Spoken Like a Gentleman: The Burden of the Voice in An Anonymous Woman’s MANWATCHING and Gary McNair’s Locker Room Talk

Abstract

Abstract This article compares An Anonymous Woman’s monologue MANWATCHING and Gary McNair’s verbatim play Locker Room Talk to explore the rupture between character and actor in these two works. MANWATCHING presents the personal reflections of its anonymous female playwright on her past heterosexual relationships and the fantasies she employs when she masturbates. Locker Room Talk, on the other hand, is an edited compilation of McNair’s interviews with men about the often misogynistic language they use in each other’s company to discuss women. Drawing extensively from Judith Butler’s influential work Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, this article discusses how these two works adopt different theatrical forms (verbatim and monologue) to challenge the parameters – that is, what Butler refers to as the “speakable” and “unspeakable” – of public discourse. McNair’s Locker Room Talk attempts to challenge the misogynistic “banter” used by some men to bond with their male peers while MANWATCHING attempts to create a context within which women will feel less stigmatized discussing their sexuality honestly. In spite of their different theatrical forms, however, both works exploit a similar dramaturgical approach to achieve these goals and this article attempts to demonstrate the radically different effect this same approach has on each work’s reception by audiences.