Pink Asparagus

(Giovanni and David sit at a 4-person table; Giovanni almost giddy; David, indifferent.)

David​: The coffee here is awful, but the view: ​(Looks over at the women sitting at the table over from them; there is no interest in his tone or expression)​ …remarkable.

Giovanni​: Listen, David, Hella stopped by the bar and arranged this meeting. I know you’re not happy about me being here or speaking to her… but… before she arrives, we need to talk. Hella has changed, her hair is much shorter, she’s been reading and smoking more, and she listens to Rihanna, ALL the time.

David​: ​(Continues to eye the women to secure his manhood.)​ Hella wouldn’t cut her hair.

Giovanni: She wants to talk to you about something. She’ll be here any moment… I know this is a sensitive topic but I need to just come out and say it. You know, you don’t ​need​ to marry Hella. You don’t need to sleep with her either.

David: (Through his teeth) Please not this again, I want to. I want to marry her. She’s so… hot!

Giovanni: For sure. Look, I know you’re not into her. I know you don’t sleep together. And we really need to bring up the facts here. You and I have incredibly sex.                  

David​: ​(Sighs)​ Giovanni, you’re not even supposed to touch your partner unless it’s for reproductive purposes… what we do is wrong and I want kids. Don’t make this into more than it is. You’re just a side gig.                                    

Giovanni​: We can do kids. We’ll adopt.

David​: We!? Yes, and then what? You go to work at the bar, and I stay home, like a god damn ​woman,​ watching our kid?!                  

(Giovanni can’t respond, and Hella conveniently walks in right then, an androgynous godess, hair in a pixie cut, cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, accompanied by another woman. They both sit down. There is tension rather than an introduction.)                                   

Hella​: Look, David, I had sex with a woman.

(David is stung; his binary conception of gender shakes. His internalized homophobia burns. Giovanni is giddier than before.)

​Hella​: …actually with three. And… they actually made me finish, every single one of them, within minutes. And then I married one.                                                

(There is a pause; David is dizzy.)                                                                

Giovanni​: That’s great! David isn’t turned on by you at all!

(There is a pause; that comment wasn’t well-received; David might pass out)       

Hella​: Look, David, I’ve learned new things in Spain, about life, love, and being whoever I want. And… I don’t want kids.

(There is a pause; David can’t believe that someone would reject reproduction and he reacts immediately.)                                           

David​: Why wouldn’t you want kids?! We need kids, without them, we’ll have empty hearts AND an empty minivan!                                     

Hella​: Kids are a burden; I want to read and study and pursue a career as an academic; I want to live in a villa with my wife.                                                

(David feels his “manhood” decline. Giovanni is happy as hell.)

Hella​: This is Judith ​(gestures at the beautiful woman she walked in with)​; I know this is hard for you, but I’ve told her about you… everything about you… like the whole sleeping with Joey and Giovanni, and she wants to talk to you.                             

(The shock hasn’t killed David yet, but it has come close. His eyes are wide, his hands shaky.)

Judith​: David, I know that I’m not your favorite person right now, but we need to talk…

(​David is shaking. Giovanni must answer for him.)

Giovanni​: Don’t bother… he doesn’t want to work through his internalized homophobia; he wants to cling to an exclusionary concept of manhood and marry a woman that conforms to an exclusionary concept of womanhood, and he wants to live the rest of his life, having bad sex, during which his top priority is trying to get through it without looking at his wife!       

(Well great, David is outed twice now for not bring attracted to Hella. How can he ever be a MAN now?)     

Hella​: (Locks eyes with David.) David, I know you’re struggling, I was too, and it’s because I didn’t understand that there is more to my identity than I always thought. I wanted to be your perfect wife, and I wanted to have your perfect children. I wanted to clean a house and to have long hair and then I realized that I only wanted all that because I wanted to be a woman; and I thought I needed to do all that to be a woman. And I know that you think that you need ungroomed fingernails, and pints of beer, and strength and dominance, to be a man; I know you think manhood is being strong like a soldier. But it’s so much more than that.                                 

(David sits up, not traumatized, well, a little traumatized, and hesitantly interested.)                    

David​: Look Hella, I don’t want some ​gender can be anything you want​, or ​gender doesn’t exist bull. I’m a man and I have the parts to prove it. I’m just not interested in this stuff ok.                                                         

Hella​: What do your parts have to do with anything?

David​: Oh, this is the ​gender is different from sex​ thing. Hella, I know that gender is created, and sex is biology. I don’t need that explained to me either.               

Hella​: No David, they’re both created.

Judith​: (Mostly to herself) And both performative. Your repeated acts create both your gender and your sex.

