{"id":1149,"date":"2021-06-08T21:23:26","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T21:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doarj.org\/ijhrss\/?p=1149"},"modified":"2021-06-08T21:24:06","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T21:24:06","slug":"castration-or-decapitationa-feminist-reading-of-two-stories-by-angela-carter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/castration-or-decapitationa-feminist-reading-of-two-stories-by-angela-carter\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cCASTRATION OR DECAPITATION?\u201dA FEMINIST READING OF TWO STORIES BY ANGELA CARTER"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Shadi S. Neimneh<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Abstract:<\/p>\n<p><em>This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, \u201cThe Bloody Chamber\u201d and \u201cThe Executioner\u2019s Beautiful Daughter,\u201d to account for Carter\u2019s dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women. Using the French version of feminism, the work of H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous, and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, the article contends that Carter uses decapitation to link beheading to loss of agency and thus to serve her project of exposing violent patriarchal and sexual structures. She utilizes decapitation to interrogate female inferiority and project its castrating impact on those women who are threatened with this punishment. Decapitation, however, becomes a means of undermining patriarchal logic from within. In \u201cThe Executioner\u2019s Beautiful Daughter,\u201d it is the son who is literally decapitated and thus symbolically castrated, not the daughter. In \u201cThe Bloody Chamber,\u201d the female victim escapes decapitation and the husband threatening her gets shot in the head (symbolically decapitated\/castrated) by her mother. Carter\u2019s conflation of castration and decapitation revises power structures and challenges attributing castration to men and decapitation to women, offering a postmodern critique of patriarchal fixities and oppressive boundaries.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Keywords:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><em>Angela Carter; Castration\/Decapitation; Cixous; French Feminism; Psychoanalysis; British Fiction<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Full Text:\u00a0<a class=\"file\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/IJHRSS\/03\/4.pdf\">PDF<\/a><\/p>\n\n<div class=\"gde-error\">GDE Error: Error retrieving file - if necessary turn off error checking (404:Not Found)<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shadi S. Neimneh Abstract: This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, \u201cThe Bloody Chamber\u201d and \u201cThe Executioner\u2019s Beautiful Daughter,\u201d to account for Carter\u2019s dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women. Using the French version of feminism, the work of H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous, and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1150,"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1149\/revisions\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tdoarj.org\/ijhrss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}