Abstract
History of Australian Aboriginal’s colonisation, exploitation and assimilation has had ill effects on the performance of Indigenous gender relations, challenged the heteronormative conception of gender and directed Aboriginal people into shaping marginalised type of masculinities and femininities. With this background, this study attempts to depict the trajectory of shift in gender enactment of Aboriginal men and women in the pre and post contact era. The purpose is to account for the gender enactment of Indigenous people of Australia as has been veridically represented in Davis’s The Dreamers in the decades of 1970s and 1980s. Zooming in on such issues as unemployment, imprisonment, alcohol consumption, and acts of violence, among others, this paper argues that Indigenous characters in the play show signs of crisis of masculinity; in this regard, Tim Edwards’s notion of the crisis of masculinity has been employed. As the counterbalance of Indigenous emasculated men, however, the masculine performative role of Indigenous women has been highlighted. Raising these assumptions, we touch upon Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and gender identity, at the heart of theoretical framework, and prove the authority of our discussion regarding Indigenous ambivalent figures in the light of Indigenous critics such as Brendan Hokowhitu, Kim Anderson and Shino Konishi, to name but a few. Keywords: Jack Davis; The Dreamers; Indigenous Gender Roles; The Crisis of Masculinity; Performativity
Highlights
Jack Davis is a prolific and distinguished 20th-century Australian playwright and poet
Edwards does not extend his argument in claiming that Indigenous communities are in crisis, we argue that colonisation has brought along issues of unemployment, racism, family crisis, among others, and made Indigenous family members in the play suffer from a crisis know as the crisis of masculinity
Showing that Aboriginal men, according to Edwards’s definition of the crisis of masculinity, reveal tendencies which are accountable for their masculinity crisis, in the following, we turn to the issue of Indigenous women and the ways in which their femininity has been signified and embodied in the post contact era
Summary
Jack Davis is a prolific and distinguished 20th-century Australian playwright and poet. Behrendt (2012) further elucidates that the separation existed between gender roles in Indigenous cultures did not mean to say that women were inferior to men rather “in Aboriginal society, female Elders can have as much influence — or even more — as male Elders. They participate in key decision-making processes of the community and have moral authority” In light of this de-essentialising notion of gender, this paper analyses Indigenous gender roles and discusses the ways in which the perpetuation of these norms has led to the crisis of masculinity and Indigenous women’s masculine gender achievements
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