Abstract

This dissertation examines the victim/persecutor basis of Western morality in order to suggest how and why this binary may be used to interpret and rewrite cultural and historical narratives of oppression. Chapter 1 consists of a close reading of Plato's Gorgias in order to discuss the way that Western culture identifies and defines morality. Although in Plato's scheme of things, wrongdoers and the ones who suffer wrong are not as symbiotically related as victims and persecutors are in modern ethics, nevertheless Plato provides a skeletal binary which assigns moral authority to the victim and moral condemnation to the victimizer. Plato not only sets out to prove his claim that the one who commits a wrong is always more wretched than the one who suffers from wrongdoing, he puts into place a rigid binary system wherein contradictions are evidence of moral corruption. ;Chapter 2 suggests that many of the current debates concerning linguistic indeterminism and moral relativity are similar to the debate between Socrates and the Sophists in Plato's Gorgias. In addition to tracing the connections between Plato's concept of wrongdoing and postmodernism's critique of Enlightenment philosophy, chapter 2 examines what happens to concepts of morality when gender is added to the equation. Some feminists feel it is possible to borrow the skepticism of postmodernism in order to deconstruct the negative depictions of women without necessarily abandoning the binary construction of morality which makes political resistance possible. ;Because postmodernism reveals the subjective agenda of objective philosophies and theories, the binary distinctions of high and low culture become blurred. Consequently, postmodern theory provides a rationale and an impetus for observing and analyzing popular culture. Chapter 3 explores how and why it is possible for some contemporary movies to depict women persecuting men by inviting or compelling them to employ the violence that is all too often used to physically oppress women