David​: (Clearly having heard Judith, glares) And what’s this? You can perform your gender and then just (sputters out of frustration) stop whenever you want? We’re back to ​gender isn’t real?​! It’s just something you opt-in and opt-out of? Did you cut your hair to signal that you’re not a woman, Hella? Is that what all this is?             

Hella​: I didn’t get a pixie cut to add to the performance of my gender, I did it because Rihanna did it and she looked… amazing. I could’ve done it for my gender performance, but my intention doesn’t matter. The haircut is part of my gender performance because other people can take it as such. People… well…like you. I could shave my head and still be a woman. The concept of womanhood would change, and my performance would contribute to that, not the other way around.                          

(David hates her pixie cut; it’s so “unwoman” of her; how could she do such a thing!)     

Hella​: And David… I could’ve just stayed in Spain and hit you with an over the phone breakup, but I knew you were struggling. And I need you to understand that the things you want to adhere to, are supposed to be constructed by you. You don’t need to follow any set of rules. YOU make the rules David.                                      

David​: ​(Frustrated, he sighs and then explodes.)​ I don’t make the fucking rules Hella. God makes the rules. My penis means male. That’s not me that’s biology!

Judith​: (Steps towards David.) David… Can I ask you a personal question?

David​: (David is vexed, and growls:) What?!                                                          

Judith​: Does it say, in little black letters, either on your penis, or, perhaps, right above it, the word “male”?                                                       

David​: What the-!?

(Judith smirks and bites her lip. She was waiting to say that for a while.)               

Hella​: I’m sorry, what she meant was, our bodies didn’t exactly come with labels; we added the labels; we constructed sex.                                                     

David​: Well yeah, we needed to distinguish between the two kinds of bodies somehow.               

Hella​: Yes exactly, we constructed labels and now we perform those constructions. You aren’t man or male…

David​: (mockingly) … I just perform man and male. So then gender AND sex aren’t real and they don’t matter? Bull.

Judith​: (Ignoring his tone:) Yes, gender and sex are just constructions. But they are real, and they do matter; they’re ​our​ identities, ​our​ constructions and they’ve also been used as exclusionary forces in history, more so than I can thoughtfully address right now. But what you need to understand is that gender is performative, which doesn’t only mean that it’s performed, but that every time we perform it, we change it. Hella being a woman who is openly a lesbian, and embraces short hair, will help to open the gender of a woman up from being strictly heterosexual and long-haired, for example. (Smirks.) It’s not (mockingly) Bull.                                 

David​: (Finally gives in since Judith seems to know what she’s talking about.) Wait…  how could my desire to be a man, (mockingly) exclude anyone?        

Giovanni​: (He’s waited long enough to say this.) David, you hide your love for me in public. We sleep together and then you hold Hella’s hand outside to prove your manhood. It’s all about proving your bullshit manhood. But you sleep with ME; you are excluded from the conception of man that you’re trying to act out!             

David​: I am a man, Giovanni, I’m strong and dominant-                                                 

Giovanni​: And you’re NOT heterosexual and you like to TAKE COMFORT in my arms, and you think my body is BEAUTIFUL. You’re sentimental and you like it when I hold you and that doesn’t mean that you’re not a man. You are a man no matter what you do. You’re not supposed to change yourself to align with some constructed concept of man! You’re supposed to change the concept of man by acting however the fuck you want. Men can be gay David. Hiding it just hurts you AND you lose the opportunity to make loving men an accepted male act. If we have everyone performing as if they’re straight when they’re actually gay, gay men won’t be accounted for under “man”. What she’s saying is crucial.                                 

David​: (Pauses to think.) So… I construct gender AND sex…

Judith​: You apply your own feelings to the reference points of gender and sex that are presented to you, and then yes, your performance revises and shapes “man”, “man” doesn’t make you. It’s like a role that has been performed before; but when you perform it, you can do it however you want; you must interpret a role before you perform it; and your interpretation changes the role, making it more inclusive.                                    

Hella​: It’s like being a student: you can be hardworking and lack a social life or you can skip lectures and spend all your textbook money on pints. You’re performing the role of a student either way because you ARE a student; and everything you do contributes to the conception of a student. Students can be lazy or hardworking, dominant or submissive, respectful or bitter. The goal is to make gender THAT inclusive. We need both lazy students and hardworking ones as reference points. You might grow up under parents that encourage you to be studious but you’re still exposed to students who aren’t studious, and if that style of student appeals to you, that’s what you’ll choose to be. But you don’t need to perform a certain way to be a student.            

Judith​: Gender and sex are like that, except it’s more open because you don’t necessarily have to be enrolled in school to perform gender, you’re just performing, all the time.              

Giovanni​: You could sleep with all the men in the world, paint your nails red and clean my room with a feather duster wearing a little skirt, and you’d still be a “man”.       

