A lot of stress there is a difference between gender and sex. And there certainly is. Sex is essentially biology, the masculine and feminine 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, generally ascribed to which of those physical parts one possesses. It is a “social construction”, something that is not based on actual physical makeup.

William Shakespeare’s famous “transvestite drama” Twelfth Night effectively exemplifies gender as a social construction. After all, the play centers, among other things, on a young fraternal twin named Viola who decided to cross-dress to get a job and enter the court of Duke Orsino. After all, a girl has to eat, and since she’s 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, since male actors played female characters all the time) was prohibited. Of course, women were expected to uphold and adopt strict standards regarding femininity, appearance, and behavior. Deliberately putting on 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 considered morally corrupt in this sense, portraying women as departing from their strict gender roles. However, feminist scholars are quick to point out that it speaks to the lack of freedoms or agency that 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 feminine behavior, Ophelia found herself a pawn in the hands of the men in her life, she felt trapped by her circumstances and ultimately committed suicide. Throughout time and literature, we have seen women who, unlike Ofelia, went against society’s expectations to affirm their beliefs or claim a measure of the happiness they deserved and faced severe 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 a living, she had to pose as a man to survive (or get married, 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 to the genre as performance. After all, the actor who played Viola on stage during that time was a man, which made the entire performance a man acting as a woman acting as a man. If that doesn’t bend the genre, nothing will. The genre, 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 same countess she the Duke is romantically. chase.

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 Harper Lee’s famous classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel about southern racism, morality, and justice, we are led by a tomboyish Scout, who has grown up largely free of the feminine standards of propriety and courtesy that are often imposed on typical southern belles. She mainly has her father to thank, the wise and fair lawyer Atticus Finch. Scout is like Viola, in a sense, both behaviors defy what her gender demands that her gender be. Viola is supposed to wear women’s clothes and act like a woman, just like Scout. Scout is also supposed to be polite, prim and proper, not the rough and tumble tree-climbing preteen that she is. She abhors femininity, in fact. It’s something she chooses to object to, something she considers inferior to herself for most of the novel. Shakespeare’s Viola doesn’t speak out so directly against gender or being female (this is the Elizabethan era, after all), but her choice to dress as a man suggests a rejection of the feminine norms and demands that society has imposed on her. .

Both Viola’s and Scout’s rejection (however temporary or forced) of such norms clearly support this theory of genre as performance. For both characters, it’s something one can do or behave and change in an instant, unlike one’s sex, which today can be changed but not as easily or painlessly. Consider Scout’s musings on how the ladies of town, including her aunt, dress up in a veneer of polite propriety and strength after the tragic death of the falsely doomed Tom. During this time, Scout imitates her aunt Alexandra by assuming courteous propriety, 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.