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continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory (Foucault, “History of Sexuality”
144).
Tinker takes the role of a voyeur gazing on its patients for whom he performs as the doctor He regulates manners and punish inhabitants of the institutions severely whenever they attempt to reveal an act of love. The brutal punishments by the hand of Tinker are the projections that point to his repression of his true desires felt towards Grace. Tinker does not often tend to kill, but correct:
Tinker I'm not going to kill either of you.
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especially on Carl who does not hesitate to show acts of love towards Rod but punished severely for them. As the rituals of dismemberment in Carl’s corporeal correction continues, any act of love or compassion outside of the heteronormative gender economy is met with extreme form of violence by Tinker:
Tinker is watching.
He lets Carl finish what he is writing, then goes to him and reads it.
He takes Carl by the arms and cuts off his hands.
Tinker leaves.
Carl tries to pick up his hands - he can't, he has no hands
Rod goes to Carl
He picks up the severed left hand and takes off the ring he put there.
He reads the message written in the mud (Kane, “Cleansed” 23).
The homosexual love threatens the inherent nature of the appropriate sexual relation as part of the binary gender system thus it must be severely punished “since anal and oral sex among men clearly establishes certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the hegemonic order, male homosexuality would … constitute a site of danger and pollution, prior to and regardless of the cultural presence of AIDS” (Butler, “Gender Trouble” 168).
Michel Foucault traces the genealogy of power in his works, focusing on the distinction between a non-authoritative power - a power that is not enforced by law or state apparatuses in traditional sense- and what he calls power/knowledge that is governed by a naturally circular and encompassing “discourse” in the creation of the subject. For Foucault, discourse as a circular phenomenon in imposing on subjects’ behaviour and not
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to mention thinking processes creates power/knowledge, which in turn forms identity. In relation to gender, this power/knowledge has a regulatory effect on the subject in terms of imposing a binary logic of gender norms, out of which the abnormal is born as a consequence of being cast outside of such heteronormative matrix. Carl as a homosexual resident of the institution is heavily beaten and progressively amputated for not conforming to the heteronormative mode of production demanded by the patriarchal order. The violent response of such order against non-conforming members of the society are exemplified through “the voices” who obey the orders of Tinker: “Tinker holds up his arm and the beating stops. He drops his arm. The beating resumes” (Kane, “Cleansed”
10). Carl and Rod as a homosexual couple threaten the boundaries of the heteronormative sexual mode of production. The reproductive economy of the gender binary system would be rendered obsolete as the biopower imposes the fact that an “encounter with the totally
“other” [connoting to homosexual relationships] always signifying death” (Irigaray 24).
As for Cleansed, this signification of death is a symbolic one as is apparent in the rituals of dismemberment to which Carl is subjugated. Carl first loses the tongue followed by hands and feet. The brutal ritual of cutting off the tongue is an act done towards the erasing of the discourse on the homosexual love outside of the heteronormative gender economy, as Carl has always been open to talk of his love towards Rod throughout the play until he loses his tongue. Through these rituals, the audience witnesses the coerciveness of the heteronormative order in its most violent form. What the ideology at work does is eliminating and removing the power of speech and discourse as the very possibility of a discourse around the homosexual love, represented by Carl and Rod in the play, means the possibility of a resistance against the coercive forces of the binary gender matrix. In other words, what the ideology does through the deployment of Tinker followed by his brutal actions is eliminating the discourse out of the equation that discourse creates power/knowledge and in turn power/knowledge creates identity.
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Carl and Rod in the play express their love through a discourse that resists the heteronormativity of gender. Eliminating the discourse is thus a pivotal task of the ideology that surpasses Tinker but nevertheless makes him an instrument of brutal corporeal corrections. In the deployment of such ideology that conceives eliminating the discursive power of the abject love in the form of same-sex as well as incest love, Tinker first cuts out Carl’s tongue, hands, feet and penis but also mutes Grace by techniques of domination such as electrocution. However, as every character goes under a subjectification, Tinker is not resistant to it at all since as if this ubiquitous change in identity the other inhabitants are subjugated to leads Tinker to re-evaluate his own.
Tinker’s subjectification is evident in the epiphanic moment of the passionate love scene with the unknown woman and it would be wrong to see him as a mere brute at the deployment of ideology. Tinker begins to function outside of this ideology and its impositions by becoming a mechanic of non-subjectification in the merging of Grace/Graham that defies gender. As Delgado-García notes, Tinker is not an instigator only for the deployment of the heteronormative order since the ideology at work in the campus imposes punishment “irrespective of identities, desires, or behaviours: Graham’s addiction to heroin, Grace’s incestuous love for her brother, Carl and Rod’s dispute over the necessity of marriage, Robin’s heterosexual desire for Grace, and the unnamed Woman’s exposure of her body” (234). In this respect, Tinker is an ambiguous character like Grace. He is betwixt and between the employment of ideology and an urge of compassion and love as opposed to it. The frictions in his identity are observed in his interactions with the unknown woman in the peep-show booth:
…
Tinker What you doing here?