David​: Are you kidding!? My gender AND sex are a performance, performed by ME and then my actions CONSTRUCT man?                                   

Giovanni​: Yes.

David​: But my body… I’m stronger than women, more built for sure and I’m more dominant.

Judith​: Yes, maybe because when your sex was interpreted for you at birth, your parents, and most authority figures for that matter, conditioned you into that sex. Like, my mother encouraged me to watch my weight, and be mindful of keeping my braids tidy and not ripping my leggings when I played, but my brother, well he’d be downing loaves of bread and was constantly encouraged to play as many sports as he possibly could. Maybe that sort of conditioning has something to do with your “strength”.                                   

Hella​: And of course, we can also change that; like Judith never followed her mother’s instructional conditioning of the stereotypical “woman”. She looked at her brother’s masculinity and that appealed to her, so she acted more like him. She got into fistfights with him and played sports and got bruises every day. She performed how she wanted, and that contributed to the overall gender of “woman” and sex of “female”.                                                

Judith​: Arm wrestle me, you “male”.

(David hesitantly, takes her hand. She wins, immediately. Giovanni rushes to comfort David.)     

Hella​: (Holding back laughter.) To be completely honest David, I’d always wanted a strong and dominant partner, and it wasn’t until I was with Judith that I had one.                 

(Hella and Judith kiss more passionately than David and Hella ever had.)

Judith​: Look, David, you can use “male” or “man”, or any term for that matter, but you should also critique it and consider what it’s excluding and if it’s ok to exclude that thing. In this case, “man” has been excluding you (a man) because you are attracted to men; the term man shouldn’t exclude any men, no matter how they act. So, you, and everyone for that matter need to understand that man does not have a set of prerequisites. Just because you have a penis and are the penetrating force in heterosexual sexual intercourse, doesn’t mean that you need to be dominating to be a male. If you get comfort, or even pleasure, from being dominated, then just do that. Have good sex and perform the way you’re comfortable performing.                                

David​: So, we can be what we want and act how we want.                                     

Hella​: Yes.                                                     

David​: My being a man is not a fact but a performance that I keep reproducing.                

(Hella and Judith get up and walk away, as he makes this final claim; their work is done.)           

Expository Notes

Using the Characters from ​Giovanni’s Room

David understands manhood as a pre-determined concept that he must fit himself into. Throughout Giovanni’s Room, he is insistent on portraying himself as the exclusionary conception of man that includes dominance, strength, heterosexuality and financial stability (“James Baldwin.”). David seeks comfort in this conception and frequently “[wants] to be inside again, with… light and safety, with [his] manhood unquestioned, watching [his] woman put [his] children to bed again” (Baldwin 104). In the novel, David “wanted a woman to be for [him] a steady ground, like the earth itself, where [he] could always be renewed”(Baldwin 104).

Hella, similarly, does not engage in anything outside stereotypical white, western, womanhood throughout the novel. She wants marriage and children from David and even goes as far as to blatantly plead “David, please let me be a woman. I don’t care what you do to me. I don’t care what it costs. I’ll wear my hair long, I’ll give up cigarettes, I’ll throw away the books.” (Baldwin 161). Her request for allowance to be a woman also shows womanhood as something that a man can grant, and therefore control, referencing Foucault’s idea that powerful women control the meaning of the overall category of women(“Foucault: Discourse and Power”). Hella points out that “women are always waiting for men to speak” (Baldwin 164) and questions that “if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens then?” (Baldwin 164). With these ideas Hella signals Butler’s point of departure: men control feminist discourse. Since Hella’s character is written with the mindset that Butler sought to revise, I let Butler revise it in my script.                                

Giovanni is Baldwin’s enlightened character; Giovanni conformed to western manhood for some time with his nuclear family, but now performs manhood how he wants. He does not adhere to a constructed conception but performs to construct the conception. He was then the ideal character to help Butler teach David about an inclusive conception of maleness and manhood.

Depicting Butlerian Basics

This script focuses on revealing Judith Butler’s theories through the elimination of what she isn’t saying. Hella and her wife tackle misconceptions of “Gender Trouble”, “Butlerian Performativity” and “Bodies that Matter”, and answer questions one would have when initially being introduced to these works.

