[298/365] my dangerous blogging

(Almost all the links here that aren't to the play itself were chosen kind of haphazardly, to illustrate points I've absorbed over a long period and don't have single sources or go-to good references for. I've skimmed them pretty well but if I scrutinized and sought out perfect explanations, I would never have gotten this written today.)

I found out about this play because one of my coworkers is involved in the music for it, and after she told me what it I was really intrigued. And it's nice to see the RSC being cool about gender as part of its promotion of this play.

But I'm a little wary of something using "boi" to mean "queer-coded" when my understanding is that this is appropriation of Black American English/AAVE and also knowing that cowboy itself has been whitewashed by Hollywood so we don't think about how many cowboys were Black, Mexican, mixed race, etc. The word boy itself has a racist element (and I can't believe it never occurred to me before now that this might be why boi was such a valuable distinction for Black people to make: a useful subversion of a word used against them so it could be transformed into something for them).

I don't expect any of this to be addressed by an apparently-white presumably-British (the text on their webpage is aggressively northern-English) person.

Shame, because now I wanna see that play!

It's weird being a white USian in Britain sometimes. I know so little of my own country's history, because of how bigoted our education system is, but I still feel like I "know too much" to be capable of enjoying an idea like "the Wild West" in the way the people around me do. The description of the play describes the women of this "sleepy town in the Wild West" as "repressed" and wearing "petticoats" just seems so odd considering what I know of what rural or "frontier" life was like. "The Wild West" might have been going on at the same time as the Victorian era in Britain, but this isn't where people were covering table legs for propriety's sake.

I might be reading too much into this, but now I worry it's straw-manning the genders of white settler-colonialist women (which are restrictive enough as it is!) in order to make the "gender revolution"* feel as drastic as possible when it arrives.

I really don't mean to criticize this play, which I know nothing about except what's on that RSC page I linked to and my colleague saying the costumes are great. I sat down just to share the link! This is where writing gets you, it's dangerous!

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* That one transmasc person can apparently being about! Seems like a lot of pressure when I have no hope of doing similar among the farmwives in my family of origin...