Cloud 9 Gender Quotes

Clive is a white man, and as a white man, he's pretty certain that the rest of the world should do whatever he says. Luckily for us, Clive is also the biggest loser in this play by the time the action ends, because he's completely unwilling to adapt his views of gender to changing times.

When Betty first greets us, she tells us that her only purpose in life is to be whatever her husband Clive wants her to be. This is because Betty, like her husband, has some old fashioned ideas about how a wife should always do whatever her husband tells her.

Clive's son Edward isn't dealing with his gender very well. For starters, he's very effeminate and likes to play with dolls. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, unless you've got a dad who's obsessed with making you into a manly man.

In Act 2 of the play, we find ourselves in late 20th-century England. The character Lin has a daughter named Cathy, but unlike the characters in the first act, Lin has no interest in making he daughter act "girly. " In fact, she encourages her to paint a picture of something bloody and violent when Cathy rejects her first couple of suggestions.

Lin is a lesbian and she totally hates men. Now Churchill isn't buying into stereotypes here and saying that's true of all lesbians. Ellen from Act 1, for example, is also gay and doesn't hate men at all. But Lin's been pretty badly abused by men in the past, and there's little doubt that this has something to do with why she hates them.

Lin doesn't want her daughter Cathy to grow up loving Barbies and planning her dream wedding at age eight. But that doesn't change the fact that society still has some pretty strict ideas about what makes a woman beautiful, and it's impossible for Lin to protect her daughter from the influence of these ideas. This puts Cathy in a strange gender space where she loves to do "boyish " things like play with toy guns, but also wants to look pretty by wearing earrings and necklaces.

When Gerry accuses Edward of acting like a wife, Edward is genuinely hurt by the comment. At the end of the day, he feels that being feminine is his "normal" way of being but no one else in the play seems to accept this, not even his gay lover.

It's interesting here for Edward to refer to Gerry as one of "you men," since Edward himself is biologically male. But that's just Churchill's point: Edward's biology has nothing to do with any sort of male or female behavior. As far as Churchill's concerned, there's no such thing as naturally "male" or "female" behavior. It all depends on the individual.

Poor Cathy wants to play with a group of young boys called "The Dead Hand Gang," but when she finally tries to, they give her a bloody nose and take her ice cream cone away. Worse yet, they tell her that she can't play because she's a girl. As Churchill shows us, sexism doesn't just go away because we're living in modern times. Kids can be especially cruel when it comes to making fun of people or hurting them for trying to act different than what is considered normal. As Churchill tries to show us, it might be better if we tried to live with no concept of normal at all—at least when it comes to gender.