MONKS Article: Highlights

Modern society expectations people to act people like themselves: e.g.

Shakespeare in Love where Paltrow plays Juliet, a woman playing a woman.
Actor-boys were used during the Elizabethan era to play female roles, yet the
audience were always seeking ways to reassure that they are still boys with a
functioning male genital.
Callows line: nervous laugh about the actor-boy still has a penis, and Paltrow still
has breasts. Signifying how people seek reassurance from making it as a joke that
our gender is bind to our sex.
Cross-dressing in a performance highlights the difference/distinction
The constant reminder/idea that it is all just acting, and nothing is actually true
Costume just appears as costume, and that it is separated from the performers body
Blackface Minstrelsy
"Make up unsettles the distinction between the real and the illusion."
The idea that gender is socially" constructed, and that it can be changed at
will, while race is naturally" constructed and cannot be changed the same way
gender can
Jack Gill: bases his claim on a set of assumptions about gender and race by arguing
that the clothing codes of gender are "social", whereas race is natural. He assumes
that cross-gendered performance invokes an identity that can be changed at will,
whereas skin colour (or make-up) signifies an aspect of race that cannot be
transformed in the same way.
Black people are then expected to perform a certain way after the practice of
minstrelsy, the same as how black people are portrayed on stage in order for
them to be socially accepted
white audience members considered blackface performers "authentic"
representations of black people. The effect of this belief in the authenticity of the
depiction of blacks as musical, instinctive, violent, lascivious and stupid was to
mediate the white view of black people outside of the theatre. Minstrelsy became a
self-fulfilling prophecy: white audiences learned to "look" race at black people
through the representations of blackness they saw on the stage.
BRECHTIAN Article: Highlight
MODERN EXPECTATIONS ON GENDER
Gender refers to the words, gestures, appearances, idea, and behaviour that
dominant culture understands as indices of feminine or masculine identity
Alienation provides gender critique for the familial and sexual roles in Victorian
colonial society
GENDER IS AN IDEOLOGY, A SYSTEM OF BELIEF AND BEHAVIOURS THAT
REINFORCES A SOCIAL STATUS QUO
Alienation effect denaturalises and defamiliarises what ideology makes seem
normal, acceptable, inescapable
It makes the audience think about how gender is something that society forced upon
on
FREUD: Anatomy [] can point out the characteristic of maleness and
femaleness, [but] psychology cannot.
The traditional view that is far too readily identity activity with maleness and passivity
with femaleness, [] is by no means universally confirmed."
Brechtian embodies the blindness typical of all Marxist theorist regarding sex-gender
configurations. Feminist theory insist on the presence of the gendered body, on the
sex-gender system, on the problematics of desire.
The female body in particular enters the stage and it is only a representation, a
signifying element in a dramatic fiction, a part of a theatrical sign system whose
conventions of gesturing, voicing and impersonating are references for both

performer and audience, a sign in a system governed by a particular apparatus,

usually owned and operated by men for the pleasure of a viewing public
dominated by male.
The fact that women writers and women dramatists were erased from history.
Feminist critic feels compelled to make some attempt at recovery.
Actress meant whore, authoress was soon to mean whore, and both were
commodities in a pleasure market whose major consumers were male."
Even though they were acting/writing/making a living with their own talents, because
their main audience/market/consumers were male, they had to fit the mens
expectation and desires in order to succeed - much like what a whore does.