Re-shaping Identity Through the Body: An Analysis of K.S. Maniam’s <i>The Sandpit: Womensis</i> & Mark de Silva’s<i> Stories for Amah</i>

Abstract

The fundamental concern of this paper is with issues of authoritative control over individual expressions of identity, as well as with the construction of identity within Malaysian society. There is a level of resistance to this process of construction and the  subsequent imposition of identities on the individual at the authoritative level. The  theatre is a particularly rich site for the staging of such resistance because it can physically  embody, explore, and exhibit identities which challenge and subvert the official  rhetoric. In this paper, I look specifically at how the physical bodies of the characters in  certain plays become sites of contention; the plays in question are K.S. Maniam’s The Sandpit: Womensis and Mark de Silva’s Stories for Amah. In both plays, the bodies of the female protagonists can be seen as expressions of their identities, as well as sites which  dominant figures try to re-shape and control.