Cloud 9 Gender Quotes

In Act 2 of the play, we find ourselves in late 20th-century England. The character Lin has a daughter named Cathy, but unlike the characters in the first act, Lin has no interest in making he daughter act "girly. " In fact, she encourages her to paint a picture of something bloody and violent when Cathy rejects her first couple of suggestions.

Lin is a lesbian and she totally hates men. Now Churchill isn't buying into stereotypes here and saying that's true of all lesbians. Ellen from Act 1, for example, is also gay and doesn't hate men at all. But Lin's been pretty badly abused by men in the past, and there's little doubt that this has something to do with why she hates them.

Lin doesn't want her daughter Cathy to grow up loving Barbies and planning her dream wedding at age eight. But that doesn't change the fact that society still has some pretty strict ideas about what makes a woman beautiful, and it's impossible for Lin to protect her daughter from the influence of these ideas. This puts Cathy in a strange gender space where she loves to do "boyish " things like play with toy guns, but also wants to look pretty by wearing earrings and necklaces.