drama and feminism

I love my drama course at the moment. The unit we're doing is my favourite so far - take a play, find something you like about it, chuck out the rest, smash it to pieces and stick it back together in your own special way. We're massacring Fen by Caryl Churchill, taking the central concept of death and the afterlife and exploring it in a musical cabaret/circus/black comedy style with singing, dancing and a giant cupboard that is the portal to the next world.
Weird and pointless things please weird and pointless minds...

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At Priory Players, we're doing a Lorca play called The House of Bernarda Alba. I'm the maid, which is a more than healthy boot to my ego (humility is a virtue) because it is actually as small a part as it sounds. I don't mind the small part, it's actually good because I don't have much time to stress about anything bigger, but I think being on the bottom of the casting list playing a character who exists on the bottom rung of the rural 1930s Spanish social ladder has had a bad effect on me.
I have become the maid. The director can't remember my name, so that's what I'm referred to. Sigh.

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I got a letter today from Royal Holloway. I have an interview and audition workshop next Wednesday. That's 6 days. Way to give me notice, you swines! Holloway is my first choice, so I'm freakishly nervous about going there. More so since I got the results of a re-mark from last year's practical exam and it turns out that I did get an E after all. Ouch. This means my overall grade is still a B, meaning that Drama is still the weakest of my A-levels, meaning that I have to work my butt off this year to get the grades I need to take over the world.
Speaking of working my butt off, I would like to make this proclamation.

To all of you who think that Drama is a doss subject. To everyone who has raised their eyebrows at the fact that I'm going to get a degree in "arsing around on stage in funny clothes" instead of going to Cambridge to study bloody Chaucer like a good little girl... My drama coursework (at last count) was 22 pages long, close on 8000 words. It's not finished yet. I have more to write. Would the real Drama cynic please stand up and let me slap you upside the head with a piece of paper that says "DRAMA IS NOT A DOSS, I'LL GIVE YOU DRAMA!".

I know you don't care, but I feel like the funkiness of Royal Holloway needs to be broadcast.
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Drama/theatres/boilerhouse/boilerhouse_tech_specs.html

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We were talking about Sex in the City in English today (we get wonderfully distracted in English, all 20 of us get the giggles simultaneously, teacher included. Is it our fault, when William Wordsworth uses phrases like "Superadded soul"? Barry White tribute, superadded soul? Anyone? Never mind). I can't remember how we got onto it, but I made some derisive comment.
Helen almost exploded.
"No no no it's fantastic, it was so funny!"
"It was just rich women having lots of sex..."
"No not at all, it was really empowering, they were women who went out and got what they wanted."
"By having lots of sex."
"It's not just about sex! It was about relationships and friends and family..."
"So why wasn't it called Relationships in the City?"
"Because that sounds crap, no one would have watched it. It was totally feminist anyway."
At this point, my teacher jumped in with his usual display of eloquence.
"Helen, it was shit. It made women look like shallow, materialistic nobodies with nothing more valuable about their characters than their ability to look pretty and get laid."
"Yeah," pipes up the weird blonde girl at the back whose name I cannot remember for the life of me, "why does everyone assume that women can only be empowered through sex?"

It bugs me too, crazy blonde girl, it bugs me too. Sometimes it seems like no matter what a girl does, she's gonna get criticised. I'm 'frigid' because I don't sleep with guys. Another girl is slutty because she does. The women in Sex and the City were objects, shallow and materialistic. Women who don't objectify themselves and gain intellectual power instead are prudish and boring.

I'm sick of trying to figure out what I should and shouldn't be. I refuse to objectify myself and turn in to a Barbie doll, but I'm not ashamed of my sexuality and the fact that I am female. I'm not going to stop acting like a ditzy giggle-girl because it's fun - if people can't see that I'm intelligent and thoughtful then that's their problem, not mine. Just because I dance doesn't mean I'm drunk. Just because I prefer the company of guys, doesn't make me a slut. Just because I call myself a feminist, doesn't mean I'm gonna burn my bra and join an exclusively homosexual separatist movement, dungarees and crew cut compulsory. The world is made of pigeonholes, I'm sure they're nice and warm but I'm not gonna squish myself in just so I can live in one.