Gender Politics in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine

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Gender Politics in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine ------------------------------------------------- Formal Paper #4 Course - English-1000B Name – Riley Remington T.A - Kim Sigouin Professor – Adam Barrows Date – April 13, 2013 Issues in gender have placed a sense of historical, social and political context into many twentieth-century playwrights. Performance and theatre have developed a way for the deconstruction of gender positions in contemporary society. Race, gender, and sexual orientation have meaning in primarily how they are preformed. (Waterman, 1999) Caryl Churchill, one of the most substantial British dramatists in the late twentieth century, has concerned her writings with the great suppression of women, as well the great displacement of social inequity. Churchill explores into depth with elements consisting of Class-consciousness, socialist-feminism and sexual politics, with the intentions to spread social and class awareness. ‘Cloud Nine’ was the first play in which had received a large response from the public. The playwright was first performed in 1979, and stood out to be one of Churchill’s greatest playwrights in respect to portraying gender roles and the hidden works behind a colonized and modern society. The first act of ‘Cloud Nine’ is situated in the Victorian Africa, while the second act is placed one hundred years later, in London in 1979, but as for the actors they have only aged twenty-five years, stating that maybe society has not changed that immensely. (Waterman,1999) Churchill has developed ‘Cloud Nine’ to play around the roles of a patriarchal society, which helps distinguish the gender roles that were apparent at both of these times. Churchill’s use of dramatic techniques and her perspective on pre and post-colonial society allows for the play ‘Cloud Nine’ to challenge the ‘reality’ of the social constructions of race
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