Gender Acts and Gender Lies in "I Am My Own Wife"

Among the resonant assertions of ''I Am My Own Wife'' is that lives themselves are narratives, and that the perspective, sympathy and reliability of the narrator are crucial to our understanding of them. In other words, to endure the world, people may lie about themselves or to themselves, and the lies are as important as the truth.
-Bruce Weber, THEATER REVIEW; Inventing Her Life As She Goes Along, Published: December 4, 2003

I find this comment from Bruce Weber’s 2004 New York Times review of Doug Wright’s “I am My Own Wife” particularly intriguing. As a biographical play about a transvestite, Wright’s one man show already calls to mind Judith Butler inspired ideas about the performativity of socially constructed gender identities. As a play deeply concerned with questions of credibility, authenticity, and lying as a means of survival, the play raises similar, although perhaps more materially grounded questions.


I have only begun to puzzle out the relationship between “the lies” that constitute gender, and “the lies” that allow Charlotte to survive in her (male) body, through both the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Berlin. What can be said of the connection between lives as narrative, as Weber puts it, and gender as narratives, as Butler gestures towards?


First, a refresher. In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler’s hallmark piece of queer performance theory, she reminds us that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). This phrase, “stylized repetition of acts” seems especially important in the context of this play.

Jefferson Mays as Charlotte

Charlotte constructs her identity as a woman through repetition of such stylized acts and tokens, most notably her trademark pearls. Her charming and unruffled demeanor also suggest the easy grace of femininity, for example in her reply to Wright’s initial query of her, in which she merely replies: “Dear Mr. Wright, Yes. Perhaps it is possible for you to make a play. Maybe you will visit Berlin after Christmas. Sincerely, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf” (14). She is routinely described as charming and enchanting, suggesting her authentic relationship to femininity as a stable identity. As Butler puts it, the “tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production” (522). Charlotte is suitably credible, and thus acceptable, comfortable even.


Butler goes on to point out that gender acts only make sense in relation to other acts, it is infact the pattern that is most important for constructing a gender identity, that and historical maintenance. Gender after all, is an “historical situation rather than a natural fact” (520).


The question then becomes one of identifying those acts which break the pattern. Butler writes, “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (520). The acts that seem to break Charlotte’s gender patterning of her body seem to overlap with those that break the pattern of her story as historical martyr, or hero, of representing what Wright perceives as a secret history of queer integrity and perseverance. Acts that would be associated with spying, or deception, seem to me gendered in the same way that wearing pearls, or penmanship “full of curlicues and frippery” are (Wright 37).


That her public villainization, her recasting from hero to traitor coincides with the breaking of her repetition of stylized gender acts strikes me as significant. Note, for example, Charlotte’s attempt to reestablish her gender patterning as Wright confronts her about Kirschner. Avoiding Wright’s questioning, she pulls out an artifact as she is wont to do, an old sweater with antique brass buttons. “These hands have laid mortar and brick; they have carved walnut. But for Alfred, they learned to knit. (Beat.) It is beautiful, yes?” (37-8). To Charlotte, the break from the pattern, the expression of agency and survival that allowed her to survive, but put her dear friend in jail, is a disturbing break in the pattern that must be forgotten. The only way to go on living is to reestablish her stylized repetition of gender acts.


Perhaps the public, in the world of the play and indeed in the audience of the playhouse, are willing to accept Charlotte as a woman so long as she acts like one, actively working to maintain the authenticity of her relationship to femininity. When there is a break in the act, rendering it less than credible, we are no longer comfortable. This ambivalent relationship to credibility, both in the narrative of Charlotte’s life, and in the narrative of her gender, continue to shape contemporary understandings of this individual, and indeed this play in important ways. And furthermore, if we accept Butler's claim that "gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions," than for each of us, to endure in the world in a gendered body is truly a matter of lying, or at the very least, acting (527).

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. ““Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

          and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40. 4 (Dec, 1988): 519-531. Print.


Weber, Bruce. “THEATER REVIEW; Inventing Her Life As She Goes Along.” Review of I

         Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Dir. Moises Kaufman. New York Times 04

         December 2003: Web.


Wright, Doug. I Am My Own Wife. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc, 2005. Print.

A Hair Monologue

In the spirit of exploring why the personal narrative seems to be a privileged genre of performance among marginalized groups, I present for your consideration something completely different from what has thus far been presented on Dramaturgette...

