Can Medea Speak? Tracing Euripides’ Medea's Complex Performative Gendering in Her Speech from the Outside in the Outside

AbstractThe complexity of Medea's gendering has become one of the most widely explored topics, particularly in the field of ancient Greek literature within the context of gender. Given that Medea's character is also known to be highly verbal and behaving beyond the general norms of the feminine in the ancient Greek context, this paper proposes to explore Medea's act of speaking and its influence on her gender signification. The notion of Medea's speech “from the Outside in the Outside” defines Medea's act of speaking in the public space of the polis that is normally marked as the masculine space, as an abject. In other words, Medea's subjectivation and gendering can also be considered to be constituted through her speaking in the masculine space as a marginalised subject. My reading of Medea's gendering in the context of her act of speaking appropriates the gender performative framework, which is useful to gauge how Euripides’ text operates by way of reiteration and repetition of the norms, constraints and failure of repetition of signs of the normative, and the presence of power relation in terms of how the text appears to regulate the performative significations of Medea's gendering in the context of her act of speaking. This paper makes reference mainly to Euripides’ text because it is one of the most popular existing versions. On the whole, this study aspires to further expand the exploration of Medea's gendering within the performative context