Union College Union | Digital Works Honors Theses Student Work 6-2017 The Ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra: Interrupting Phallocentric Schemes of Objectification through the Mutual Gaze Sydney Paluch Union College - Schenectady, NY Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Paluch, Sydney, "The Ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra: Interrupting Phallocentric Schemes of Objectification through the Mutual Gaze" (2017). Honors Theses. 66. https://digitalworks.union.edu/theses/66 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Union | Digital Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Union | Digital Works. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. i The Ambiguity of Antony and Cleopatra: Interrupting Phallocentric Schemes of Objectification through the Mutual Gaze By Sydney Paluch ******** Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in the Departments of English and Political Science UNION COLLEGE December, 2016 ii ABSTRACT PALUCH, SYDNEY An analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of ambiguity as applied to William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. English and Political Science Departments, January 2017. ADVISORS: Professor Patricia Wareh and Professor Lori Marso This thesis proposes an alternative to the male gaze, using Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of ambiguity in order to understand the subversive sexual politics underlying Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. The concept of the male gaze was first identified in feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which explains how film is explicitly constructed around the male gaze.