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Assignment 5: Miguel Montana

There’s compelling reasons to believe that gender and sexuality are social constructs when reading through this story. Namely in the form of projection. There’s a strong sense of projection going on through the play where the characters portray typical gender norms, where masculinity is grown into and femininity is seen as weak or inferior. This is shown by the boys growing into their voices, and the girls needing to be rescued as per their roles in the play. Though it’s meant to be nothing more than a play, plays are drawn from representation of reality and to a degree parody the writer’s understanding of reality. In this case, the typical gender norms are greatly exaggerated, perhaps to draw emphasis on the roles and even to draw absurdity to them. This isn’t apparent to the people in the play, but it is painfully apparent to the person reading the story, which is the intended goal of the fictional play, I imagine. There’s also the issue of sexual interests. There’s almost a constant display of typical romantic interests involving men and women to such a degree that anything exceeding that is abnormal and frowned upon. Mrs. Mac in particular is a strong proponent of the constant in-your-face shoving of this idea that only men and women can be together. Though this one is a little more difficult to argue, as biologically speaking men and women are supposed to be paired together, the idea that something else can’t exist outside of that is a little absurd, however. And that’s where this constant shoving of the almost obvious starts to become almost comical and perhaps, even an act to repress something else. What I find particularly interesting about this story, though, is how sexually charged the entire thing is. For a High School that’s meant to nurture young minds, there’s this implicit dialogue of sexuality going on between teachers and students that’s quite literally palpable. Which is not unusual, but given how dated their approach to sexuality is, it makes the whole thing very concerning. There isn’t a questioning approach, there’s just a, “This is how things have always been” approach that offers no further dissection as to why things are the way that they are. Which adds, perhaps, to the repressive nature that I am sure is to come later on throughout the story.