Sarah Kinne

A pedagogical exercise in metacognition that attempts to unpack my own reading and writing procedures--from the viewpoint of a Rhetoric and Composition researcher. In this brief exercise, written toward the beginning of my graduate school career [and thus relatively unencumbered by a vast theoretical knowledge of the discipline], I reflect on the pragmatics of my own reading and writing strategies, and how this self-awareness might impact my teaching practices.

Caryl Churchill, known for her highly provocative theatrical interpretations of colonial and postcolonial societies, sexuality, and the ills of patriarchy, comments critically on the performative aspects of gender and sexuality in her play Cloud Nine. Produced with the Joint Stock Theatre Group in 1978-1979, this incisive polemic narrating the lives of Clive and Betty, fictional colonizers of Victorian Africa, destabilizes its audience’s view of gender as a “natural” category. Read through the lens of gender performativity and Marxist criticism, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine features characters whose relationships represent extremities of gender and sexuality stereotypes in order to highlight the significant role of the alienation of romantic and sexual desire caused by a strict adherence to normative gender behavior.