‘Ever more crossed and crossed’: cross-gender performance and violence in contemporary productions of Shakespeare’s comedies 2000-2019, a feminist queer reading

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between the performance of gender and the portrayal of violence in contemporary cross-gender productions of Shakespearean comedies from a self-consciously feminist and queer standpoint. The thesis analyses productions of five of Shakespeare’s plays that can be broadly described as comedies, produced between 2000-2019.The methodology for the research is based primarily in archival research and performance analysis, supplemented by analysis of play texts and critical reviews of theatre productions, and is guided by an interdisciplinary range of theoretical literature.

Two new methodological tools are developed in order to analyse cross-gender performance specifically: lenses of cross-gender performance, and spectrums of gender-y-ness. The lenses of cross-gender performance allows for an analysis how cross-gender performance is constructed out of layers of textual, embodied and staged semiotic meaning, and how audiences are asked to read through and between these layers. The spectrums of gender-y-ness are a method of visualising and diagramming individual performances of sex-gender-sexuality that go beyond binary or orthogonal methods of diagramming gender.

These tools are applied to the research material to analyse the conjunction of gender, violence and comedy in the performance of cross-gender Shakespeare, through a series of frames. Differing performances of masculinity and femininity are explored in relation to parody, performativity, and resistant laughter. Criminological theories are borrowed to analyse the representation of sexual violence, victims and offenders, and the weaponization of laughter against victims. The portrayal of vulnerability is shown to have complex impacts on representations of gender, sexuality and race in cross-gender performance. Queer theory provides a range of readings including identity-focused approaches, explorations of worldmaking techniques, and analysis of different ways of addressing the convention ofmarriage-as-happy-ending.

The feminist, queer approach shapes the research through a continuous awareness of and emphasis on the material, social and political conditions which shape gendered identity, and the need for constant re-evaluation and reconceptualisation of our understandings of these forces and the very concept of identity itself; an understanding of the need to keep difference in view and interrogate the politics of its construction; attention to nonnormative identities, relationships and sexualities, and what is oblique or out of line with normativity. One of the main arguments of the thesis is that queerness follows cross-gender performance, in multiple, contradictory and unpredictable ways. The research identifies the importance of intention and attention in shaping the different political implications of a production: cross-gender Shakespeare can be progressive, regressive and, perhaps most useful (from a feminist queer standpoint), productively uncomfortable.

Date of Award	Aug 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Lisa Fitzpatrick (Supervisor) & Victoria McCollum (Supervisor)