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2 results

  • Chapter 11 - The Trump Effect: Exceptionalism, Global Capitalism and the War on Women in Early Twenty-first-century Films of King Lear

  • from Part IV - Lear on the Loose: Migrations and Appropriations of Lear
  • Edited by Victoria Bladen, University of Queensland, Sarah Hatchuel, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
  • Book:
    Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear
    Published online:
    10 September 2019
    Print publication:
    26 September 2019, pp 171-184

  • Summary

    This essay explores three turn-of-the-century spinoffs of King Lear: Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive (2000), Don Boyd’s My Kingdom (2001) and Eli Udell’s King of Texas (2002). In each of these films, King Lear becomes a vehicle for the ‘new racism of the developed world’ (Slavoj Žižek). This ideology has been taken to an extreme by US President Donald Trump, whose Muslim ban and plans for a wall separating the USA from Mexico are merely the latest variations on a xenophobic theme. The chapter argues that the roots of this crisis moment, magnified by ‘the immigrant flood’ of Syrian refugees converging upon Europe, are rooted in gender, as ongoing efforts to subjugate and micromanage the female body are becoming the very condition of the state of exception.What the chapter refers to proleptically as the ‘Trump effect’, namely, the definition of the female body as the subject of punishment, or in Agamben’s terms, as homo sacer – a life that can be killed but not sacrificed – emerges in each film’s interpolated scenes of gratuitous violence against women.