Women and Violence in A Mouthful of Birds

Abstract

Soon after Caryl Churchill and David Lan's collaborative work A Mouthful of Birds (1986) was published, scholars of feminist theatre recognized the play's significance—most particularly for its bold stagings of transgressive, gender-bending bodies. Elin Diamond and Janelle Reinelt wrote important essays in 1988 and 1989 respectively, which examined the way the play broke out of the representational apparatus of realism to stage bodies and desires that refuse stable, binary constructions of gender and sexuality. 1 Reinelt hailed the play as representative of a third stage of feminist drama, one which goes beyond deconstructing the dominant discourse to stage "the subject-in-process practicing resistance, exploding the strait jacket of gender through doing the 'work' of self-inscription on stage" (52). Reinelt's interest in representation, gender, and the body leads her to analyze two striking episodes in A Mouthful of Birds that involve the staging of an ambiguous, androgynous body. While Diamond examines a number of Churchill plays in the course of her essay and considers several characters in A Mouthful of Birds, she also focuses on the same two episodes: "Dan Dancing" and "Herculine Barbin." At the center of both episodes is an androgynous, shifting body that represents a transgressive sexuality that defies clear-cut boundaries of heterosexuality or homosexuality. As Diamond observes in discussing Derek's possession by Herculine Barbin in the episode named for the nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite, "This body ruins representation. It undermines a patriarchy that disciplines the body into gender opposition . . ." (277).