Gender Theme Analysis

Though Have You Seen Us? focuses mostly on prejudices based in religion, race, and immigration status, it subtly suggests that gender is another major area of prejudice in the modern world. The play’s central character, White South African ex-professor Henry Parsons, has an initially hostile and combative relationship with another central character, Mexican waitress Adela Venegas. The two characters sometimes play a nasty “game” in which each attempts to wound and humiliate the other. As part of this game, Henry often attacks Adela in gendered terms, suggesting that she has failed to live up to a feminine cultural ideal. For example, he regularly references her weight, calling her “Tubby” and a “tub of Mexican grease”—insults that imply Adela has failed to live up to a feminine beauty standard. Moreover, he calls her “señorita,” a form of address applied to unmarried women, despite not knowing her marital status, because he claims that surely no man would want to marry her. For her part, Adela fights back by speculating aloud about a woman and a girl on a “missing persons” mailing card that Henry is using as a bookmark, suggesting that they are probably a mother and daughter successfully and heroically fleeing an abusive husband/father whom the legal system privileged because he was a man like Henry. Thus, though gender is not the play’s central focus, it still subtly highlights the prevalence of gender-based prejudice in contemporary society.