Gender Fluid Performances and the Ozark's Omerta

While never taking the forefront of the novel, Ree's relationship with Gail is an expression of how the innate nature of omerta, the code of silence typically attributed to the Italian Mafia, has infiltrated every portion of the protagonist's life. Near the middle of the book, the narration detours to recount Ree's first sexual encounter, "The first time Ree kissed a man it was not a man, but Gail acting as a man" (Woodrell 87). What would typically be a lesbian experience is instead preformed in a heterosexual way. They act as if Gail is a man rather than a woman. A simple reading would entail that these character's repressed nature prompted this performance; but if one looks at the scene through the lens of performance theory then it begins to be clear how the gender roles in the Ozark's are much more fluid than expected. Judith Butler, an early theorist in the field of performance theory, argues that "genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done...all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation" (Butler 313). She goes on to say that all gender is simple an enactment of certain norms and ideas that have been set before and have no origin; it is a performance for the world. This sentiment is expressed all throughout Woodrell's Ozark's but becomes the clearest during Ree's first sexual encounter with Gail. It's not just the world in which they live in that causes them to be secret, but also forces them to perform in these manners. Ree's imagination of tasting "morning coffee and cigars" on the "wiggling tongue of a man in her mind" is an expression of these gender performances as well. The expectation that a man must have these particular roles are gendered performances that the Dolly family has been participating in for decades (Woodrell 87). It goes even further when Ree kisses another boy and is surprised that "his lips were soft and timid on hers, dry and unmoving, until finally she had to say it and did, 'Tongue, honey, tongue,' and the boy she called honey turned away saying, 'Yuck!'" (Woodrell 87).  Ree expects that the boy perform as Gail did when she performed as a man. The expectation reaches across sex lines to include any performance that can be defined as masculine. In the Ozark's, it is not just the omerta that creates the secrecy of Ree's sexual preferences but also the weight of gender performance.

http://paas.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/3.-Judith-Butler-Imitation-and-Gender-Insubordination.pdf