Poof Gender Roles

Gender roles and issues are clearly defined in the play Poof! by Lynn Nottage where women are oppressed by patriarchal ideology. The focus of the play is also presented to the audience from a female perspective. Nottage also seems to reject the traditionally accepted roles of women as being weak, helpless, and vulnerable victims unable to forge ahead without the involvement of their male counterparts. She wants to demonstrate that through strength and rebellion Loureen and Florence bond to fight against gender abuse while trying to support one another and gain their independence. Nottage wants to break the gender stereotype of women being helpless victims as she empowers Loureen to will the death of her husband and free herself from a life

In the opening scene of the play Poof, Loureen is rebellious and argues with her husband Samuel and takes control from him by saying, “I will not tolerate this!” and continues with “Damn you to hell, Samuel!” In an instant, Samuel spontaneously combusts and is turned into a heap of ashes on the kitchen floor. Although she had been wishing for his demise during her entire marriage, she continues to apologize for her shortcomings as a wife. After the trauma of realizing that she had killed her Samuel, Loureen asks her best friend Florence for help. She convinces Loureen, that his death is “a blessing thing” and to sweep him into a dust pan and get rid of him and continues to call him “a bastard and nobody will care that he’s gone”. Florence requests for Loureen to go upstairs and make the same thing happen to her abusive husband Edgar. Male and female roles are defined through the roots of violence that exist in both households and perpetuates the patriarchy associated with male control over women’s lives. The fact that Loureen and Florence are traditional “housewives” suggests that they are responsible for all of the domestic duties within the household

In Gender Stereotypes 2.0: Self Representations of Adolescence on Facebook by Comunicar Media Research Journal, different genders have preset actions and expectations. Based on societal norms, each gender is assigned a particular role from the time we are born and as a result gender stereotypes have developed. Men and women are expected to fulfill certain stereotypical behaviors stemming from cultural and societal beliefs. For example, boys are expected to play with toy guns, violent videogames, and sports while little girls are expected to play with dolls and have tea parties. Boys are perceived as being the physically violent gender while girls avoid physical confrontations. This suggests that parents raise children based on norms that connect with gender and that those norms are carried on throughout one’s life. Additionally, race seems to have also played a role in the nature of the culture within the African American community. Florence asks, “Did that muthafucka hit you again?” Loureen responds, “ No…he was shouting like he does being all colored…” This indicates that this behavior was in someway associated to a cultural “norm” within the home that intersects with the economic, social and psychological operations of patriarchy. This psychology may explain Samuel and Edgar’s learned behavior towards their wives and societal norms of that