CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Semashyna, Mariia |
|---|---|
| Title | It sometimes seems that I am a mother to all things: Gendering human/non-human distinctions in the texts of Elena Guro |
| Summary | The thesis explores how human/non-human distinctions and human/non-human contact are gendered in the texts of Elena Guro (1877-1913), a pre-revolutionary Russian Futurist writer. The post-humanist approach, particularly works by Donna Haraway and Giorgio Agamben, is used to map how human/non-human boundaries are blurred and re-constituted in Guro’s project of an intimate and creative communication between the human, nature, and the objective world. The close reading of Guro’s short prose, poetry, and diaries demonstrates underlying gender dichotomies that organize Guro’s vision of the human/non-human communication. Guro imagines the ideal mode of human subject relating to the world as a version of heterosexual nuclear family of mother and son. Since the father figure is in most cases absent, this couple’s relationship is presented as devoid of sexuality, although certain erotic overtones of the mother-son communication are still identifiable. Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of the human/non-human encounters as becoming with one’s companion species helps to see how both the mother’s femininity and the son’s masculinity are constructed and performed through their interaction with non-human living and non-living beings. Multidirectionality of this becoming is particularly visible in the interpretation of Guro’s transrational poetry as a performance of motherhood and femininity and a performance of poethood. Becoming together for Guro involves the experience of being the other, where experimental Futurist transrational language stands as a voice of the non-human. At the same time, fear of contagion and sexuality as contamination characterizes instances of the human-human contact in Guro’s writings. Similarly, the city as the space of the human-human interaction is depicted as a space of violence, male dominance, and commodification of women, epitomized in the figure of the prostitute. Masculine urban space in Guro’s view de-humanizes all its inhabitants. What is at work here in Guro’s texts is mechanism of the anthropological machine, as described by Giorgio Agamben. As the human proper is separated from the animal or the objective component in them, Guro’s urban characters are deemed not human enough, since their low animal nature or mechanical emotions prevail over their spirituality. On the contrary, the process of separation between the human and the non-human is stopped in the domestic space, which is marked as feminine. The private sphere thus appears the main locus where intense and fruitful communication between the human and the non-human happens on a daily basis. |
| Supervisor | Julia Hölzl |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/semashyna_mariia.pdf |
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