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4

Section A.

Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine

Review of the Play

One of Churchill’s most prominent plays is Cloud Nine which was first performed in 1979. It was performed several times in many different countries. In 1982 it won the Obi award after its

New York production. Gender and class oppression and sexual politics have been touched upon in the play. The problems of race oppression and colonialism are another concern in the play. In this play Churchill is believed to have “‘traced the legacy of colonial regimes’ sexual and racial oppression in contemporary life” (Reinelt, On Feminist 27). To draw attention to her ideas, Caryl

Churchill has employed techniques such as cross-gender and cross-race casting. The play is written in two acts, and offers an exploration of sexual politics. The first act has five scenes and the second act has four scenes. Act One is set in Africa where a man and his family are living in colonial times. This setting can be viewed as a critique of the Victorian era. In Act Two, the same family is cast, however, the place is London, the year is 1979 and the characters have aged only by twenty five years.

According to Aston, “Cloud Nine has mainly attached critical interest on account of its gender role reversal and cross-race casting” (Feminist Views 29). Cloud Nine represents character attitudes and the changes that occurred towards sexual behavior in the hundred years from 1879 to 1979. Janelle Reinelt believes that theatrically “Churchill could represent the presence of the past in the lives, minds, and bodies of living human beings” (Politics of Style 183). 127

The play is different, both, in time and setting and is performed in two separate acts. Each actor plays one role in Act One and a different role in Act Two. The only exception is Victoria’s daughter, Cathy; her role is played by a male actor in Act Two. They have aged only by twenty five years while about one hundred years of time have passed.

Clive and his family are living in Africa to take care of the Queen’s Properties. The main members of his family are Betty, his wife, and their two children Edward and Victoria. Edward is nine years old and Victoria, whose name reflects Clive’s faithfulness to the Empire, is two years old. The other persons who live with them are the governess, Ellen and Betty’s mother,

Maud and their black servant, Joshua. This company is later joined by Mrs. Saunders who is a wealthy widow from their neighborhood, and Harry, an adventurer. In the play we see that Clive is sexually attracted to Mrs. Saunders and makes advances to her, while his wife Betty has a fancy for Harry. Harry, on the other hand, is gay, and has secret sexual relations with the servant

Joshua as well as Edward, Clive’s son. We also find that Ellen, the governess is in love with

Betty who is unable to comprehend her sincere passion. The act ends with a gathering of all the men on the verandah where they discuss the growing tension with the native insurgents. There have been no white casualties so far but the British Army is on the way to help quash the rebellion. Clive, however, has burned a village and Harry protests against this.

Then Clive talks to them about the nature of fellowship amongst men. Harry misunderstands what Clive intends to say and makes a pass at him. This horrifies Clive who is offended by

Harry’s homosexuality. He wants to cure Harry of his ‘disease’. In trying to do so, he attempts to marry Harry to Mrs. Saunders but she refuses the offer. As the decision maker and master of the household, he then forces Harry and the governess, Ellen to marry each other. The marriage is an act to save the Empire from a sin which could destroy everything and he has no consideration for 128 their feelings and desires. The final scene in Act One is the wedding celebrations. While Clive is giving a speech, Joshua is seen raising a gun. He aims at Clive and though Edward (Clive’s son) sees this, he does not warn his father about the impending danger.

In Act Two the setting is that of a park in present day London. The year is 1979 (a century has passed). Some of the characters of Act One reappear in Act Two but they have aged only by

25 years. Betty has separated from Clive. Their son Edward is now openly gay. His partner is

Gerry. Their daughter Victoria is married to Martin who is overbearing. Unable to put up with him, Victoria is upset with and distant from her husband. She starts a lesbian relationship with

Lin. Later in the Act, Gerry leaves Edward who discovers that he is bisexual. By late summer, we see that Victoria, Lin and Edward are living together. One summer night, Victoria, Lin and

Edward assemble in the park to hold a ceremony for a goddess of sex. Within moments, Lin’s dead brother appears to them and tells them about his experiences while serving in the army. As soon as her brother disappears, Lin collapses. Later in the play, Gerry and Edward sort out their differences and make a plan of a date with each other. Betty, after she has a discussion with

Gerry finally accepts the fact that her son is gay. In the final scene, Betty returns from Africa and embraces the new Betty.

Churchill’s Subversion of

Gender Identities and Gender Roles

Judith Butler is a renowned gender theorist and feminist theorist in the critical and theoretical fields. I would like to employ her ideas about gender theory to analyse Cloud Nine. Here I wish to argue about gender performativity and performance, drag or cross- dressing and sexual politics by using Judith Butler’s ideas on gender. 129

When Simon de Beauvoir stated, “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” it seems it was an early attempt to address the cultural construction of gender (qtd. in Butler, 111).

Butler asks questions that perhaps Simon de Beauvoir herself might not have considered or intended: “who is this “one” who does the becoming? Is there some human who becomes its gender at some point in time? How does one “become” a gender? What is the moment or mechanism of gender construction?”(Gender Trouble 111). Butler says that the body is not a

“mute facticity” (Gender Trouble 129).That means there is no body prior to cultural inscription and “sex as well as gender can be performatively reinscribed in ways that accentuate its factitiousness (i.e. its constructedness) rather than its facticity (i.e. the fact of its existence)”(Salih 55). Thus, When de Beauvoir states that “woman” is not a natural fact but actually a historical idea, she emphasizes on the difference between sex as a biological facticity, and gender as a cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity. Butler argues by that distinction, to be female is a meaningless facticity, but to be a woman would mean the process of becoming a woman, to force the body to adapt to a historical idea of ‘woman’ so that it becomes a cultural sign. In fact, Simon de Beauvoir has not denied the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body, but reconceived them as distinct from the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings. Elaborating on de Beauvoir statement, Butler writes:

to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical

idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in

obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated

corporeal project.(Performative Acts 522) 130

So, Butler challenges the sex/gender distinction and develops her theory of gender performativity. She argues that gender is performative rather than natural. She believes that gender identity is socially constituted. She highlights gender performativity and says that

“gendered and sexed identities are performative” (Salih 10). In the article “critically queer”,

