What you write sounds like the play was working against usual discourse
forms and genre-reading traps. But did it also make you think about some
substantive social issue or ideology differently?
I do imagine that in the popular feminist literature, esp. perhaps the
earlier works, that there might be something that fits my criteria. I have
not actually read such classics as Friedan and de Beauvoir (except for
selected sections and excerpts at times), and am probably not part of their
intended primary audience in any case, so would not be the best judge of
their popular effects. I was personally 'converted' to feminist views of a
sort by reading the bits in Ms Magazine that detailed the rather horrendous
sexism of the media, especially advertising, in the 60s and 70s (and a lot
later than that in places like Australia, which I visited in the 80s).
Those and various simple renderings of historical facts (e.g. women's
explicit exclusion from higher education, the justifications by men for
denying suffrage, etc.) made me decide women were systematically oppressed
and it had to change. But my views about gender construction and
categories, the relation of gender and class and culture, gender and sexual
orientation, etc. did not evolve in the context of such easily accessible
texts, but in a more rarified system of discourse norms that were mostly
analytical-expository.
The subtext of my request for exemplars is that I really think it is hardly
possible to write texts that meet the criteria I put down -- though it may
happen from time to time, and those special cases should be of great
interest to us.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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