Cartesian Dualism and Postmodern Elements in "Cloud 9"

I was really interested in our discussion of Cartesian Dualism in class on Monday. Amelia Jones writes in the Introduction to Body Art: Performing the Subject, "Body art is viewed here as a set of performative practices that, through such intersubjective engagement, instantiate the dislocation or decentering of the Cartesian subject of modernism" (1). I had learned about Cartesian dualism in the past but never thought to apply it here, but it is all over Cloud 9. Most inherently it is in the way that Churchill sets up the play. There are different settings for both acts, and the characters are played by actors who appear to be different than their characters, just so that Churchill can make an argument. This juxtaposition of the mind of a woman depicted by the body of a man, for example, complicates the story, but makes a broader argument about the performance as a whole. Jones continues in her introduction, "This dislocation is, I believe the most profound transformation constitutive of what we have to call postmodernism" (1). I learned about postmodernism in an English class in high school, but I have not thought much about it since. Once again, it totally applies here. Cloud 9 is postmodern in that it plays with the relationship between the actor and the character in a way that we would not have otherwise thought about.