Under the Name of Father: Heterosexual Normativity and Patriarchal Family System in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 explores how the society has been constructed and maintained by heterosexual normativity. The text parallels the two stories of the same family in the different time and place backgrounds: one is placed in a British colony in Africa one hundred years ago, and the other is in London of the present time. The first story is presented around a family’s patriarch Clive, a figure representing patriarchal power within a family system or the British Empire. The second story is the Clive-less world where patriarchal power is vanished and new types of family modes founded on the acceptance/recognition of a variety of sexual orientations emerge. Through Clive’s family, Churchill demonstrates the unjust and violent domination of heteronormativity, which makes individuals have to repress their desires for the compulsory social order. Churchill’s examination of the heteronormative family system and her experiment with a new mode of family emerging after the elimination of the father do not suggest a solution or a perfect alternative to heteronormativity. In the text, nevertheless, she successfully illuminates the un-naturalness and injustice of the “sexual politics” in which patriarchal family and societal systems are profoundly involved.