Entangled Desires: A Post-Modern Feminist Reading of A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

This paper examines how desire entangles with illusion, denial, repression, gender performance, and existential futility in Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire. The study, based on the postmodern feminist theory, examines how patriarchal power systems generate and manage gendered desire, which ends up making female subjectivity weak and disposable. Utilising the gender performativity theory by Judith Butler, the idea of woman as Other by Simone de Beauvoir, the critique of patriarchal violence by bell hooks, and the theory of abjection by Julia Kristeva, the paper elucidates that the psychological breakdown of Blanche DuBois is not a personal problem but one of the structural effects of strict gender expectations. By closely analysing the text, the study shows how Blanche plays femininity as a survival mechanism within a patriarchal economy, which both requires and enforces female desire. The play ultimately reveals the failure of desire as a site of meaning breakdown, as the pointlessness of maintaining feminine identity in a hyper-masculinist social world.