Butler defines gender performativity as follows:

gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a regulatory regime of gender

differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social

constraints, taboos, prohibitions, threats of punishment operate in the ritualized repetition

of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and

destabilization. There is no subject who precedes or enacts this repetition of norms. (21)

Indeed, Butler refers to de Beauvoir’s prominent statement to explain that “woman is something we do rather than something we are” (Salih, 10). Butler proposes the idea of performativity by declaring, “Gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed” (Gender Trouble 25). Butler argues, “The gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts that constitute its reality, and if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is a function of a decidedly public and social discourse” (Gender Trouble 136). Gender identities are constructed and constituted by language, which means that there is no gender identity that precedes language. As Butler argues it is not that an identity “does” discourse or language, but on the contrary language and discourse “do” an identity or gender. Culturally intelligible subjects are not the causes of discourses but rather they are the effect or the result of such discourses. 131

Hence we find that “I” is a signifying practice which does not exist outside language. Gender identity, in this sense, is performative. (Salih, On Judith Butler 56)

She draws a parallel between gender and performativity. Butler asserts that gender identity is constituted by the manner in which people perform masculine or feminine roles which they have learned from the beginning. For instance, “acting feminine” does not mean that the person is feminine, it means that the person is creating the “act” of being feminine, it is not natural feminine. Such behavior is the performative aspect of gender. In other words, though it is not the natural quality of the person, man or woman continues to perform according to their sexuality.

As Salih mentions:

Butler is not suggesting that gender identity is a performance, since that would presuppose

the existence of a subject or an actor who is doing that performance. Butler refutes this

notion by claiming that the performance pre-exists the performer, and this counter-

intuitive, apparently impossible argument has led many readers to confuse performativity

with performance. (10)

The terms performativity and performance seem to overlap at times and make some confusion. It is essential to remember that, as pointed out by Sara Salih, the concept of gender

“performativity” is not the same as the concept of gender performance. Thus, she makes a distinction between the two terms. In Gender Trouble, we find that Butler tries to give a very specific definition of the differences between performativity and performance as a part of theatre.

She asserts that while performance assumes a preexisting subject, performativity challenges the very idea of the subject. She emphasizes that performativity is different from performance when she argues that: 132

In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that it performed is the ‘truth’ of

gender; performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the

latter consist in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer

and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’...

The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake (Butler, Bodies 234)

Hence, it is Butler’s contention that performativity refers to the manner in which people play out their genders everyday by ‘acting’ the parts which they play. They believe that this is natural behavior but instead, it is performative. On the other hand, performance refers to the destabilization of such performativity. This idea can refer to Churchill’s strategy of drag and cross-dressing in Cloud Nine, a theatrical device by which men can wear women’s clothing and act as women on stage and vice versa. This means that gender is not real but imaginary. The use of drag has facilitated the amalgamation of performance with gender unnatural identity. Drag subverts the assumption of coherence as well as originality of “heterosexuality”. Butler debates that drag contributes to creating a “unified picture of “woman”, as it reveals the fabrication of gender. So, Drag reveals the counterfeit structure of gender itself in contingency as well as in imitating gender. Hence, drag seeks to challenge heteronormativity by establishing all gender as parody.

In Cloud Nine the first act introduces Victorian colonialists who represent a rigid conventional patriarchal system, and male-centered world. In the opening scene of the play

Clive, who is the patriarch, decision-maker and masculine stereotype stands surrounded by his wife, children, mother-in-law, and servants. He introduces each character to the spectator.

This is my family. Though far from home

We serve the Queen wherever we may roam 133

I am a father to the natives here,

And father to my family so dear. (251)

Apollo Amoko in an essay “Casting Aside Colonial Occupation: Intersections of Race, Sex, and

Gender in Cloud Nine and Cloud Nine Criticism” asserts his view on Clive’s statement:

This statement exposes not only a multiply oppressive structure, but also the interrelation

between the colonization of Africa (and African bodies) and (metaphorically) that of white

women and children within a patriarchal structure. The social order constructed reveals

itself to be white in its dominant racial ideology, masculinist in its dominant gender

ideology, and heterosexist and monogamous in its dominant sexual ideology. (153)

Male-domination is clearly portrayed in the first act. Clive symbolizes order and heteronormative organization when he forces his patriarchal values through authoritative control, not only over every member of his family but also by extending it to the two visitors, Harry

Bagley and Mrs. Saunders as well as the native tribes. Churchill uses her most powerful strategy, cross gender casting, to expose the cultural construction of women’s bodies and feminity. This strategy foregrounds the ideological forces which shape both gender and representation.

Churchill theatricalizes woman’s construction within the terms of male hegemony by using a male actor to represent Betty. Betty plays the role of the ideal Victorian woman; she is an angel in the house, however, she does not seem as stereotypical as her mother, Maud, who believed that the world and the women were to be ordered and controlled by men. Betty believed that the sole purpose of her life was to be a dutiful wife who fulfilled her husband’s dreams and she waited for him and other men to make decisions for her without ever complaining. Betty’s stereotypical characteristic is evident in her behavior, language and the way she introduces herself when she says: 134

I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life

Is to be what he looks for in a wife.

I am a man’s creation as you see,

And what men want is what I want to be. (251)

Indeed, Betty is guilty of identifying herself with the patriarchal system and her response emphasizes this. She is typically the product of a male-centered world that considers women as nothing more than helpmates of men. Betty is literally constructed in Clive’s image. Clive also announces: “My wife is all I dreamt a wife should be, / And everything she is she owes to me”

(251). These words show how Betty is oppressed and dominated by Clive in patriarchal system.

The same power structure is seen when Clive goes out to introduce Joshua, his African servant, and Edward, his son. The character of Joshua is played by a white actor who steps forward and announces, “As you can see, what white men want is what I want to be” (525). In addition, a female actor plays the role of Edward. Churchill’s desire to foreground Clive’s way of imposing traditional male behavior on Edward is the reason that this casting choice was made. Though, in

Edward’s case, the patriarchal project meets with more difficulty. Clive does not lose any opportunity to emphasize what masculinity should mean and how it should be practiced. In

Scene Two of the first Act Betty tells Clive that he has hurt Edward’s feelings. His response to her is: “A boy has no business having feelings” (266). On another occasion, when he finds

Edward playing with his sister’s doll, he reacts abruptly:

CLIVE: What are you holding?

