Gender Honestly

    To be honest, the beginning of Schechner's article (part 2) blew my mind. I had previously learned that at least in communication, men and women really didn't communicate all that different (at least thats what my Communication 225 Professor told me); but thinking about how sexes perform, or rather how gender performs versus what is really being said blew my mind and shed a different light on Churchill's "Cloud 9" text.

    I really liked the idea that "...gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again." This idea for me means that gender is like a coat hanger. There is a certain frame given to clothes once hanged which the hanger determines, but the clothes can be as unique on the hanger as they want. The same thing applies to performance of gender. There are certain, 'facial-displays, gestures, walks, and erotic behaviors" that are stereotyped or labeled as male or female, but to be a living person, one must add their individual selves to those roles. The confusion then comes when the coat hanger of gender is changed to be a different sex but still carries and performs those gender traits. This happens exceedingly a lot in the play, "Cloud 9". Betty in Act one, by sexual birth decided a man, performs female traits as Clive's submissive wife. While Betty in Act Two, still named to be a women, and now by sex a woman, plays around with male gender traits, such as chasing independence, freedom and a new masculine-like sexuality, unbound by a dominate man in her life.

    In the article, I also found it very interesting that to "get a man" and female is encouraged to match her male stud counterpart, very much like the relationship of Clive and Betty. Females are encouraged too "match his energy level" and the article continues to promise that, "it will only take a few minutes for a man to make up his mind that you're just like him. Once you've established that, you can be yourself." This befuddles me as why it is in the man's court to call the shots. Why are women called to conform to be of the man's liking, rather than men trade there cool-guy attitudes for ones of sensitivity. Edward is the example of such a man, and he gets pressure from women and men characters in the play to change which is interesting. Perhaps that is why he decides he is in fact a Lesbian.

     I do now see the fact that current shows and play today have an undercurrent of "normative heterosexuality that is a major tool for enforcing a partiacal, phallcentric social order" as Professor Renzi mentioned in class on Monday. "Cloud 9" definitely challenges our mind with its mixed up or perhaps more natural way of casting characters. I hope we can discuss this more in class as the lines between gender and performance and original sexuality and what is original are blurring for me a little.