Gender politics and feminism in Caryl Churchill's "Cloud Nine"

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979) with the help of an eclectic theoretical framework enriched with a critical approach drawn from the ideas prevalent around the discussions of feminism, gender politics, and the construction and the representation of gendered identities. Reading Cloud Nine, this study argues that gender and sexuality are discursively constructed in accordance with the interests of the patriarchal and heteronormative regulations. It also traces how a distinction between sex and gender is forged with a view to securing patriarchal kinship systems, which maintain the binary oppositions based on the sex/gender dichotomy. Reading a range of theorists analyzing the notions of sex and gender, this dissertation upholds that the assumedly stable and unalterable distinction between the two is illusory. Laying bare the constructedness of the notions of sex/gender, this work asserts that these notions are fashioned through the repetition of the stylized acts pertinent to a sanctioned gender. As gender is understood to be a social and cultural construct predicated upon the repetition of various acts, this project asserts that the patriarchal notion of gender could be subverted by repeating such acts in an unorthodox way, thereby contesting patriarchy¿s grand narratives of gender. Thus, it explores how gender could be 'done' subversively by using the patriarchal and heteronormative machinery that purports to repress the non-conforming gender identities and sexualities. Heralding the possibility of subversion within the patriarchal regulation of gender and sexuality, this dissertation claims that gender-bound expectations from women and other marginalized groups could no longer be valid. In addition, this study analyzes how a feminist practice of theater challenges the patriarchal assumptions of an abiding hierarchy between the male and the female through the analysis of a number of feminist theorists. By the same token, it explores how feminist playwrights could write plays against the grain to challenge the central position of patriarchy within conventional theater as a site of power relations. Providing the theoretical framework fundamental to the analysis of Cloud Nine as a feminist play resisting patriarchal and heteronormative impositions, this dissertation argues that Cloud Nine subverts the patriarchal and heteronormative grand narratives with the aim of vindicating subjective power for women and other peripheral groups through both its content and its deployment of non-Aristotelian theatrical techniques. This project, thus, aims at deconstructing the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the notions of sex/gender and subverting the patriarchal hierarchy that restrains women from occupying central positions in theater and in society as a whole.