Social Context

     The politics Churchill is concerned with addressing include is gender, sexual orientation, and race. She does this by incorporating the tactics of cross-dressing and role-doubling. The patriarch of the family, Clive, is played by a white male, while several of the main characters play something other than they are. His wife is played by a man in an attempt to help him envision women, as to him women are constructed from male attitudes. It's this kind of writing that has helped Churchill through feminist performance theory broaden traditional views of gender roles (Price, 1999). The black male servant is played by a white man to reflect how European attitudes with imperial and racist culture reduce the African identity to the construction of white. Clive's son, a homosexual, is played by a woman to show the impossibility for homosexuals to conforming to heterosexual standards. This ethnocentric view erases the character's sense of identity, filling in instead the attitudes that Clive and his society want. Churchill accomplishes a postmodern inquiry into the structure of social reality, looking what meanings are created by these categories, and how they work to form a relationship between self and society (Worthen, 2004).

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