Download shakespeare*s play with gender

SHAKESPEARE’S PLAY WITH
GENDER
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We all are androgynous…each of us, helplessly and
forever, contains the other-male in female, female in
male, white in black and black in white.We are part
of each other. -Baldwin,James.
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What is Gender?
Gender is the social construction of Sex.
Sex refers to the biological differences between the
male and the female and the related differences in
procreative function but Gender is a matter of
culture.
It implies us to think of distinctly two different
bodies: the masculine and the feminine.
We discriminate a human being as either a masculine
or a feminine because of the language we speak
and the beliefs we inhabit.
And what emerges from all these definitions is a
hierarchical way of thinking about gender in which
the woman becomes the “other, the inferior in
comparison to her male superiors, politically and
culturally well established in society.”
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Residing in a patriarchal, strictly gendered society
of early modern England, Shakespeare took a very
daring stance in setting out to challenge the image
of a natural gender order.
What has inspired Shakespeare to subvert the
traditional norms of gender? In order to find answer
to this question, we can focus on two Facts:
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The Renaissance cultural ethos had not established a
fixed concept of one’s sexuality or physicality that could
dictate one’s being.
Shakespeare was himself greatly influenced by the
potent symbol of Queen Elizabeth, for she was in fact a
cultural anomaly whose femininity could not be
measured within the norms of gender boundaries.
Elizabeth was represented as a warrior woman, a
virago, who said to have a weak feeble body but heart
and stomach of a king.
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If we turn to the plots of Shakespearean plays, we will
notice that Shakespearean heroines, when dictated by
necessity, deny their internal femininity. Masculinity
surges up within Viola(Twelfth Night), Portia(The
Merchant of Venice) and Rosalind( As You Like It).All
became half male and half female in the process.
Androgynous characters are generally divided into
three types: physiological androgyny, behavioral
androgyny and psychological androgyny.
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For the Renaissance, masculinity implied Heroism.
Hence what finally emerges from all these speculations
is that many of Shakespeare’s male characters suffers
from various shortcomings that draw them back from
being ideal masculine entities while many of the female
protagonists do lack in conventional femininity.
The play Wright seems to assert that masculinity and
femininity are ever fluid concepts and that human
identity can be best imagined as an androgynous
being.
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THANK YOU