BETTY: It’s Victoria’s doll. What are you doing with it Edward?

EDWARD: Minding her.

CLIVE: No, we had you with Victoria’s doll once before, Edward. … let Ellen mind the 135

doll. ELLEN: Come, and give it to me.

EDWARD: Don’t pull her about. Vicky’s very fond of her. She likes me to have her.

CLIVE: Yes, it’s manly of you, Edward, to take care of your little sister. We’ll say no more about it. (257) Edward struggles to live up to the expectations of his father. This sentiment is rightly captured in his introductory lines: “what father wants I’d dearly like to be. /I find it rather hard as you can see.” Moreover, Clive advises his son and gives him explanations about what a man’s duty is when he says:

CLIVE: You should always respect and love me, Edward, not for myself, I may not

deserve it, but as I respected and loved my own father, because he was my father. Through

our father, we love our queen and our God, Edward. Do you understand? It is something

men understand. (276)

It is not only Betty but also Maud, her mother, who reinforces the patriarchal system with their own complicities in that. As Churchill portrayed in Act One, scene three, Harry and Clive are managing by overseeing the flogging of their African domestic servants while Joshua,

Clive’s loyal and senior domestic servant, flogs the other African workers. As Joshua reported to

Clive, these servants were not “trustworthy” for “whispering” “visiting their people”, “going out at night” and “carrying knives”. Under patriarchy, acts such as flogging are constructed as male acts and so the women and children must be shielded from their inclemency. Hence, throughout the duration of this heinous act, the women and children are kept indoors. The women embody and perform their allocated gender roles, thereby significantly embodying and reinforcing their oppression. Maud says: “The men will do it in the proper way… We have our own part to play”

(273); “Luckily this household has a head. I am Squamish myself. But luckily Clive is not” 136

(274). Apollo Amoko argues about this scene: “The ‘part’ the domesticated women have to

‘play’ is the consistence reproduction, in a deeply theatrical sense, of docile, obedient bodies useful in support of the colonial economy” (154).

The traditional ideologies and roles of the patriarch have lost its meaning and value in the final quarter of the twentieth century. This is evident by Clive’s absence in the Second act. Act Two most dramatically reveals the uncertainties and complications in a period of sexual evolution where everyone is trying on new attitudes, new roles and new practices. As Churchill notes in the preface of the play:

The first act, like the society it shows, is male dominated and firmly structured. In the

second act, more energy comes from the women and the gays. The uncertainties and

changes of society, and a more feminine and less authoritarian feeling, are reflected in the

looser structure of the act. (246)

Churchill tries to undermine the pervasive sexual difference by having created a distinction between the first act which is “male dominated” and the second, “more femimine” act which is dominated by women and gays. By presenting different forms of desire, the gay and lesbian characters in Cloud Nine disrupt what Butler calls “heterosexual matrix”. However, they are still influenced by dominant constructions of gender. In Act One, the homosexual characters like

Ellen and Harry feel compelled to hide their desire. This highlights the pressure of these constructions. Act Two shows much greater openness about homosexuality and yet the gay and lesbian characters seem exceptions to the rule in the world of the play. Both these aspects of the play serve to highlight the continued marginalization of homosexuality within the dominant discourse. Elin diamond argues, “Sexual identity in the hallowed institution of the Victorian 137 family is not ‘natural’ but is constituted by prevailing gender codes” (Refusing the Romanticism

277).

Lin and Victoria make conscious efforts to break away from stereotypical gender roles, however, they are obligated by the heterosexual matrix. Lin encourages her daughter, Cathy, to play with guns and to “kill” her playmates, rather than just hit them. In doing so, she attempts to challenge conventional gender behavior; however, it seems that she fails to reverse traditional gender roles. She is unable to escape from a power structure based upon binary opposition and sexual difference. Lin’s confusion about how to raise her daughter is foregrounded by the fact that Cathy’s character is played by a man. Cathy is drawn to the typical gender behavior she sees among her playmates, despite Lin’s child rearing efforts. In Lin’s words: “I give Cathy guns, my mum didn’t give me guns. I dress her in jeans, she wants to wear dresses. I don’t know. I can’t work it out, I don’t want to” (303).

Churchill in Cloud Nine demonstrates that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, Performative Acts 519).

Churchill interrogates gender stereotypes and clarifies that sex and gender is not natural but socially constructed. Role reversal is one way to prove this concept. In role reversals, actors of different races and genders play roles of characters that are different from their own race or gender. Hence, some characters play parts which are unnatural to them. Often these roles are enforced upon them by the society within which they live.

The instability of genders has been portrayed well by Churchill. As we can see, many characters like Edward, Betty, Cathy, or even Victoria (played by a doll) display the performativity of gender rather than its performance or naturalness. In all cases, we can see 138

“gender is parodic” (Salih 66). Churchill’s different strategies “underscore the fictionality of an ontologically stable and coherent gender identity” (Goodman 69).

Drag and cross-dressing is the strategy that Churchill uses to destabilize gender identity and can be considered as an activity which focuses on the untrue nature of gender. It suggests the possibility of a concept of gender identity which does not work to regulate and normalize the male/ female bounds. Butler confirms, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingencies” (Gender Trouble 137). Drag denaturalizes a set of relations between sex, gender and desire. Contrastingly,

“heteronormativity” considers relation between sex, gender and desire as natural. Hence, Drag is effectively, the opposite of “heteronormativity”.

Churchill’s Cloud Nine represents “being female constituted a cultural performance rather than a natural fact. Naturalness constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex” (Butler, Gender Trouble viii).

Drag emphasizes that gender is unfixed and instable and, therefore, merely the shadow of reality.

Moya Lloyd argues: “When drag successfully challenges heteronormativity … it reveals all gender as parody” (Loyd 44).

As mentioned earlier, Betty, the mother of the family, is played by a man while Edward, the son, is played by a woman. These are examples of drag. Other examples of such identities are

Victoria, the daughter, played by a doll in Act One, and Cathy, the four year old girl in Act Two, who is played by the same character who played the role of Clive, the patriarch of Act One.

