"Her Kind" by Anne Sexton

One of the foremost American poets of the mid-twentieth century, Anne Sexton wrestled throughout her life and work with sexism, mental health, and abuse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, and committed suicide seven years later, at age 45.

In honor of her birthday (November 9, 1928), we created this unsettling, evocative little film, featuring vintage vaudevillian performers. It's not for the faint of heart — but neither is Sexton's work, in which she so often sought to challenge and provoke. There’s something about this old footage that brings to mind Judith Butler’s concept of “gender performativity,” the idea that, to a large extent, gender is something we perform through a series of acts that are passed down, repeated, practiced, revised, and consolidated over time. Put another way, gender involves a “script” based on cultural norms of “femininity” and “masculinity,” and its performance, much like a theatrical performance, is made to please an audience of social expectations. Sometimes the script feels like a good fit, but other times, like a straightjacket. At its worst, gender can become not an expression of true humanity, but a suppression of it.

When we first heard this particular recording of Anne Sexton reading her famous and moving poem, “Her Kind,” we were overwhelmed by the struggle and the pain we could hear in her voice. There's something haunting, even disturbing, about the gender roles we are pushed to play, or choose to play, or are pushed-to-choose to play.

But there at the heart of this poem, we can also hear Sexton's moral vision. It's not that "femininity" and "masculinity" are problems in themselves; the problem comes when we build and maintain cultures that push people into roles that go against who they truly are, as if the script is inflexible, and as if the audience can only think in binary terms. We hear Sexton calling for a world in which we all are free to play the roles we choose, feminine or masculine or both or neither — rather than a world full of straightjackets.

Here's to Anne Sexton, poetic visionary and disturbing prophet — and here's to her vision of a world more free, more true, and more humane.