Gendered Bodies, Objects, and the City in Olga Tokarczuk’s Short Story 'Sabina’s Wish' and Feliks Falk’s Film 'The Debt Collector'

• In Event: Reclaiming Urban Space: Fighting Unequal Representation and Spatial Marginalization in Urban Narratives

Abstract

This paper is premised on the idea that human bodies and the spaces they inhabit mutually inform and shape each other (E. Grosz). Although geopoetics scholarship often centers on embodied subjects defined by their corporeality and situatedness in space and place which become the sites of self-construction, I propose to look at how geophysical and geopolitcal spaces are informed and affected by these self-constructions. Through the analysis of Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “Sabina’s Wish” (2001) and Feliks Falk’s film “The Debt Collector” (2005) this paper examines how the gendered bodies of the main protagonists, Sabina and Lucjan Bohme, respectively, interact with the landscapes and the material worlds in which they are embedded and what these interactions convey about the Polish post-industrial city of Wałbrzych in which the two stories are set. Both narratives reveal that Wałbrzych in the early 2000s is marked by economic decline and poverty but also by pronounced hyper masculinity and an objectified and marginalized femininity. The gender dynamics are underscored by the prominent role of material objects in the protagonists’ lives: Lucjan asserts his dominant masculinity through the appropriation of others’ possessions, whereas the emotionally deprived maid Sabina voluntarily surrenders her human agency to transform into a doll.

Author

• Svetlana P. Vassileva-Karagyozova, U of Kansas