As Janelle Reinelt’s debates, “The celebrated cross-casting in the first act set up the terms of identity struggles” (Politics of Style 183). Butler asserts that the identities that are expressed by words, actions, gestures and enactments are “fabrications that are manufactured and sustained 139 through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (Gender Trouble 136). They are “generally construed” and thus are “performative”. Cloud Nine illustrates the performativity of characters’ genders as they are displayed unnaturally and also encourages the spectators to question gender stereotypes. Cloud Nine represents, “Butler’s theory is one in which sex, sexuality, desire, gender, and the body are all regarded as discursively constituted. In other words, none of these features is treated as a natural fact of human existence” (Lloyd 30). 140

Section B.

Caryl Churchill: A Mouthful of Birds

Review of the Play

In 1986 Caryl Churchill collaborated with David Lan to create A Mouthful of Birds for the

Joint Stock Theatre Group. For the purpose, ’ was chosen as the pre-text.

Euripides’ tragedy, The Bacchae, relates the tale of a group of Theban women who give up their families and responsibilities to celebrate Dionysos, the God of ecstasy and intoxication in the mountains. In A Mouthful of Birds together with the enactments of violent behavior and monologues, the “Possession” scenes give all actors double identities drawn from the Euripides text. Comparing The Bacchae with A Mouthful of Birds Raima Evan in “Women and Violence in

A Mouthful of Birds” says:

The ancient play makes clear that Agave is deceived by Dionysos; she and her women

followers are pawns in Dionysos’s game—his lust for revenge against . Given

that the women of Thebes in Euripides’s text are victims of a patriarchal social structure, it

is imperative that feminist critics look closely at Churchill and Lan’s re-thinking of the

play to see if the violence in A Mouthful of Birds truly frees the women or if it only makes

visible the extent of their oppression. (265)

Ian Spink choreographed the play. The play comprises of two acts in three sections: an introduction, an ‘undefended day’, and the aftermath. There are more than thirty-two short scenes combining drama and dance to depict the lives and stories of the seven characters: a

Switchboard Operator, a Mother, an Acupuncturist, a Vicar, a Businessman, an Unemployed man and a Secretary. At the introduction, each of the characters in some way performs 141

‘mainstream’ roles. However, as the play unfolds and the ‘undefended’ day arrives, each one shows an undercurrent of violence. An undefended day is a time when the body can be possessed by a spirit, or even, an addiction, a love, or intense desire as is seen in the play.

Yvonne, an acupuncturist, becomes possessed by her addiction to alcohol and takes on the role of a butcher. Her need for violence is coupled with her talent for identifying body parts.

When she changes from acupuncturist to butcher, her needle gets replaced by a knife and the animal victim seems to satisfy her drive for control. She also eludes the gender stereotype saying, “Many people are surprised to see a woman behind this counter.”

Marcia, originally from Trinidad, plays the role of a switchboard operator who, in her

‘undefended day’ becomes a medium. Sybil, a “spirit from the white upper-middle classes,” takes possession of Marcia’s body. (17) She also acts as a conduit for another spirit called Baron

Sunday. Ultimately, Marcia loses her power and Sybil takes complete control of Marcia who finds herself adrift on the ocean hoping that she’ll “never wake to see the sky without a star.”

She becomes the outsider and always finds a place, but never a steady one. Finally she is released to a place on the ocean where she belongs and does not belong.

Lena’s husband is a dominating, oppressive and violent man who indulges in freeway competition. Lena kills her child with the hope to escape from a spirit that says negative things about her and her husband. However, the spirit doesn’t leave as it is her permanent demon. In the end, she realizes her capacity to nurture or destroy and becomes a caregiver for the elderly.

Churchill and Lan present before us Lena, who, like many other women, is both the victim and the perpetrator of violence. Lena suffers from the Medea syndrome: fears of women as nurturers and destroyers. Based on Euripides’ Medea, Bob Wilson illustrated this syndrome in his 142

‘Deafman Glance’ where a mother brings her child a glass of milk, and then kills him with a knife.

Doreen is a secretary who is looking for adventures like the time she spent in a night sleeping on the grass by a canal. She gets possessed by the spirit of Agave and slashes a neighbor’s face on her undefended day and subsequently dismembers Pentheus. She develops telekinesis by which she can make objects fly and also bounce a person off walls. Even at the end of the play, she is seething with restlessness. The play was in fact, named after her, “It seems that my mouth is full of birds which I crunch between my teeth. Their feathers, their blood and broken bones are choking me. I carry on my work as a secretary” (53).

Derek is an unemployed man who works out and spends most of his time building his body.

Derek who is possessed by Pentheus threatens violence against Dionysos. Derek also experiences a sex change as Herculine Barbin, a French hermaphrodite from the nineteenth century takes possession of him. In addition, Doreen who has become Agave, dismembers Derek who is also Pentheus. This transformation brings him great satisfaction and the comfort of being

“in love with a lion-tamer from Kabul” (52). The original Pentheus died after he was dismembered; however, he gains a new body and a new life.

Paul is a businessman who has fallen in love with a pig. The pig however, is killed in Paul’s own slaughterhouse and he is unable to save it. There is a touch of magic realism when he rescues the ‘corpse’, peels off its wrapper to find that it comes alive and dances with him. At the end of the play, we see that his fable ends with loss. He is shown as an alcoholic who is awaiting his potential love. He is left with nothing but his dreams and continual possession by his addiction. 143

Dan, who is a vicar in Anglican Church, is the seventh ambivalent character. He is a serial killer. A prison guard is seen quoting his confession: “My plan was that they should all be good deaths. Clean, effortless, without tension or pain. To die of pleasure, like a young boy slipping through the mirror of a mountain stream. These are the deaths the earth needs to grow strong”

(25). He dances people to their death by choreographing for them their innermost pleasure. When he is arrested, the police are unable to recognize his gender. Dan is aptly seen as , for a while. By the end of the play, Dan’s garden is growing very well. He is in his garden and says that though his garden was barren before, now it is green.