What follows is an early college-era attempt at a personal narrative monologue. It is probably painfully obvious that I was, at the time of writing, acquiring a BA in gender and women’s studies and theater. Other insight into 20 year-old-me would include my deep admiration forTim Miller (see post #1) (queer performance artist extraordinaire who writes autobiographical work, one of the NEA 4, etc.) and my growing distrust of The Vagina Monologues (celebrated cultural feminist nonfiction play by Eve Ensler, constructed of interviews with women discussing the links between their bodies and their identities as women…)

In addition to considering the allure of this genre, be it political or therapeutic, I also find myself considering the role of self-reflection in the personal narrative. Is there something about telling our own stories that forces us to grapple, to attempt to make sense of that which was incomprehensible in the moment? And furthermore, is there something about returning to these stories at different times in our lives that is necessarily revelatory, perhaps not only for ourselves, but others as well? In a word, I believe the answer is yes. Cultural and historical distance, personal growth, the political economy of remembering… these all shape our understanding of the past, and perhaps most importantly, the present.

And with that all-too-brief introduction, I present you with the horribly embarrassing: A Hair Monologue.

If my life were a performance, and as it turns out it is, or so Judith Butler keeps telling me, I know what the central plot question would be. Like Hamlet and his epic indecisiveness, I too have my own unanswerable query:



“To be hairy, or not to be hairy: That, is the question.” 



This is my soliloquy. The crux of this dramatic conflict is, like most good theatre, quite simple: I am ashamed when I shave my legs, because I’m supposed to be a feminist, and I am ashamed when I don’t, because I am supposed to be feminine. This is that same shit that drove Ophelia mad- trying to sort out all the conflicting expectations of the world. Maybe I should just get me to a nunnery and call it a day. I’ve even got my own cast of characters weighing in with their opinions, completely and inexplicably invested in the status of my body hair; my own personal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trying to “glean what afflicts me,” if you will. 



Take the character of my former employer, who carefully monitored the length of my armpit hair. Working as his nanny in the summertime, he was known to frequently pepper dialogue about the swimming pool schedule and bedtimes, with questions like:


“Did you boys know you have the cutest babysitter?” and 
“Do you have a boyfriend? Do you date a lot of older men?” 


One day, sitting in the front seat of his car, the boys tucked safely in the back, he leaned over, and inches from my sunburned face demanded: 


“Can I ask you a personal question?” 


As if saying no had even stopped him. Everyone was silent, waiting. 


“Why did you shave your armpits?”


If this had been a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical I would have slapped him across the face and done a tap dance on the hood of the car. 




This was not that play. It was social realism meant to make the audience squirm. The truth was I didn’t know why I had shaved my armpits for the first time in months, but it certainly wasn‘t so this fucker would notice. Who knows? I mean, as Hamlet, I’m constantly deliberating; this shave was just an arbitrary plot point along the way to the denouement.

It was August. I mumbled something about sweat management, ashamed to be held accountable for my body in such a direct way. There was no escape. Not then, trapped in that car, with the boys’ embarrassed silence, and not ever. Every morning when I get dressed I know that if my hair, or lack of hair is visible, that I might at any moment be required to justify it to the world.



Not all characters are so direct in their confrontations.


For comic relief, I like to throw in frequent interludes of the generic “women on the street who visibly find my leg hair disgusting“ routine. It’s an audience favorite that integrates elements of mime and physical comedy. The scene always plays the same: I’m strutting down the street in my favorite dress, enjoying the sunshine, whistling a tune, feeling lovely. Two women walking the other direction pass me, only to perform a classic double-take, erupting into gasps and giggles:


“Oh. My. God. Did you SEE her LEGS?!”


Sometimes I laugh at them, and feel superior, maybe walk a little taller, playing the part of some hairy supermodel. But inevitably, I feel a twinge of panic in my gut, the inner monologue kicks in: “Is everyone looking? Are they right? Why am I putting myself through this?”



Did I mention that my play is avant-garde? Occasionally it features the odd Kafka-esque dream sequence. I’m on trial, standing before the judge. She is superhuman, enormous, I can not see her face. Leafing through my file, she coolly remarks:


“It says here that you secretly purchased a depilatory over the internet in 2005. Do you deny the charge?”


I spin around, frantically searching the teeming crowd of onlookers for my lawyer. Finding I am alone, I squeak:


“But I’m a Jew. Certainly the law makes allowances for–”


She cuts me off: “The law makes no allowances. It also says here that you have not shaved your armpits since August 2007. Your boss reported you. Do you deny the charge?”


The spotlight is making me dizzy. Confused and pleading, I try calling out 
“End Scene!” but the curtain remains drawn. 


Someone from the audience cries “Off with her Hair!” 


Another screams “No! Down with the man!”


“Silence!” bellows the judge, pounding her gavel. “I hereby sentence you to a low budget, off-off-Broadway production of your life as a Senecan tragedy. Take her away!”


The cast of The Vagina Monologues cheer: “Take her away! We don’t want her anymore!” 


The chorus of attractive heterosexual sailors from South Pacific concur: “She can wash us men right out of her gross, hippy leg hair!”




This cues the strobe lights and smoke machine, and to the cacophony of booing, I disappear through the trap door, never to be seen again.



