The connection of gender and sex is a topic that is treated in many of Shakespeare’s works. Seeing as the performance of actresses was forbidden, the female roles in the plays had to be played by young men, which might have often led to involuntarily absurd situations and unintended homoerotic innuendo. Shakespeare uses the subject of transvestism multiple times, making it even harder for the audience to differentiate between the actual gender of the actor, the gender of the role he embodies and that of the person his character impersonates. This confusion can be used to show that, apart from the outside appearance, men and women might actually not be so different and the discrimination against women as the weak and dependent sex stems from social conventions rather than natural circumstances.
Twelfth Night uses the characteristics of the carnivalesque to subvert the stereotypes for male and female behaviour in Renaissance Britain and to deconstruct the notion of a natural gender role that is dependent on the sex. To analyse the subversion, Renaissance gender roles are being introduced and compared to Olivia and Orsino as representations of both sexes. It will be shown how the cross-dressing of Viola alias Cesario represents an event that catalyses as well as performs the deconstruction of gender hierarchies by comparing it to Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” and analysing the relationships between Orsino and Viola and Olivia and Viola respectively.
Moreover, the argumentation will illustrate the way in which the ending of the play adds to the impression of subversion and deconstruction of patriarchal gender hierarchies and uses the properties of carnival and comedy to allude to concepts frowned upon by society.
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- Anonymous (Autor), 2017, A Maid and a Man. Gender Performativity and the Subversive Potential of William Shakespeare’s "Twelfth Night", Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1718686