The play has several dances throughout its duration. Dionysos puts on dances at the start as well as at the end of the play to seduce the audience into a sensual experience. One of the other dances is the Fruit Ballet, in which imaginary fruit are wrenched apart and eaten. Dan is seen dancing his victims to their death. Dionysos 1 and Dionysos 2 clothe Pentheus in his priestly robes to prepare him to be sacrificed. Both the Dionysos dance a preview of his ecstatic death.

Then there is the dance of Paul and his beloved pig. Yet another dance is the “Extreme

Happiness” dance. (33)

The play voices Caryl Churchill’s rejection of the stereotype of the nonviolent female and claims that there is a “danger of polarizing men and women into the traditional view that men are naturally more violent and so have no reason to change.” (Fitzsimmons, File On 77). The women in Churchill’s play are permitted to be violent. It is this violence that brings them fulfillment in their professional lives. Dionysos facilitates the process of self-discovery. Pentheus is violently punished in Euripides’ The Bacchae because he refused to recognize the god (Dionysos) in the city. In A Mouthful of Birds, the characters experience violence as though it is a tunnel passage to self-discovery. 144

The Bacchae that Churchill chose as the pre-text, adheres to the Aristotelian rules of closure, i.e it has a conclusion, an end. However, A Mouthful of Birds, though it is precise in its form, does not have an end. On the contrary, it offers a new beginning. In its circular structure, the play begins and ends with the dance of Dionysos which goes on for eternity. In the older play, we see death; a reminder to us of our mortality while in the new play we see life and the endless possibilities it offers. It is essentially a parable about women; their escapes, their violence and their journey to self-discovery. The plays disrupt dominant constructions of sex, gender, and desire as well.

Undoing Gender: Churchill’s Subversion of

Gender Regulations and Norms

Here I would like to employ Judith Butler’s theoretical standpoint on ‘gender regulation’ which is discussed in her book Undoing Gender (2004) to analyses of A Mouthful of Birds. The problematic definition of regulation as an institutionalized dynamics that regularizes persons, construct them as gendered subjects, disclose by Judith Butler. Early in her argument, she presents Foucaultian concepts of the ‘regulatory power’ which enables it to legislate and produce subjects. Butler begins speaking to the phrase “gender is a norm” and proceeds to define a norm as distinguishable from a rule or a law which gives an individual social intelligibility. Thus, on the basis of Michel Foucault’s concept, she argues that gender does not preexist regulation: but in fact, the regulatory power produces the gendered subject which is also shaped and subjectified by it:

regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that

subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect; and (2) to 145

become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought

into being as a subject precisely through being regulated. (Undoing 41)

Butler contravenes Foucault in some respects. She argues that if Foucaultian wisdom considers regulatory power as a certain broad historical characteristics which operate on both gender and other social and cultural norms, so “it seems that gender is but the instance of a larger regulatory operation of power” (Undoing 41). Butler claims “the regulatory apparatus that governs gender is one that is itself gender specific” (Undoing 41). She does not suggest that the regulation of gender is paradigmatic of regulatory power as such. But she is of the opinion that gender establishes a regulatory and disciplinary regime that is distinctively its own. Butler asserts that the norms which govern the regulations of gender should not only be interpreted as rules or laws. Instead they must be seen as that which determines social intelligibility and recognizes

“certain kinds of practices and actions” and thus “defining the parameters of what will and will not appear,” (Undoing 42) in the social sphere:

gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and

feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic,

and performative that gender assumes.(Undoing 42)

Further she says, “A norm operates within social practices as the implicit standard of normalization” (Undoing 41). Norms are not always explicit. Most often they are implicit when they function as the normalizing principle in social practice. In other words, they are difficult to read and only become discernibly apparent through their consequences. Hence, the question is raised -is there any way to disrupt and resist these norms? Butler writes:

Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-

gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that 146

naturalized binary. The conflation of gender with masculine/feminine, man/woman,

male/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to

forestall. (Undonig 42)

Moreover she claims: “Gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized, but gender might very well be the apparatus by which such terms are deconstructed and denaturalized” (Undoing 42).

She talks about two alternatives to the “gender blending” approach. Multiplicity of genders is the first alternative proposed. The second, (based on Lacan), is Luce Irigaray’s proposal.

Irigaray’s notion of gender refutes the masculine sex as “the one and only” on which other sexes are established. It attempts to break away from the quantitative description of gender: “The sex which is not one” is thus femininity understood precisely as what cannot be captured by number”

(Undoing 43). Butler also believes that “‘transgender’ is not exactly a third gender, but a mode of passage between genders, an interstitial and transitional figure of gender that is not reducible to the normative insistence on one or two”(Undoing 43).

In A Mouthful of Birds, Churchill and Lan subvert binary oppositions, staged a shifting,

“multiplication of genders” and reconceived gender as an unstable system that surpasses the concepts of feminine and masculine. By this they have disrupted what Butler calls the

“heterosexual matrix”. It is clear that Churchill rejects the idea of the body as a unified, closed and stable system. Instead, she directs us to think of the body as in-process, open and unstable.

Churchill focusses on disruption of male/female binary through her staging hermaphrodite character. In fact, Churchill and Lan, blurring binaries which are at the center of Western discourses: male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, self/other, white/black, etc. Churchill’s strategies problematize representation and the notion of visibility by making the body the site of 147 multiple meaning on stage. In the play A Mouthful of Birds, the dominant construction of gender and representation is challenged when the lives of seven people are changed forever by their experiences of possession, ecstasy and violence. By disrupting the realistic representation of the body in the play, Butler and Lan strategically dismantle and reconceive gender. So, lives of four men and three women have been portrayed before, during and after they experience “undefended days”. The play consists of three parts. The first part is an introduction of the characters and their circumstances. In the second part, the characters encounter their possessions. Part three has seven, post-posssession monologues which bring out the changes in the characters after they have undergone their experience with forces beyond their control.

