Throughout The Whole Of Zenobia, It Is Unclear Whether Nick Dear Is

Throughout the whole of Zenobia, it is unclear whether Nick Dear is misunderstanding feminism, satirising it, or characterising female aggression as irrational hysteria and a cold drive for masculine power. The question is apt for the Zenobia, too- whose agenda is driven entirely by a hollow paradoxical desire to be other, while also succeeding as other.
Although both plays circulate around themes of sexism and misogyny, it does not necessarily follow that the movie is condemnable, lazy, or worthless. As Medea and Zenobia are concerned with abuse, abuse of everyone and everything in every direction, they manage to corner the market on it, and uphold this monopoly as a means of vindicating themselves for continually representating it. Clearly depicting is not the same as endorsing, but it can be. In Medea and particularly Zenobia we find constructed in sexism the most pervasive and intangible challenge faced by the protagonists. Clearly just investing the Bride with surprising, virtually supernatural willpower and stamina does not constitute postfeminist empowerment and perhaps one of the more unfortunate and masculine of the protagonist's characteristics is the inability or unwillingness to fight the less obvious but more pervasive sexism on any more than the most personal level.
The fact that neither character lifts a finger to change this world of endemic misogyny might hint that the apparently woman-hating frame around her character is not, in fact, the point. Like any mythological hero, Zenobia finds her mission directed by symbols, and the glaring misogyny that appears to form the background of her world is not to be taken too literally. The regular markers of woman-hating in Zenobia are, it seems to me, not to be read as anything more than extensions of the semiotic value of the core misogynist males. Zenobia's anger towards herself has extended into a general wrath to all those associated with her injustice, male and female, but this does not necessarily amount to a masculine hatred of the female, on her part. Nor does it amount to a feminine hatred of females, or any kind of irrational or juvenile aggression that might be suggested in male adolescent taste for violence. Zenobia's psychological association of everyone responsible for her tragedy is identical to the semiotic connection of all the misogynistic events and characters in the play. This play is after all hyper real, a fantasy and a myth before it is anything else, and as such must be read as a symphonic expression of semiotic and psychological equivalence.