Aunt Mary: The Dialectics of Desire

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyse the roles of the three transgendered characters of Pam Gems' play Aunt Mary. Sinfield and other western metropolitan theorists' 1990s discovery via Other (mainly Eastern) cultures that there are "radically different ways in which [gay] people can conceive their subjectivity and focus their desire" is an issue pre-figured by Pam Gems in Aunt Mary by nearly a decade. Written as far back as 1982, the drama anticipates much of the gay, transgender and transvestism theorizing of the 90s and the present day. Gems is on the pulse of cultural iconology by having written this piece so early and what is interesting is that the characters escape easy definitions and tidy categorizations. This is a performance of the identity of drag and queer framed by a play: the shifting and fluid space in which the identities of the players locate themselves is a study in the psychology of transgendering, transvestism, and transsexualism.

"[T]o take sex out of transvestism is like taking music out of opera" (H. Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon).

"It is not the reader's 'person' that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game" (Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text).