Decentering King Lear: Feminist Reperformance, Rural Voices, and Deconstructive Aesthetics in Queen Lear

Abstract

This study analyzes Pelin Esmer's 2019 documentary film "Queen Lear" in the context of feminist film theory and deconstructive narrative aesthetics. The documentary tells the story of an amateur theater group consisting of peasant women on a tour to the mountain villages of Turkey and their staging of Shakespeare's famous play King Learas Queen Learin their own interpretation. Based on a qualitative research design, we analyze the documentary on two levels. First, the experiences of women through theater are examined as a feminist practice of subjectivation and the director's approach to this process is questioned. Secondly, the way the director presents this process and the narrative elements she prefers are analyzed in terms of feminist documentary understanding. In summary, we find that Pelin Esmer approaches theater as one of the fields of self-realization for peasant women in her film; that theater functions as a means for them to be liberated to a certain extent from patriarchal codes and social conditions that limit them; and that she presents theatrical performance as a kind of cultural interaction, enrichment and border-crossing experience. Furthermore, we conclude that the deconstructive and original narrative created by using tools such as intertextual, observational, episodic, and layered narrative reinforces the critical attitude of the film. These formal choices reinforce feminist discourse by presenting women's transformation processes in a non-linear, fragmented, and polyphonic manner. In this way, it is shown how feminist politics can effectively combine with the narrative structures of documentary cinema.