Subversion, Refusal, and Contingency: The Transgression of Liberal-Humanist Subjectivity and Characterization in Sarah Kane’s <i>Cleansed, Crave,</i> and <i>4.48 Psychosis</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Drawing on Judith Butler’s writings on performativity, this article investigates the critique of the liberal-humanist understanding of selfhood offered in Sarah Kane’s last three plays. It argues that Cleansed subversively deploys conventional dramatic character to disfigure the subject as it is understood by liberal humanism. The motif of the wound activates this subversive characterization, with the supposed self-sameness or coherence of selfhood being dismembered on the page. Subjectivity emerges in this playtext as discursively produced, defined by the body, and processual. Conversely, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis reject the terms through which such liberal-humanist subjectivity is represented. Through uncountable and opaque characters, subjectivity is formulated as queer, foreclosing the equation of body morphology with the sense of the self and dismantling fixed and unified notions of identity. Finally, the article interrogates to what extent the staging of the plays inevitably reproduces stable characters and normative subjectivities. Desire and recognition are considered here as key to maintaining the plays’ critique of liberal humanism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".