A Mouthful of Birds extends The Bacchae’s challenge to patriarchal system but remains different from its pre-text to some extends. In The Bacchae Agave descends from the mountains, she realizes her crime and is exiled for denying Dionysos while the other women follow the god, thus reject gender conventions that limit woman within domestic sphere. Although The Bacchae challenged patriarchal system to some extent, yet some other aspects of the play reinscribe this system. But in A mouthful of Birds every single one of the seven characters reacts in one of the two ways. They reject their former way of life prior to the possession or choose to be a representative of the ongoing, impending possibility of another encounter with violence or ecstasy. The impact of A Mouthful of Birds is not restricted by conflicting commentary about the dominant discourse. “Possessed by AGAVE and the spirits of BACCHANTS”, we see that

Doreen and the other women experience a “moment of severe physical pleasure” while they are performing the dance of “Extreme Happiness” (34). In A Mouthful of Birds, Agave and her followers decide to abandon their old life and continue to stay on the mountain after the tearing of Pentheus. The characters reappear in their post-possession monologue; we find that their 148 experiences with possession have a direct and transformational impact on their lives. These changes have been influenced by the subversive forces. Amelia Howe Kritzer reads possession, arguing that “the experience of possession frees each of the characters from her or his artificially constructed self and allow for the possibility of new selves and new community” (Madness 134).

In A Mouthful of Birds we can see Dionysos enter into lives of a number of characters. The repetition of the god’s androgynous on stage is a strategy that suggests “gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary” (Butler, Undoing 42). Furthermore we see in the play

Dan and Derek get possessed by Dionysos and Herculine Barbin respectively. During the time of possession, both the men become androgynous and forsake their masculine identities which

“chart the play’s disruption of dominant constructions of sex, gender, and desire.” (Evan,

Women and Violence 264)

In an episode in Act Two entitled ‘Hurculine Barbin’ Churchill and Lan use a remarkable strategy for undermining sexual differences and norms. The scene is based on the memoirs of the nineteenth century French hermaphrodite and shows Derek possessed by Herculine Barbin. As

Herculine Barbin enters, “Played by a woman but dressed in the clothes of a Frenchman of the nineteenth century” (35), the scene challenges the sexual difference when Churchill and Lan use an interesting strategy to depict the character of Herculine Barbin. At the starting of the episode,

Herculine is narrating her/his story while she/he hands over objects from her/his past to Derek.

At this stage, they exhibit a body that appears men, Herculine, but speaks in the voice of a woman. Later, this is reversed and Herculine possesses the body of a woman but has the voice of a man. By the end of her/his monologue, Derek is wearing a petticoat and a laced shawl. She/he is either holding or wearing a rose, a book, a comb, a pair of scissors and a crucifix. This is the moment when Derek “sits in the Chair and becomes HERCULINE” (37). Derek, who is now 149

Herculine, repeats the monologue in exactly the same words as the first Herculine. During this second recital, the first Herculine takes the objects from him/her and “packed them into her suitcase” (37). The strategy is used again, wherein the spectator sees Herculine in a female body, gendered by dress and objects, but hears the voice of a male. Elin Diamond asserts, “his double identity is doubled and strikingly divisive, for sexual confusion is precisely what Pentheus struggles to eradicate” (Unmaking 96). Furthermore she declares: “Derek’s scene of possession is an ambitious and self-reflexive comment on the processes of representation” (Unmaking 96).

The notion of sexual difference is radically destabilized when the synchronization of body and voice is subverted. Moreover, the instability of the body is further underscored when the exact same monologue which was first said by a woman dressed as a man, is repeated, by a man dressed as a woman. Such a technique which is Churchill’s interest is known as cross gender casting and it subverts what Butler called “gender regulation’. Churchill and Lan make use of this strategy to depict that the body is pliant and in a state of constant change, while the word remains the same. A character cannot inherently belong to any sexual category if its gender is determined only by the presence or absence of a shawl, a rose, a petticoat. Without a doubt, this body, that simultaneously displays the characteristics of both sexual categories, throws into question the whole notion of stable sexual categories as they exist in binary relation to one another.

In the post-possession scene, we can see that Derek is happy with her/his own body.

However, the civil authorities of the real Herculine Barbin’s time made it impossible for him/her to live with his/her hermaphrodite body. So, in order to be accepted by the society of that time, he/she was forced to assume the masculine gender. She/he left her lover and her/his job, changed her/his name to Abel Barbin and finally committed suicide as she/he is forced to live as a man 150 and found this role unbearable. Here we see the effect of ‘regulatory power’ on Hurculine life.

Butler argues, “it is a form of social power that produces the intelligible field of subjects, and an apparatus by which the gender binary is instituted” (Undoing 48). Moreover, Butler by taking up a discourse between Ewald and Foucault, confirms, “the norm transforms constraints into a mechanism … [turning] the negative restraints of the juridical into the more positive controls of normalization” (Undoing 49). Elin Diamond brings forth the emotional and physical anguish as well as the social torment experienced by Herculine Barbin when there was forced detachment from the plenum of androgyny. “Sara’s body, my girl’s body, all lost, couldn’t you have stayed?”

(37). Especially her/his passage spoken by a woman, dressed as a man intensifies this separation more. “Hermaphrodite, the doctors were fascinated how to define this body, does it fascinate you, it doesn’t fascinate me, let it die” (35) (Unmaking 202). Indeed, I am reminded of Butler’s words when I read hermaphrodite Hurculine Barbin’s monologues.

One important sense of regulation, then, is that persons are regulated by gender, and that

this sort of regulation operates as a condition of cultural intelligibility for any person. To

veer from the gender norm is to produce the aberrant example that regulatory powers

(medical, psychiatric, and legal, to name a few) may quickly exploit to shore up the

rationale for their own continuing regulatory zeal. The question remains, though, what

departures from the norm constitute something other than an excuse or rationale for the

continuing authority of the norm? What departures from the norm disrupt the regulatory

process itself? (52, 53)

Herculine blame people who were involved in changing her/his female civil statues to male; the

Bishop, the doctor, and Sara’s mother, to name just a few. 151

At the end of his/her monologue, Derek says this last mournful and repetitive line: Sara’s body, my girl’s body, all lost, couldn’t you have stayed?” (52). The actress who plays the part of

Herculine, turns to leave but then she turns around to give Derek a kiss on the neck. This final image is captured and reproduced as a photograph in the playtext as is pointed out by both Raima

Evan and Elin Diamond. When writing about this image, Elin Diamond describes it as

“startlingly resemble a two headed body” (Unmaking 98). There are two hermaphrodite heads but it is not clear if they are male or female. It is strange that they are so hauntingly ambiguous.

