Forms of resistance and shaping female identity in pam gems's dusa, Fish, Stas, and Vi And Jakie Kay's Chiaroscuro

الملخص EN

The paper proposes to investigate the concept of resistance and its relation to shaping female identity in Pam Gems’s Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (1976) and Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro (1986) within the framework of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Both plays, though set in different historical conditions, are concerned with the same gender issues; each presenting a set of four characters struggling with questions of female identity.

Gems belongs to the feminist climate of the 1970s that witnessed the introduction of women’s dramatic texts into mainstream canonical theater works, while Kay comes from the late eighties charged with racial concerns.

The paper provides an analysis of the stories of the eight women with the aim of showing the patterns of resistance adopted by these women within a complex matrix of racial as well as gender issues.