How does Tennessee Williams present gender roles in A Streetcar Named Desire?

Sexually volatile, ‘gaudy’ masculinity pervades A Streetcar Named Desire, destroying Blanche and her ‘moth’-like femininity, from beginning to end. When Stella is struck by Stanley, Mitch says: ‘poker should not be played in a house with women’ but as her ‘luxurious sobbing’ fades out under the pervasive jazz sounds of the Quarter, Steve initiates a card game of ‘seven-card stud’. Williams choice for the last word of Streetcar, a play centred around the damaging yet inevitable effects of desire, to be ‘stud’ emphasises the control Stanley has regained through the removal of Blanche, both sexually and in terms of his territorial brood. The presence of the baby ‘in a blue blanket’ threatens to disrupt this newly re-established ‘equilibrium’ but as Stanley ‘finds the opening of [Stella’s] blouse’ in the play’s very last moments, it is clear that the male-dominated, desire-driven social order has been temporarily reinstated.