“Women are irrational, demanding, inconsistent, treacherous, lustful and they smell differently from us.” Coming from Clive, one of the few male characters in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 played by a male actor, this assessment of gender reads like an ironic statement from the past. Although it premiered in 1979, Cloud 9 and its boundary-expanding, cross-gender casting resonates with today’s discussions about gender identity—namely that gender can be, and is for many people, a fluid plurality of individual experiences and expressions, a spectrum instead of a binary.
Arriving at the end of the 1970s—the decade that saw Roe vs. Wade guarantee the right for women to have abortions in the US, the almost final dismantling of the British Empire, and the rise of Margaret Thatcher as England’s Prime Minister—Cloud 9 intersected with new academic fields that specifically studied women, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. In the case of gender, feminist literary scholars began asking “new questions of old texts,” as scholar Lisa Turtle put it, examining representations of women in texts written both by men (the basis of the much-maligned canon of English Literature), as well as overlooked work by women.
As a political movement, feminism is identified in “waves,” periods of time in which certain issues are foregrounded at the expense of others. During the 19th and early 20th century, first-wave feminism focused on legal inequality and obtaining female suffrage without significant attention to race, class, or sexual identity beyond heterosexuality. In the 1960s, second-wave feminism broadened the movement’s scope to include issues of sexuality, reproduction, and family, with a particular emphasis on domestic violence and rape; like its first-wave precursor, it was faulted for its lack of attention to class, race, or queerness. Responding to that critique, third-wave feminism emerged in the 1990s and was led by theorists of color, low-income, and queer identities, who highlighted the separate and specific ways in which women of different identities are oppressed through material circumstances.
In academia, feminism opened up new avenues of inquiry for literary theorists to consider the consequence of historical and social circumstance, with feminist scholars pursuing questions of how women either were represented or represented themselves in literature. At the same time, gender studies departments were beginning to explore the boundaries that culture used to define gender identity and expression. In 1990, philosopher Judith Butler, arguably the most famous gender theorist working today, published her groundbreaking work Gender Trouble, which took up the question of gender and the supposedly solid categories of male and female. Instead of seeing male and female as facts of nature, as many did at that time, Butler argued that gender is something performed every day, a gesture completed so many times that it becomes ingrained in culture as if it were a fact of nature.
As Butler writes in the preface to Gender Trouble’s 1999 edition, “The view that gender is performative sought to show that [what] we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.” This “gendered stylization of the body” can be as simple as a woman wearing a dress and increasing perceptions of her femininity as a result, because dresses code for “female” in many Western cultures. Butler’s work expanded what had been feminism’s essentialist view of gender (women are this, men are that) and paved the way for other queer theorists, many of whom argued that the “we” that second-wave feminists invoked to describe the women they spoke for was a concept neither compelling nor clarifying enough to be of sustaining use.
Such work is indebted to critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, whose pioneering theory of intersectionality argues that an individual’s intersecting social identities—particularly minority ones—relate to and are entangled in structures of oppression. Because race, class, ability status, and sexuality are experienced on an individual basis, “we” as a term (and its implicit claims to universality at the expense of the individual) is not always an adequate category in which to express the myriad experiences of individuals invested in a political movement.
In Cloud 9, Clive’s glib statement about women—“They smell differently than us,” petty misogyny at its finest—is undone by virtue of Churchill’s casting of actors across gender identities and race. At the time Cloud 9 premiered, in a pre-Butler and Crenshaw world, having actors embody identities other than their own was in itself a radical statement about identity and the ways in which it structures how we experience our existence. Today, the public discourse about identity—how we express who we are, and what forces enable or inhibit us from doing so—remains indebted to scholars such as Butler and Crenshaw. Their work insists on full expression of identity as a birthright for all, and especially for those whose individuality embraces a sense of the multiple, who live as one at the intersection of many.
— Sarah Cooke