A lot of stress there is a difference between gender and sex. And certainly there is. Sex is essentially biology, the male and female manifestations or, to put it more bluntly, the physical parts that come with being male or female. Gender, on the other hand, is the social norms, roles, and ideals tied to one’s identity, usually ascribed to which of those physical parts one possesses. It is a “social construction”, something that is not based on the actual physical composition.
William Shakespeare’s famous “transvestite drama” Twelfth Night effectively exemplifies gender as a social construct. After all, the play focuses, among other things, on a young fraternal twin named Viola who decided to cross-dress in order to get a job and enter the court of Duke Orsino. After all, a girl has to eat, and since she has been separated from her twin brother who was thought dead after a nasty shipwreck, she has to find work.
In Shakespeare’s time, cross-dressing (with the exception of on stage, as male actors played female characters all the time) was prohibited. Of course, women were expected to maintain and adopt strict standards regarding femininity, appearance, and behavior. Deliberately donning a pair of Elizabethan breeches when you’re supposed to wear pounds and pounds of layered skirts was an absolute scandal.
Naturally, Shakespeare’s play was seen as morally corrupt in this regard, portraying women as straying from their strict gender roles. However, feminist scholars are quick to point out that it speaks to the lack of freedoms or agency women had at the time. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we see exactly how oppressive and damaging a patriarchal society can be to a woman’s psyche; Prescribing prevailing notions of proper female behavior, Ophelia found herself a pawn in the hands of the men in her life, felt trapped by her circumstances, and ultimately committed suicide. Throughout time and literature, we have seen women who, unlike Ophelia, went against society’s expectations to affirm their beliefs or claim a measure of the happiness they deserved and faced serious rejection, opposition, and social condemnation. as a result of that. Sophocles’ Antigone, Henry Adam’s Esther and Kate Chopin’s Edna are good examples of this.
In Shakespeare’s world, if a woman found herself without earning a living, she had to pose as a man to survive (or marry, which also happens at the end of the play). More importantly, though, Viola’s entire performance as Justin Bieber-ish (women love him and “his” slightly androgynous physique) Cesario speaks of gender as a performance. After all, the actor who played Viola on stage during that time was a man, which made the entire performance a man acting like a woman acting like a man. If that doesn’t bend the genre, nothing will. Gender, therefore, becomes something that can be imitated and well imitated, especially in the case of Viola-as-Cesario, who is so adept at acting like a man that she attracts the attention of Olivia, the very Countess who the Duke is romantically. to pursue.
This notion of genre as performance is also present in another classic piece of literature almost 400 years after Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night.
That literary work is the famous Harper Lee classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel about southern racism, morality, and justice, we are led by a tomboy Scout, who has grown up largely free from the feminine standards of propriety and courtesy often imposed on typical southern belles. She mainly has her father, the wise and just attorney Atticus Finch, to thank. Scout is like Viola, in a sense, both behaviors defy what her sex demands her gender to be. Viola is supposed to wear women’s clothing and act like a woman, just like Scout. Scout is also supposed to be polite, prim and correct, not the rough and tumble tree-climbing preteen that she is. She abhors femininity, in fact. It is something that she chooses to object to, something that she considers inferior to her for most of the novel. Shakespeare’s Viola doesn’t come out so directly against gender or being female (it is the Elizabethan era, after all), but her choice to dress as a man suggests a rejection of the feminine norms and demands society has placed upon her. tax.
Both Viola’s and Scout’s rejection (however temporary or forced) of such norms clearly support this theory of gender as a performance. For both characters, it’s something one can do or behave and change in an instant, unlike one’s gender, which nowadays can be changed but not as easily or painlessly. Consider Scout’s musings about how the town ladies, including her aunt, dress with a semblance of polite decorum and strength after the tragic death of the falsely convicted Tom. During this time, Scout imitates her aunt Alexandra by assuming courteous decorum, offering food to the mourning ladies like a good hostess. She says, “After all, if Auntie could be a lady at a time like this, so could I.” Genre performance, indeed.