Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers’s Filipino Boy, and David Henry Hwang’s Chinese Woman

Canadian Review of Amencan Studies Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 1992, pp: 95-106 95 Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and David Henry Hwang's Chinese Woman Robert K. Martin Almost twenty years after its first production, Michel Tremblay's twoperson play about a drag queen and her motorcyclist lover, Hosanna, was staged again in Montreal, this time by a woman director, Lorraine Pintal. In the interval, the play had become a classic of Quebec nationalism, with the sexual disguises read as failure of political self-affirmation. The new production was significantly different from the 1973production, which manypeople in the audience remembered. Most striking of the changes was an alteration in the ending when the drag queen Claude, or Hosanna, no longer undresses to reveal her "true self." As Renate Usmiani rather sententiously described the ending in her account of the early version, "both characters realize that the time for hiding places and disguises is past and they must assume real life and real identities" (96). Even if it originates in Tremblay's own accounts of the play, the notion of "real identities," would seem hard to sustain in 1991, especially when it is accompanied, as it is in Hosanna, by a claim to masculinity; Hosanna's five-time repeated final words of the play, as she "becomes" Claude again, "Chus t'un homme ['Tm a man."-author's translation]" (75), words that echo and make explicit the end of the first act, when Hosanna declares to her lover Cuirette, "Moe aussi j'arais envie de t'enculer! ["Me too, I want to fuck you."-author's translation]'' (48). 96 Canadian Review of American Studies However much it may be necessary for Quebecois (and perhaps particularly Quebecoises) to rewrite that final scene in a more modern, and less triumphant, version, English speakers seem to have been almost invariably incapable of understanding the play's political content. Again, Usmiani mayrepresent the critical response to the play. Denying Tremblay's definition of the play as "an allegory about Quebec," she claims that "Hosannawill doubtless survive its political uses because its psychological and philosophical themes have universal implications" (96). It is not that Usmiani wants to stress the play's situation in a rhetoric of gay liberation: on the contrary she stresses that "the fact that both [lovers] happen to be male becomes irrelevant" (89). Despite such transcendental readings, Tremblay's play remains a crucial work for an understanding of a discourse of sexuality and nationalism. The shifts made necessary in the recent production indicate ways in which the affiliations between nationalism and masculinity have been redrawn since the early 1970s. Ifwe bear in mind Patricia Smart's comment that revolutionary nationalism is a project of the son raised against the mother, "a 'virility' to be assumed against and at the expense of woman" (240), it is easier to see Hosanna as a nationalist project and to understand why it is the "woman" Hosanna, the drag queen, who must be humiliated and then reborn. While Tremblay clearly does not participate in the ritual violence that Smart shows is central to the nationalist novel, he is caught up in an equation that links masculinity with nationhood. The male character, Cuirette, is pathetic, but he is not subject to the ritual destruction that Hosanna endures. Hosanna's situation for Tremblay is that of a person lacking identity, "ce coiffeur de la plaza St-Hubert qui a toujours reve d'etre une actrice anglaise (Elizabeth Taylor) naturalisee americaine qui joue un mythe egyptien (Cleopatre) dans un film americain tourne en Espagne ["This hairdresser from Plaza St. Hubert who has always dreamed of being an English actress, naturalized American, playing an Egyptian myth in an American film shot in Spain."-author's translation]" (4). Hosanna's femininity and his "Orientalism" are signs of his lack of identity, that is to say, masculinity. Wishingto show Quebec's failure to develop its own identity, Tremblay turns not simply to a drag queen, but to a drag queen who wants to play the part of the Oriental queen.1 This doubling of difference acts in some ways Robert K Martin I 97 to counteract...