Right. I don't know why it's routinely chopping off the ends of paragraphs, it's all there when I send it: but here are the missing bits, for anybody who can be bothered to patchwork it:
First par:
A dream is already indefinable; to try to define what a womanıs dream might be is surely beyond possibility. One may speak of ³this womanıs dream² or ³that womanıs dream², but not at all, I think, of any dreaming that is inherently female. How often do we wonder what a ³manıs dream² is? Dreams are beyond gender: they are where sex becomes fluid, ambiguous, subversive, full of the terrors which are the other faces of desire. For dreams also encompass nightmares.
Fifth par:
Camille Paglia, for example, asks how many great works of art have been about childbirth, as if there arenıt any. There are in fact very many, from say Wordsworthıs Intimations of Immortality to Muriel Rukeyserıs Nine Poems for the Unborn Child: but in her statement their existence is instantly elided. These assumptions distort the actuality of both art and human experience; and by so doing, they distort the possibilities of the future.
Sixth par:
And yet in these desires towards the feminine is a recognition that there is something still which is undervalued or censored, a sense of an imbalance in cultural perceptions of the female, which somehow has to be addressed if we are to see our worlds clearly.
Eighth par:
To write something down, to make a piece of art, is already a movement away from the thing itself; no piece of art is me.
Ninth par:
I see around me a world shaped and in many ways defined by male violence, and theatre is a place where I can examine what that might be, how it works, what drives it; perhaps to see also what male and female have in common, because we have much more in common with each other than with, say, a spider. We are all human, although I donıt see this statement as any easy gloss over our differences. Unfortunately the ironies and questions implicit in what I have written have not always been translated to the production on stage: this might well be, in part, because they have been directed by men, who have simply not picked up on them; or perhaps there is a subconscious desire to repress those very fears and desires I wish to express.
I sure hope these ones come out. I won't clog up your mailboxes any more... Sorry about all this.
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