In light of this information, Gallimard dresses himself up like a woman, before killing himself. Everything else-simply falls short." In this we see that Gallimard is unable to fully take on the role he wants as a heterosexual man until the woman he is falling in love with is an "idea," the performance of a man. As he tells Song, "I'm a man who loved a woman created by a man. At the end of the play, after Song has shown Gallimard his male body, Gallimard laughs at the absurdity of the fact that he has fallen in love with an idea. Gender also comes into play in complicated ways when we learn that Song is not biologically a woman after all, but a man disguised as a woman. In his estimation, femininity has everything to do with submission.
In this metaphor, the East is the submissive "woman" while the West is the dominant "male." This logic extends to actual sexual dynamics as well, as we see Gallimard fall in love with Song because he perceives her as more "feminine" than the Western girls he has met. For one, many characters feminize the East throughout the play, and use gender as a metaphor to explain the colonialist relationship between the East and West. The play is about gender on many different levels. Song understands this dynamics from the start and speaks about his racism overtly in their first meeting, claiming that Madame Butterfly, an opera Gallimard loves, is a white fantasy of oppression and tragedy. Throughout the play, there is a contradiction between the fact that Gallimard is in love with Song and puts her on a pedestal, but also disrespects her culture and race. Indeed, his perception of Song as "submissive" and easy to dominate has a great deal to do with her race-the fact that, as Song points out in his testimony against Gallimard, "The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated because a woman can't think for herself." Gallimard falls in love with his ideal submissive partner, and he expresses a negative image of just about everything that is Chinese. The play examines issues of racist stereotypes throughout the narrative.
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