Butler created her theory of sex and gender because sex and gender were the foundation of an exclusionary feminism and needed to be conceptually broadened. The term “woman” was troubling since it only pertained to the ideal western woman (“Gender Trouble”.). There was a misconception that feminism needed to be grounded in the stable physical form of “woman” (which Hella clings to throughout Giovanni’s Room). Butler’s theory contributed to a feminism that was inclusive and productive, which is immediately signalled in the script by Hella’s change of appearance. Butler first looks at how womanhood is always = grounded in the body because there needs to be a stable ground for feminism and matter has been construed as stable. Butler then takes the existentialist stance that the body is a set of ideas that are continuously realized rather than a finite truth (“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”). I stress this point with Judith’s asking David if he is physically labelled. The moment is purposefully memorable because sex (and matter) is still dominantly seen as an unchangeable fact. The line also communicates the duality of being something and being labeled as something which is an important difference that teenagers should be approaching critically. Just saying that a vagina means femaleness, is in itself, a cultural performance because you’re suggesting that a vagina, or matter, matters. But Butler argues that the vagina did not mean anything when it was created and had a meaning culturally ascribed to it. So then the body isn’t the beginning, or the more real, it’s constructed. The arm wrestle routine drives this home.

Butler argues that the idea of a female body beyond the vagina is constructed by discourse and social conditioning. Sex is constructed by gender and vice versa. If you’re deemed female at birth, you will be treated as female throughout your life, being told to watch your weight, and not run too fast, or rip your stockings. You’ll then grow up, daintier than boys who were encouraged to play sports and eat as much as they could. Your gender, a constructed theory separate from your sex as gender essentialists would put it, then constructs your sex. Sex and gender are codependent, and they’re both performative. Butler argues that gender identity comes from all the examples of gender that you’re exposed to your entire life, combined with your impulse, which is explained by Hella and Judith in the script. It’s not that binary gender does not exist, it’s that binary gender should only be used as a point of reference. Judith and Hella explain this with the example of a child growing up observing both men and women and mimicking the actions they like best from either one. You need something to oppose; you need something that will let you contextualize your feelings. Of course, after this is explained, this same example is presented as Judith’s childhood; her strength over David validates the point.

Gender is only as real as it’s performed by you; you construct it but you can not ever become it, it remains a role. As Hella points out, she did not cut her hair specifically as an act of gender performance, but since it can be taken as such, it is one. She can not stop performing; she has viewers, like David, who take her performance to be one of gender, whether she intends it or otherwise. Overall, the dialogue conveys these select, foundational elements of Butlerian performativity and gender and sex theory.                                                    

Making Butler Accessible

This script intends to introduce teenagers to ideas that’ll help them better understand both themselves and the world around them. I believe that future high school curriculums should always include foundational ideas of feminist theory, gender theory and queer theory. Recently, sexual-education curriculums have regressed, becoming less informative and more exclusionary. In university we learn that gender and sex can be seen as constructions, and it’s liberating to be introduced to the idea that we’re not confined to stereotypes. So why don’t we let the kids know? This script is particularly valuable because it identifies the problem with older conceptions of gender, criticizes exclusionary definitions of gender, introduces the idea of deconstruction, rejects the idea that you are bound to a specific sex, clarifies some of the accomplishments of third-wave feminism and is still open to interpretation.The definitions have progressed, there is a more inclusive theoretical position available and we should let the kids know.

Since the script aims to communicate ideas simply, viewers will be able to disagree while understanding Butler’s theory completely. While it is important to have a basis for gender theory, I don’t intend that this script brainwash teenagers into believing everything Butler says since Butler, though brilliant, isn’t objectively correct about everything. The script intends to spark discussion and encourage critical thinking. The sexual education system could use my script and any other mode of making Butler, or any feminist and gender theorist, accessible since the problem with critical theory is that it isn’t widely read, frequently due to its stylistic presentation (“James Baldwin.”). Even if people can access her writings, Butler is philosophically dense and is responding to many theorists and constantly revising and adding to her prior theories, so her writing can be difficult to follow, especially for a teen audience. This dialogue oversimplifies Butler’s conceptions and motivations; the humour and consistent mention of genitalia and intercourse also make it memorable for a teenage audience. And that’s the point: make the information simple, memorable and consequently, widespread. Our theoretical progression should not get lost. Canada’s sexual education curriculum seems to maintain the foundational beliefs of a generation that pegged homosexuality as heterosexuals just misbehaving. We should welcome some change now.                 

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. ​Giovanni’s Room​. 1956. Vintage International, 2013.                                          

Butler, Judith. ​Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.​ 1993. Routledge, 2011.         

Butler, Judith. ​Gender Trouble​. 1990. Routledge, 2002.                                                      

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theater Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893.                                                

Moreland, Sean. “Foucault: Discourse and Power.” English 3375 Critical Theory. 1 March 2019, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario. Course lecture.                                               

Moreland, Sean. “Queer Theory: Butler and Halberstam.” English 3375 Critical Theory. 22 March 2019, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario. Course lecture.

Moreland, Sean. “James Baldwin.” English 3375 Critical Theory. 27 March 2019, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario. Course lecture.