This Island's Mine Disjunctive Identity

The presentation’s premise seeks to elaborate on the emergence of a disjunctive identity. Mainly, how identities of national, cultural, and social sources ascribe the body as a disjunctive presence. Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine (1988) illustrates the embodiment of such forces. The play extends the theme of colonialism to the advent of postcolonial discourses. Postcolonialism, succinctly, refers to the lingering effect of pernicious ideologies affecting conventions of masculinity and femininity, culture and history, and the body and the self. The governance of normative modes of gender subverts an individual's identity. Subsequently, a disjunctive sense of the self manifests. What may be considered unnatural in queerness does not coincide …show more content…
The title speaks to Thatcherism and its imposing barbarity for those that do not commit to or cannot coincide with her predatory conservatism. The metaphor of the island (as nation) as a body of desires which privileges dominant agency. Or the title exposes the individual's disenfranchisement and alienation by dis-entitlement. Nonetheless, such persons’ subjectively possess what it means to belong. One’s joy of food culture, for example, or one’s amusement in the social of art, or one’s urge for an economy of belongingness. Wherein the disjunctive sense, the aesthetics of appearance, the passions of desire, the individual participant within a community—blackness as a culture, whiteness as a race, sexuality as a gender, beliefs within a nation—one continually vacillates in the negotiation between these binary halves in search for a consolidated …show more content…
Conceptually, it is the by-product of a stigmatic (discursive) process which separates what is ‘whole’, a sense of who we are, into dichotomous halves. The characters of Osment’s play speak in secret through monologues, subtext, or in collective unison. They are careful not to expose the transparency of their true feelings as being apprehensive of a surveilling gaze. The queer identity begets conflict for the individual’s passions. This disjunction manifests within racial paradigms, social strata, national intrigue, and gender roles which disables certain halves to enable a heteronormative whole. How this appropriation of a whole works is dependent on the qualities of otherness and subsequent relationships formulating how one recognizes the others. In this light, there is a duality between self-representation and self-determination. Thus, the fracturing of the queer characters speech demonstrates a fragmented ‘self’. Even so, the characters’ sentences, are made whole by those reciprocal to their