The Crisis of Sexual and Gender Identities in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979)

Abstract

This article concerns the moral environment in terms of today’s sex and gender issues as people confront many challenges to do with gender and sexual identities in a fast-changing world. Many people across the world try to disguise their natural sexual and gender identities, with some men adopting effeminacy and emasculation and some women questioning their sex and gender identities. All these topical issues in our postmodern world are fashionably in full swing in Caryl Churchill’s comic play aesthetically titled Cloud Nine. This article therefore intends to highlight the phenomenon of gender orientation and sexual reassignment as reflected in the characters. Psychoanalytical criticism, together with womanist or motherist feminism, are the critical tools in the exploration and approach to the problematic announced above.