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In her last and posthumously published play  4.48 Psychosis , Sarah Kane considerably diverges from the dramatic style that she adopted in her early plays such as  Blasted  and  Phaedra’s Love . As the play does not provide specific information about the number and identity of the character(s), the audience needs to depend on the fragmented narratives presented in the play to get a sense of the identity of the voice(s). Yet, the function of these narratives is not to mark the effectiveness of language to construct characters’ identities. On the contrary, they challenge the capabilities of language by introducing a gap between the way a character perceives his/her body and the way his/her body is perceived by others. Particularly the ambiguity regarding the sex of the character(s) results from this gap between different perceptions and language (which already makes a he/she distinction in describing a person’s sex) proves helpless to convey the identities of the voices in the play. At this point, 4.48  Psychosis  puts forth a new approach to violence in in-yer-face theatre, which conventionally depicts overt physical and sexual acts and suffering on stage. The play emphasizes that it is the clash between the experienced world and the ‘objective’ world that brings about violence. The articulation of self-perception (in this case, sexual self-perception) turns into a painful process for the character(s). This process reveals itself through the tension between the medical narratives, which objectify a psychotic patient, and fragmented voices (which seemingly belong to the patient). In this paper, I will first examine the play’s treatment of different perceptions with respect to the concept of relationality propounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s  Phenomenology of Perception . Then, giving specific references to Helen Cixous’s “Aller à la mer,” I will explore the play’s problematization of language in the depictions of sexual self-perception and of character(s)’ bodily experience.

“Born in the Wrong Body:” The Articulation of Sexual Self-Perception in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis