with voice and agency. Kee gives fair
treatment to his women by painting them as strong, liberated, determined and fearless beings. Armed with the
literary tools of feminist dialogics which is derived from Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and strategies of
historical re-visioning, this study investigates and explores Kee’s representations of his female characters and
the various ways that he has liberated them from being passive and silent beings as they contest the norms,
values and even traditions. It is found that the dissecting voices of Kee’s female characters contain veiled
messages and it is dialogic in nature. Their voices are caught in between opposition and struggle which echoes
Kee’s manifested resistance towards the authority’s establishment of power. |
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