For Tuesday, we're reading M Butterfly by David Henry Hwang. Late in the play there is a line, "The West thinks of itself as masculine--big guns, big industry, big money--so the East is feminine--weak, delicate, poor...but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom--the feminine mystique" (Act 3, Scene 1, p.83). This line brings together the themes of nation, race/ethnicity, and gender, all with an eye toward geopolitics. In some ways, we talked about these elements and their combination in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, but M Butterfly is a very different piece of literature. Please write 300-350 words on one of these thematic elements or on a combination of them, drawing on 2-3 other passages in the play for evidence. Consider this writing another chance to practice sustained analysis of a select few passages.
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