Pipers "Passing" and Other Imagined Internal/External Consistency

While reading through Chapter 5 of Schechner's Performance Studies: An Introduction, I was particularly struck by the section exploring the life experience and  performance art of Adrian Piper. Her experience as a light - skinned African American woman has led her to conclude " there is no 'right' way of managing the issue of my racial identity, no way that will not alienate or offend someone, because my designated racial identity itself exposes the very concept of racial classification as the offensive and irrational instrument of racism that it is"( Schechner 136).

Piper's reflection sheds light on our society's widespread fabrication of coherence between the "natural" classification and appearances purportedly resulting from this nature. Because we often assume race is "in the blood," we hold the accompanying assumption that one's external traits reflect this internal truth (135). It's funny that these associations become quasi-scientific, or are often regarded as pieces of a puzzle that match up in a correct way when they are, in fact, associations which disregard science altogether. Science tells us that there is no genetic basis of race differentiation and that intersex births regularly occur, similarly compromising the binary system of gender. Yet the elaborate associations between clearly differentiated biological sexes and races and the respective appearances and performances which "naturally" accompany these internal "truths" make the scientific impossible.   Piper's relation of experience made me interrogate how I  personally think about the interplay between race and racial performance and biological sex and gender.

Churchill's use of male characters to play female roles and the reverse seems to challenge not only idealized gender roles, but the sense that there is coherency between sex and gender. We are forced to  consider why someone who appears to be biologically male acting out a version of femininity is so strange and what assumptions we are making when we register this apparent disconnect. When Churchill notes Betty is played by "a man," I immediately considered biological sex, but I think its worth thinking about whether this thinking is reductive.