The Trump Effect: Exceptionalism, Global Capitalism and the War on Women in Early Twenty-first-century Films of <span class='italic'>King Lear</span>

doi:10.1017/9781108589727.011

Chapter 11 - The Trump Effect: Exceptionalism, Global Capitalism and the War on Women in Early Twenty-first-century Films of King Lear

from Part IV - Lear on the Loose: Migrations and Appropriations of Lear

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2019

Courtney Lehmann

Edited by

Victoria Bladen ,

Sarah Hatchuel and

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin

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Victoria Bladen: Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Sarah Hatchuel: Affiliation:
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin: Affiliation:
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier

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Summary

This essay explores three turn-of-the-century spinoffs of King Lear: Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive (2000), Don Boyd’s My Kingdom (2001) and Eli Udell’s King of Texas (2002). In each of these films, King Lear becomes a vehicle for the ‘new racism of the developed world’ (Slavoj Žižek). This ideology has been taken to an extreme by US President Donald Trump, whose Muslim ban and plans for a wall separating the USA from Mexico are merely the latest variations on a xenophobic theme. The chapter argues that the roots of this crisis moment, magnified by ‘the immigrant flood’ of Syrian refugees converging upon Europe, are rooted in gender, as ongoing efforts to subjugate and micromanage the female body are becoming the very condition of the state of exception.What the chapter refers to proleptically as the ‘Trump effect’, namely, the definition of the female body as the subject of punishment, or in Agamben’s terms, as homo sacer – a life that can be killed but not sacrificed – emerges in each film’s interpolated scenes of gratuitous violence against women.

Keywords

King Lear racism ideology spinoff Donald Trump gender violence

Type: Chapter
Information: Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear , pp. 171 - 184

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108589727.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

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References

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