Hir Act 2 Write Up Q&A

Mihael Ruja

Aaron Krach

Critical Studio

10/12/18

Hir Act 2 Write Up (Q&A)

Questions: What are the gendered things  Paige is trying to distance herself from? Is this distancing successful?

Act 2 of Hir, continues with an image of the reinstated clean kitchen. Isaac is focused on the expansion of this cleanliness outwards into the rest of the house. As Paige enters the scene Isaac maintains apathetic to her outrage and is adamant about reclaiming the household space in order to restore it to its past cleanliness. But what Paige specifically reacts to and calls out, is not just cleanliness in general but the “normative table in [the kitchen] and the smell (of fried chicken).” These objects and scents may not inadvertently be gendered things but Piage’s refusal provokes and interesting framing that may be missed outside of this moment. I don’t believe paige is saying that tables are active (embodied and performed) expressions of gender but that under a patriarchal and misogynistic soccio-family structure, tables may very well be an active archetype of gender. Paige has been put through an egregious amount of trauma caused by masculinity and understands the inescapable omnipresence of toxic masculinity. So in her own act she is performing her own cleansing; not by a separation but by allowing the space to inhabit the chaotic unmeasurable agendered space of unknowing i.e. the chora (Khora). The randomness and lack of control to the cleanliness of the space gives up the object/ivity to a space where gender cannot exist. I think this fails the moment Paige tries to reclaim the unattainable. By asserting her dominance over the disorderly and chaotic she is bringing back the object/tivity (the performance of space and objects in relationships to the social/political ideology it inhabits–making a table an archetype of the nuclear family rather than just a table) that she is trying to escape.