Sounding the Body’s Meridian examines the ways in which notions of belonging are constructed through the display of bodies in performance, specifically the registers of private and public body that have been revealed in the theatre‟s attempts to locate a post-liberation notion of South African-ness in historical narrative. The author investigates various ideas of the imagined community constructed in postliberation performances of South African history as a form of embodied historical-social intervention. This investigation is undertaken with specific reference to claims that are made of South African identity in terms of its public culture, especially the inscription of nationalist ideology as a performative act that operates both upon and through the „citizen‟ bodies that it mediates. The study pursues a notion of the body so mediated, and (perceived) essential “characteristics” that describe its claims to authority and “authenticity”: the “meridian” or line of essential energy that activates its power to signify on behalf of other bodies like it in the debate and transaction of social values. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

This thesis is constructed between a double argument. The first is a feminist argument that the female body may be viewed as a tool for cultural reinscription against dominant structures of subjectivity and representation that have rendered women the common flesh of art, without recourse to their own representational economy. Secondly, it is argued that the female body can never be recuperated as an essential, original form. That is, there is no essential female body or nature to be represented. In this sense, the body is artificial, or not natural, and so can be re-presented, specifically in feminist performance art, in order to rework radically the relationship between language, subjectivity and desire. The research undertaken is genealogical and also looks towards the future: deconstructing the historical imperatives that have produced 'the female body' and suggesting ways in which feminist performance art may redefine the ways in which female flesh is represented. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.