The Language Constructed Gender Identifications and Post-colonial Narratives in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine

In this thesis, I compare David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly with Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine. They are very famous post-colonial plays and both deal with the repressions on sexes and races. Furthermore, they use the dramatic techniques of mimicry, masquerade and transvestite to emphasize these issues. In the first chapter, I provide an overview of the whole thesis. In the second chapter, I introduce Bakhtin’s social linguistics, Judith Butler’s “gender as performance” and Edward Said’s Orientalism to retrospect the theories of sexes, gender, language and post-colonialism. In the third chapter, I focus on the language of M. Butterfly. It plays with the colonial stereotyped language to defy it. However, when using the colonial language, it employs the colonial ideology at the same time, which makes it fail to resist the imperialism. In the fourth chapter, I lay emphasis on the language of Cloud Nine. It presents a discontinuity between two acts. However, this rupture creates a world of multiple ideologies, so as to function as Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. In the fifth chapter, I compare M. Butterfly and Cloud Nine to argue that M. Butterfly uses the “monologic” language and Cloud Nine uses the “hybridized” language, which presents different views of world and plural ideologies equal to the author’s viewpoint.