Pretty edgy huh?



Clearly, this lifelong performance doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre. As the main character I’m pretty boring, and my development doesn’t follow a graceful arc, it happens in fits and spurts, usually followed by regression. I am no closer to knowing whether to be hairy or not to be hairy than I was when I was sixteen. But, if there is one thing I have learned it’s that sometimes to get closer to the truth, you need to put down the script and improvise. I only hope that in my version, Ophelia doesn’t have to go mad.

(Cringe. )

"The Children’s Hour" Synechode

“The fictional Mademoiselle de Maupin, from Six Drawings Illustrating Theophile Gautier's Romance Mademoiselle de Maupin by Aubrey Beardsley, 1898”

What critics and New Yorkers are willing to accept in a play and what producers feel a general audience will be ready for are not always the same thing. The Children’s Hour, Lillian Hellman’s 1934 drama is a prime example. The show, complete with overt (albeit nameless) references to lesibianism, was a huge success in New York, running for over two years, while at the same time it was banned in both Boston and Chicago. While the New York success was chalked up to masterful writing, superb cast, etc, it was also certainly a function of the controversial subject matter and accompanying sense of taboo.

This relationship between stigma and commercial success seems in some ways to be an illustration of Michel Foucault’s theory of discursive explosion. If we were really so concerned with censoring sexuality, why the extreme proliferation of discourses surrounding the topic? And why the overwhelming popularity and fervor with which we consumed, and continue to consume them? That lesbian sexuality is a police matter within The Children’s Hour seems to support this theory.

But THAT is a topic for another day. Today, I want to look at the ways that The Children's Hour was censored for a mass audience in the 1936 film adaptation, These Three, and, the (perhaps not so mysterious) way that Hellman seems to have actually prophesied this event within the very pages of play.  

For those who are not familiar with the work, the play takes place at a girl’s boarding school run by two young women, Karen and Martha. Striving for financial independence, the women pour their life savings into converting an old farm house into a school. (There are of course feminist undertones to the relationship these women have to labor, certainly another source of the play’s notoriety in 1934...) So anyway, one inexplicably bitter young pupil, Mary, decides to seek revenge for punishment and lie to her wealthy grandmother, claiming that Karen and Martha are lovers. (Of course she never says this explicitly, but finds a thousand ways to imply it. Discursive explosion!)

We are supposed to believe that Mary gets the idea for this lie by overhearing a heated conversation between Martha and her aunt, who accuses her of being jealous of Karen’s relationship with her fiance, Joe. However, there is another more oblique way that Hellman implies Mary may have learned of lesbianism. The girls of the school, it turns out, have been circulating a certain bawdy book, as girls are wont to do in boarding school. The novel is Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Rather than paraphrasing my extremely limited knowledge on this subject, I leave it to the authorities of Wikipedia:

Check out Theophile Gautier’s cool hat!

Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) In September 1833, Gautier was solicited to write a historical romance based on the life of French opera star Mlle Maupin, who was a first-rate swordswoman and often went about disguised as a man. Originally, the story was to be about the historical la Maupin, who set fire to a convent for the love of another woman, but later retired to a convent herself, shortly before dying in her thirties. Gautier instead turned the plot into a simple love triangle between a man, d'Albert, and his mistress, Rosette, who both fall in love with Madelaine de Maupin, who is disguised as a man named Théodore. The message behind Gautier's version of the infamous legend is the fundamental pessimism about the human identity, and perhaps the entire Romantic age. The novel consists of seventeen chapters, most in the form of letters written by d'Albert or Madelaine. Most critics focus on the preface of the novel, which preached about Art for art's sake through its dictum that "everything useful is ugly. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier#Novels

And so Gautier translated a radical queer life (and a totally badass one- she stole the body of a dead nun, put it in her lover’s bed, and then set the convent on fire so they could escape together?!) into a bawdy, phallocentric novel. (Note: I don’t mean to discount the political currency of crossdressing, or furthermore the exciting implications of a male homosexual gaze issued towards a crossdressing lesbian in an 1835 novel, but this certainly does shift the focus…away from the convent and the woman in it, for example...right…? Is it a stretch to say that this adaptation would have been a comfort compared to Maupin’s real life, insofar as it renders lesbian existence somewhat dependant on masculinity, and masculine presentation?)

One hundred years later, Hellman’s quietly political lesbian drama was translated into a similarly simple love triangle, into Karen and Martha fighting over the same dude…. (It apparently took even less in the mid-twentieth century to scare an audience than in the mid-nineteenth. Which period was more repressed again?)

I believe the word is synechode, when a part of something refers back to the whole. The novel, adapted from a subversive historical source, seems in some ways to preemptively reference the adaptation of Hellman’s play into These Three. When read this way, the small but essential role that the novel plays in the action of the play feels almost like a wink from Hellman.

