조나단 스위프트의 화장방 담론: 여성의 아름다움, 몸, 그리고 젠더 위계 (Jonathan Swift’s Trope of the Dressing-Room: Woman’s Beauty, Bodies, and the Gender Hierarchy)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국영미문화학회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문화 / 8권 / 2호 / 1 ~ 29페이지
· 저자명 : 강문순

초록

Dressing-rooms undress the hierarchy between men and women in Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature. Although the eighteenth-century witnessed improved material conditions that made women more equal with men, the construction of the dressing-room conceptualized modern gender difference and introduced strategies to facilitate its regulation. This regulation functioned to hold men and women in a strict hierarchy that the dressing-room potentially threatened. The dressing-room first institutionalized privacy for women and foregrounded the possibility that women hid their true selves beneath clothing and cosmetics; but it also evoked a range of connotation that represented female subjects as having access to privileges ordinarily reserved for men. As a private space central for ordering structures outside of it, dressing-room scenes enact a logic that attempts to render women as spectacles and inferior to men, and men as spectators and superior to women. Therefore the trope of the dressing-room stages a profoundly performative structure of gender identity and gender difference that attempts to naturalize this hierarchy. Female subjects need to be watched by masculine subjects because this activity defines them both; yet the very act of observing women is confounded by the introduction of the private dressing-room. The possibility of a closed dressing-room thus gives rise to speculation about what sorts of activities might be happening inside.

영어초록

Dressing-rooms undress the hierarchy between men and women in Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature. Although the eighteenth-century witnessed improved material conditions that made women more equal with men, the construction of the dressing-room conceptualized modern gender difference and introduced strategies to facilitate its regulation. This regulation functioned to hold men and women in a strict hierarchy that the dressing-room potentially threatened. The dressing-room first institutionalized privacy for women and foregrounded the possibility that women hid their true selves beneath clothing and cosmetics; but it also evoked a range of connotation that represented female subjects as having access to privileges ordinarily reserved for men. As a private space central for ordering structures outside of it, dressing-room scenes enact a logic that attempts to render women as spectacles and inferior to men, and men as spectators and superior to women. Therefore the trope of the dressing-room stages a profoundly performative structure of gender identity and gender difference that attempts to naturalize this hierarchy. Female subjects need to be watched by masculine subjects because this activity defines them both; yet the very act of observing women is confounded by the introduction of the private dressing-room. The possibility of a closed dressing-room thus gives rise to speculation about what sorts of activities might be happening inside.

참고자료

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