“She tries to look like a feminist, but only feels more alone.”
The playwright who wrote this line claims to be a feminist and thinks she’s a great playwright. So does the drama department here, for some reason. Yes, she’s being entirely sincere.
Lost my shit.
Also, she just said, “She tries to look feminine and stable, but feels like a loser.”
I saw this post a while ago and wanted to say something, but I decided to wait a little bit and take what you’re saying in before I jumped to any conclusions about this. First of all, as Jay/Brooke, whose tumblr’s I saw mention this know, but other people reading probably don’t know, I was in this class and saw this play be read out loud just as Jay and Brooke did. Truthfully, I didn’t find anything offensive about her use of feminism and the whole concept of femininity wrong—and, after thinking about it some more, I personally don’t consider it wrong, still. This is my reasoning and I’m not trying to use it to disclaim what anyone else felt about it, because I do understand that it could be taken as offensive to some people.
What I think the writer was trying to do was to create a parody on the whole concept of what we (in this case, we being a society) project feminism and femininity to be. In the context of the play itself, and the context of the assignment, this makes sense—the plays needed to be based on a chapter from Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, which goes into description about human/specie interactions, among other key concepts relating to evolution and genetics. That was literally the worst summary ever, but the play itself was based off a chapter that dealt with how individuals interact with one another. Furthermore, we knew that the plays would be read out loud, stage directions and all (these two parts are from the stage directions). The use of feminism as some sort of ploy by the character to “appear” strong/independent, in my opinion, comes from the concept that we have in our society that feminism = radical thinking and unwavering devotion to one’s ideals. It doesn’t always have to be the first concept; there are radicals in every ideological realm, and it would be immature to not include feminism in that. Furthermore, the character who these directions are meant for is a little girl, who most likely does not even know the definition of feminism. Thinking in the mindset of the character, we are talking about a young girl who has been subjected to all of these images that are associated with being a woman—empty archetypes that most girls and women have seen, or at the very least subconsciously know and understand, in their lifetime. In the stage directions, she is trying to evoke those images—first, the one of an “independent, feminist woman”, then the image of a “feminine woman”. As adults (or close enough to it), we can all understand that these concepts are loaded, highly open to interpretation, and overly generalized. However, to a 9 or 10-year-old girl, especially one who considers herself highly intelligent, there is a loaded intelligence in the way that she perceives herself and her actions—and I believe that’s what the writer was trying to get through when she wrote the piece with this language. It’s almost like it’s meant to be incorrect, because it’s a reflection on how our society makes these terms so loaded with false perceptions.
I really didn’t mean to bring this up to rouse conflict as much as to express my opinion. There’s a lot about feminism/feminist theory I don’t know about, and all of this is really just my opinion on the matter and how I viewed it while in the course. I’m open to whatever response you guys (or anyone else) has.