Works Cited

"Theophile Gautier." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Oct 2013.
"Julie d'Aubigny." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Oct 2013.

Feeling Backward about "The Boys in the Band"

What counts as political in the contemporary context is...out of touch with the longer history of queer experience. Rather than disavowing the history of marginalization and abjection, I suggest that we embrace it, exploring the ways that it continues to structure queer experience in the present. Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present. (29)

-Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, (emphasis mine)

There is something about The Boys in the Band that I find distinctly heartbreaking. This experience of heartbreak is a complicated one. Frankly, it’s not all bad. In fact, there is a distinct pleasure, a satisfaction in this version of catharsis. As I watched William Friedkin’s 1970 film adaptation of Mart Crowley’s play on my laptop recently, my pulse quickened, I got goosebumps, the tingling-neck-feeling of watching something important. This physical sensation was in direct contrast to the spinning wheels of my analytical mind, busy accounting for all the problems with this deeply flawed text.

This is a play built on a bed of tokenism. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a Black queer; a nelly queer; a passing queer; an ugly, Jewish, queer nihilist; a poor, alcoholic, queer sociopath; a non-monogamous cheating queer; a closeted queer; a gorgeous, hustling, teenaged queer; and one forgettable queer get together for this birthday party…. First there’s a dance number. Then they get drunk. Then they all yell at each other and cry.

A "Heatwave" on Fire Island

I can hardly imagine what it must have felt like to be a gay man and watch this play in New York in 1968. The tokenism and recycled plot may have felt like a small price to pay for the chance to see something, anything, of oneself in a proud, public capacity. For those who weren’t lucky enough to live in New York City with its bars and back-rooms and bathhouses, to see the film at a Midwestern movie theatre 1970 might have been even more mindblowing. The value of this audacious claim to visibility, to legitimacy, is not in question. The question, of course, is what we are to do today with a film that proudly demands visibility for a bunch of toxic, self-hating men we would perhaps rather forget.  

While it may be tempting to dismiss Boys as backwards or counter-productive, I believe that to forget the boys would be a mistake. Somehow, despite the problematic aspects, for me the emotional core of this text remains intact, and perhaps more importantly, remains incredibly relevant. Underneath the flimsy scaffolding this is a play about the insidious nature of internalized homophobia. It is about shame. And furthermore, shockingly, the play seems concerned with revealing not only the redemptive power of community, but also the very real, at times physical danger of belonging to a community that hates itself. In other words, Boys acknowledges the empty, violent, and enabling potentialities of a community born of self-hated, fed on booze. And I might add that it does so several decades ahead of its time.

Many depictions of queer culture that my generation is likely to be familiar with tend to favor the progress narrative of “look how far we have come” and “never go back.” This is a project that requires depictions of affirming, thriving, supportive communities. While I’m not here to argue that there is something wrong with depicting such communities, to completely deny or eclipse a painful history seems to me misguided.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: "things just keep getting better"

In her 2007 book Feeling Backward, Heather Love explores the difficult question of how a marginalized group can navigate a past filled with shame, depression, regret, isolation, and violence. The challenge, she writes in the introduction to her book, “is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it” (1). While her central argument is one concerning queer literature that she sees as having a “backwards” relationship to modernism (Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyfe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, for example) her approach seems particularly helpful when considering the troubling aspects of Boys.

Love sees early LGBT critics dismiss negative representations of queer life, those that paint “same-sex love as impossible, tragic, and doomed to failure” (1). She goes on, “texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present” (8). In other words, it would be easy enough to dismiss a text like Boys as internally homophobic, as a relic that refuses to be redeemed, that has little value for us other than as a distant marker of how far we have come. Put simply, such a text implies an unfortunate past, but one we have moved past. To be positioned within a progress narrative, Boys can only be seen as a starting place, as that which is wrong and false, that which is no more.

The timing of Boys within this progressive narrative is truly remarkable, and may shed some light on why so many have dismissed the text as irredeemable. Debuting off-Broadway in April, 1968, this play was both produced and consumed in a pre-Stonewall climate. (Again, the visibility must have been thrilling.) Love, along with most scholars, sees the 1969 riot as a turning point, as the beginning of the progress narrative, of the “never go back” mentality. She writes, “the emergent field’s powerful utopianism, affirmation of gay identity, and hope for the future resonated with the seemingly magical power of this new movement to transmute shame into pride, secrecy into visibility, social exclusion into outsider glamour” (28). Imagine then, in the center of this utopian energy, a film that demanded its viewers reflect on just how bad things have been, and perhaps more importantly, to consider the implications of that not-so-distant past...

At worst it may feel like a slap in the face, at best perhaps a distinctly heartbreaking experience, but it remains as true today as it was in 1970: “Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present” (29).

Works Cited

The Boys in the Band. Dir. William Friedkin. Cinema Center Films, 1970. Web.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print.