The two heads imply that the single male/female frame has imprisoned the hermaphrodite body which constantly makes references to these two positions even as it conflates them.

Furthermore Elin Diamond describes this body: “The hermaphroditic body is excessive to itself—there is no ‘self but selves, the other in the one—orificial, literally: ‘My skin used to wrap me up, now it lets the world in,” which points out to the body that seems to have both male and female characteristics. (Unmaking 98) Yet the hermaphrodite moves beyond masculinity, femininity and combines aspects of the male and the female and the result of which is “gender blending,” what Butler refers to as a way of resistance to norms. So, the body of “Herculine

Barbin” exceeds the binary, exposes dominant construction of gender and attempts to subvert these constructions. Once again, Churchill and Lan have suggested a stance that defies the limitations of dominant construction of gender. It is a position that, indeed, subverts the “gender norms”; one that looks beyond the androgynous faces of Herculine.

After Derek/Pentheus’ brutal demise, Derek gains a new body. Though there is a chaotic flux of male and female characteristics, Derek is happy with the new body which has both male as well as female characteristics. It seems he is transformed into a new person. 152

My breasts aren’t big but I like them. My waist isn’t small but it makes me smile. My

shoulders are still strong. And my new shape is the least of it. I smell light and sweet. I

come into a room, who has been here? Me. My skin used to wrap me up, now it lets the

world in. (52)

Derek has breasts and her description of her body “let the world in” implicitly can refer to female genital. But there are traces of the old body. He announces that he has strong shoulders as well. “I’ve almost forgotten the man who possesses this body.” It is essential to note that she uses the word “almost”, which does not mean the same as “entirely”. I think both Derek’s possession scene, as well as his post possession monologue, point to a hermaphroditic body while Linda Diamond speaks of Derek’s transsexual body in “Caryl Churchill’s Plays: The

Gestus of Invisibility”, and elsewhere in the passage she talks about Derek hermaphrodite body.

Raima Evan also points out this matter that transsexuality is different from hermaphroditism.

Transsexual body stands for a fluid crossing of boundaries, but represents a transition from one sex to the other. It is finally a position that belongs to either one of the sexes and reifies sexual difference. Contrary to this, the hermaphrodite body represents sexual amalgamation which threatens the whole system of opposition. Though, the transsexual body seems “abnormal” when judged according to the standards of rigid binary position. When Butler comments on

“Undiagnosing Gender,” she addresses the tension within transsexual communities around the diagnosis of gender-identity disorder (GID), she writes:

To be diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID) is to be found, in some way, to be ill,

sick, wrong, out of order, abnormal, and to suffer a certain stigmatization as a consequence

of the diagnosis being given at all …. transsexuality is not a disorder, and ought not to be 153

conceived of as one, and that trans people ought to be understood as engaged in a practice

of self-determination, an exercise of autonomy.(76)

The new Derek is not so much a transsexual woman as his body has overstepped the sexual boundaries; a multivalence body that coalesces the two sexes.

There is another brief scene from The Bacchae and Derek possessed by Pentheus this time.

Pentheus himself highlights the reification of sexual difference as well as its erosion. On the one hand, Pentheus insults the androgynous god, Dionysos, for his feminine appearance. We also learn that he despises him – a hatred that stems from his belief that men should look like men, and women should act like women. He believes that there should be a clear distinction between the sexes. Women must remain at home and not cavort in the mountains, killing livestock, and generally disrupting the structure of both the family and the economy. He also believes that

Dionysos inspired a revolt amongst the women of Thebes and Pentheus vows to destroy him for this. On the other hand, Pentheus is profoundly curious and his interest to spy on their levels infers to the return of the repressed as he unconsciously wishes to experience what they experience. He disguises as a woman under Dionysos’ spell and his personality changes to the level that he wants to know whether he looks like his mother and is keen to resemble a real maenad. Penthouse pays for his gender bending by being torn apart. Therefore, both Pentheus and Herculine, prove that gender confusion brings with it, danger and death (Pentheus was torn apart and Herculine committed suicide). While in a post position scene in the play we see that

Derek says: “Every day when I wake up, I’m comfortable” (52). This shows that Derek not only feels danger; but also feels completely at peace.

Not only does Derek’s body raise fundamental questions about the construction of gender but it also elicits a questioning of the construction of representation. Elin Diamond writes: “This 154 body ruins representation. It undermines a patriarchy that disciplines the body into gender opposition; it dismantles the phallomorphic economy that denies visibility to the female” (98

Unmaking). Furthermore, Janelle Reinelt in “Feminist Theory and the Problem of Performance,” asserts that Derek’s post-possession final monologue “refuse[s] clear polarities of sexual distinction,” and that Derek represents “the possibility polyvalence subjectivity”(54).

The episode entitled “Dancing”, in Act One, depicts Dan’s encounter with possession. The opening scene is similar to “Herculine Barbin” where Dionysos makes an appearance, passes by

Dan and exits. In the opening line, Dan is introduced as a vicar. The scene includes a male and a female prison officer seated at the table towards the back of the stage. Downstage, a woman who is seated on a chair is wearing “the hat” (23). After a while Dan starts dancing for the woman.

“This dance is precisely the dance that the woman in the chair longs for. Watching it she dies of pleasure” (23). A few moments into Dan’s dance, the two officers of the state who are confused by Dan’s sexuality start to speak.

FEMALE PRISON OFFICER: You admitted him.

MALE PRISON OFFICER: Her.

FEMALE PRISON OFFICER: Her.

MALE PRISON OFFICER: It was him when we admitted her. I can guarantee that.

FEMALE PRISON OFFICER: Guarantee?

MALE PRISON OFFICER: you want a cup of coffee? Guarantee!

FEMALE PRISON OFFICER: you tell me it’s Tuesday, I’m going to write down Easter Sunday, that I guarantee. [ . . . ]

FEMALE PRISON OFFICER: you said when she came in here she was a he. Have I got it correct? (24) 155

The conversation continues for three scenes while Dan dances for three more “victims”. The victim in scene two is a man while the victim in scene three is a woman. Both victims are simply described as sitting on the chair wearing “the hat”. In scene four, which is the final scene, the female officer finds her female prisoners scattered throughout her prison “Dead. Untouched.

