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Bootleg excepts from Chapter 3 of my forthcoming academic publication 'How to explain pictures to an angry bird'.

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A feminist critique of Clifton's self-insertion into the 'bird' may well conclude that HE is the phallus and Oswald is the passive victim of his light entertainment patriarchy. It follows that Orville's implied incontinence is a metaphor for priapic seed spilling, thus rendering Harris' hand and Clifton's legs the archetypal symbols of male oppression and, if you'll pardon the pun, by extension, the entirety of late capitalism. Harris and Clifton are Enron and BP incarnate, their passive dummies the black slaves, single mothers and trafficked teenagers who have nothing but Freudian analysis (in the critical sense) as salvation.
— Jack Egedius McJack
Thank you for your words, Jack - you raise some interesting points. Clifton certainly serves us up a patriarchal phantasy, the latter being the operative word. While it is true that Clifton inserts himself into the bird, its gendering - Oswald - leaves in no doubt that it can be nothing more than an extension of himself, male, as opposed to an external and independent female subjectivity. Watch each priapic performance carefully, and one notes that Oswald always remains totally under Clifton's control, unlike, say, the genuinely radical and subversive Emu. (Of particular relevance here is the presence of feminist discourse in the work of Rod Hull, a theme I hope to return to in future.) Clifton's intended implication may well be of sinister symbolic gender violence - the objectifying negation of the female self - but I venture that what we ultimately find here is a counterfeit narrative of male domination, only able to sustain itself through solipsistic solitary sexual display. In this reading, Oswald is somewhat akin to an inflatable sex doll, and Clifton's representation of masculine virility and power is equally full of hot air. In terms of pertinence to late capitalism, in Clifton we find perhaps its self-mythology, whereas in Orville we see something closer to actual experience - a flawed system of social relations (Orville-Harris) resulting in a fundamental failure to control the bowels, played out in public on the global stage.
— A posthaven user
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