Beautiful” (26), and confesses that she has let Dan go free. In the meantime, Dan resumes dancing, but this time he dances only to the hat on the chair. The officers are drinking their coffee in silence and Dan finishes “dancing to the chair and goes” (27). The language and action of the officers suggest that they are unable to restrain Dan. Both the sexes are equally attracted to

Dan’s androgynous sexuality. He/she speaks in a chaotic manner that confuses the guards “I want to be milked from the udder of a cow. I’d like a pine tree to grow inside me” (26). Also, he/she evades a legal system that is built upon stable sexual categories. This behavior is reinforced by the hat which marks out his/her victims. When we first meet Dan, we find that only the female prisoners are wearing hats, however, later in the possession scene we see the hat being circulated equally among the female and male victims. This movement across gender lines serves as a metaphor for elimination of gender distinctions. Janelle Reinelt states that the final appearance of the hat on an empty chair is an indication that the eradication of gender distinctions has resulted in the total eradication of the body. She asserts: “The androgynous god, who dances precisely the dance the viewing subjects desire, causes their gender specific identities to vanish - leaving only the hat, unmarked by gender, to mark the site of seduction”

(53). The subversive movement beyond gender which the scene enacts is admirably summed up by Reinelt’s analysis of the hat’s erasure of “gender specific identities” and its evocation of “a diffused, multivalenced sexuality which escapes and exceeds the current representations of denied sexuality” (Feminist Theory 53). 156

But Dan, with his disruptive sexuality and the hats which mysteriously cross the lines of gender, cannot be exclusively accredited with the erosion of sexual difference in “dancing”. The other people who contribute to the erosion are the male and the female prison guards. Reinelt accurately calls the officers as “guardians of the arena of law where separation along gender lines is most strictly enforced” (Feminist Theory 53). Here once again we see the effect of regulatory power. Indeed, Butler points to not only law but also to gender norms when she writes:

to refer to regulation in the plural is already to acknowledge those concrete laws, rules, and

policies that constitute the legal instruments through which persons are made regular. But

it would be a mistake, I believe, to understand all the ways in which gender is regulated in

terms of those empirical legal instances because the norms that govern those regulations

exceed the very instances in which they are embodied. (40)

Another point in the beginning of the scene of Dan’s possession to androgynous god is that

Dan turns to the audience and directly addresses them “I don’t believe god is necessarily male”

(23). This line, which is repeated at the beginning of Dan’s possession scene, is ironic commentary on the scene that follows. During his possession, Dan personifies the disintegration of sexual difference. He becomes a living demonstration that male and female categories are not essentially innate to either Godly beings or human beings. In truth, Dan surpasses both these categories altogether. In doing so, he leaves the other characters as well as his spectators bewitched and in a state of bewildered confusion.

When Doreen describes herself in the concluding monologue of the play, she challenges the construction of gender norms as well as their representation. 157

I can find no rest. My head is filled with horrible images. I can’t say I actually see them,

it’s more that I feel them. It seems that my mouth is full of birds which I crunch between

my teeth. Their feathers, their blood and broken bones are choking me. I carry on my work

as a secretory. (53)

The play which is concerned with subverting binary opposition and reconceiving gender, receives a well-deserved conclusion in Doreen’s final speech. Her last words foreground a collocation of categories – the other in the self, animal in the human, the many in one, the unseen in the seen, the birds bodies in the gendered woman’s body; all of these congregate to foreground a body that profoundly disrupts gender norms and regulation. The speech provides a fascinating commentary about the flux of self and other which in turn is a metaphor for the conflation of male and female. Moreover, Doreen’s statement precisely and clearly attempts to sabotage a power which is fundamental in a phallocentric economy which is based on a visible sexual difference. Her closing statement precisely aims to subvert the power of the image. After everything that has occurred, there is no evidence, not a trace; she feels invisible. She simply continues her work as a secretary, not special in anyway and not different from anyone else.

Doreen’s monologue interrogates the whole notion of visibility and the image. Elin Diamond sees the final Doreen’s monologue “the crack and fissure in the representational surface” and believes “the structure of disciplinary control remains”, (Unmaking 98) but Raima Evan believes that Doreen’s monologue problematizes both visibility and “disciplinary control”. Diamond argues that in contrast to Doreen’s possession scene, (Doreen has a power to make objects fly around the room or possessed by murderous Agave) Doreen’s post possession scene represent her “in repose”, “docile, productive, capitalized,” and she tries to “carry on” (Unmaking 98).

Raima Evan debates that Doreen is not only violent but also there is an explosive force behind 158

Doreen’s own words. Indeed, such a reading neglects this explosive force within her life. Thus, I am in agreement with Raima Evan that Doreen is absolutely not in “repose” though she manages to “carry on” as a secretary. Doreen says “I can find no rest” but we cannot neglect the uproar and turmoil within Doreen which, like pieces of a torn body, are waiting to burst forth from her mouth. It reminds us of Agave’s own act of violence against her transgressive son. Doreen seems to be “carrying on” as a secretary, however, there is malevolence and violence in her last lines which spell a radically impending and inevitable break in her life as a secretary.

So, Doreen’s monologue with which the play ends, doesn’t have the same tone as Derek’s monologue. He is happy and “comfortable”, which points to transcendence of the binary. Doreen depicts an unhappy and eruptive situation at work, a situation which can inevitably lead to another revolt against hegemonic structures. Doreen cannot and will not be subjected. She stands for the presence of an imminent revolt against “disciplinary control”. Doreen does not make

Dionysos’ final appearance insignificant, rather, she gives more strength to it. We can see the play ends with Dionysos (androgynous god) dancing, which can refer to Churchill and Lan consistence strategy to subvert sexual difference and binary oppositions. Doreen’s words do not merely provide the title for the play but in fact they gave inspiration for the cover of the published edition of the play. This is an evidence that Doreen’s final statement encapsulates the subversive concerns of the text.