Gender, Power, and Politics on the Early Modern Stage

20 Comments

  1. Analyzing the political realm always strikes me as hyper-patriarchal and absurdly obviously sexist. Even as women infiltrate the political sphere, the structures of gender and patriarchy permeate so profoundly that it affects the way their words are heard and everything the female politician does. In “The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary,” Karlyn Campbell analyzes the language and persona of Hillary Clinton and explains the strong reactions she elicits. Campbell quotes Henry Louis Gates Jr, saying that “Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the elite and the lumpen”(1). Having grown up in the conservative Midwest, I am certainly familiar with the act of Hillary Hating, and I found this article so helpful in understanding why people hate Hillary, and ultimately voted for Trump. Essentially what I took away was that there is no reference point for a female leader, and people today simply do not have the language or mental capacity to realize what a female leader would look like. Even Hillary herself has to step into coded masculine speech and demeanor in order to be taken seriously. I was struck by how much she is working tirelessly within the confounds of language, and Trump uses language so lazily and chaotically. In fact, he does not use the typical masculine coded rhetoric such as “argument, clarity of position, offering compelling evidence, and responding to competing views” (7). Except for responding to competing views, Trump mostly appears to be drawing on the masculine appeal of fearing and even hating women. Perhaps Trump’s most significant rhetorical appeal for the presidency was Hillary Clinton herself. He could tap into societal fear about power in the hands of women and somehow then perhaps seem like a safer and saner option to some.

    • great comments–like you, I found her focus on the gendered distribution of rhetorical requirements so helpful; it’s interesting to think about what does characterize Trump’s “macho” brand of discourse..

  2. I thought it was interesting how female sexuality was present in the story of Medusa, and that potential for sexuality being both villainized and celebrated at the same time. The figure of Adromeda, theoretically is not that different from Medusa, both beautiful virgins who many suitors want to marry. And yet, Medusa ends up punished and villainized because Poseidon rapes her, which to the minds of people and Minerva, makes her a sexual being. This idea of punishing the woman who has had sex regardless of the context (and in this case I don’t feel entirely comfortable classifying it as sex because it was rape) reminded me of the slut shaming of Hermione despite the fact that she was married and already a mother. It also reminded me of an aspect of the Hilary narrative that I was surprised none of the articles touched on, which is this weird blame for her husband’s affair. Kohr Campbell’s article touched on her sexual relationship to Bill made other politicians uncomfortable with the amount of power she held, but there was no reference to the
    affair and the aftermath of that which feels poignant. Part of people’s arguments for not liking her or not voting for her in the last election was that “she couldn’t keep her husband,” allowing for the blame of his infidelity to be her fault. Not only are women punished for their own sexuality–whether that is through premarital, marital, consensual or nonconsensual sex–they are also held accountable and punished for their partners’ sexuality. It seems like such a catch-22, because if society believes a woman is too sexual, she’s punished or shamed, and if society decides she’s not enough of a sexual being (based entirely on the actions on someone else) then she’s also punished and shamed, as if being cheated on is a character trait. It’s as if people that thought this way were relishing in an instance where she didn’t have control and was powerless to prevent her husband’s behavior and citing that as proof of her lack of qualifications to be president, where as Bill who actually cheated with someone who worked for him and was president at the time has not continued to face this sort of backlash.

    Like Gemma, I was also thinking about the ted talk and still had the same question I did on the first day of class. How do we normalize female anger? I am aware of and consciously fight against the notion that as a woman, i can’t be angry or have to keep peace, but at the end of the day, if I want to actually get something accomplished –no matter how emotionally salient– i have to be the calmest person in the room. So, I don’t know how to make female anger less taboo without sacrificing our ability to be successful in getting what we want in our patriarchal world and I would be curious if any authors provided concrete examples of how to do this.

    • excellent comments–you get to the heart of the issues with your focus on the paradoxical double bind of female sexuality, and I think the Medusa story, in which the victimized woman becomes the “monster” aggressor might help us think more deeply about that dynamic. Also really agree on the issue of anger–look forward to talking more about this!

  3. When reading Rebecca Traister’s piece, “Hold Your Temper/Hold Your Tongue,” I was reminded of Soraya Chemaly’s TED Talk on the power of women’s anger that we watched on the first day of class. In her talk, Chemaly highlights the emotions that women are allowed to express and not allowed to express: a line that becomes even more extreme when it comes to women of color and of lower socioeconomic statuses. “In anger, we go from being spoiled princesses and hormonal teens to high maintenance women and shrill, ugly nags,” Chemaly states in her talk. “We have flavors though,” she notes, “Pick your flavor: are you a spicy hot Latina when you’re mad? Or a sad Asian girl? An angry black woman? Or a crazy white one?” This racialized policing of anger that Chemaly highlights we see play out horrifically in the case of Barbara Lee. “I cant let my emotions comes out because otherwise they’ll say ‘There is this angry black woman again. She’s always angry about something, here she goes again,'” Lee recalls when thinking back on her back-and-forth with Pete Sessions. As Traister accounts, Lee did indeed remain remarkably calm and collected in her exchange with the Texas Republican chairman, but this was less of her own choice than it was a necessary action done in order to tip toe around Pete Sessions’ fragile masculinity and protect her public appearance as a level-headed politician. Whilst a white man such as Sessions would appear to have “civic virtue” if he were to express anger (in the words of Chemaly), a black congresswoman would be pidgeon-holed as an “angry black woman.” What appalled me the most about this entire situation was the committee’s response to Lee’s restraint: “They expected me to be the angry black woman, okay?” Lee remarked with disbelief, “They were applauding me for not being the angry black woman, and I wanted to cuss them out. Because that was the implication: you were so cool, you were so restrained, you handled it so well, and toward the end you were a little emotional but you were great.”

    In order to avoid being called “crazy,” “mad,” “unstable,” or a “medusa,” powerful female politicians such as Lee, Clinton, AOC, and Warren have to play the subservient, mute role that we see Andromeda play in Ovid’s tale of Medusa. Yet what I find so interesting about this comparison is that even if they were to speak up and take on the role of “Medusa,” scaring away men with snakes coming out of their head, their rage would still be entirely justified. What I hadn’t actually realized before reading Ovid’s myth was that Medusa was only transformed into the terrifying monster because she was raped: a fact that makes the accusations of Hillary being a Medusa-like figure even more poignant. How is anger in women ever going to be allowed if even the most justified rage will turn us into monsters?

    • excellent synthesis of many things here, Gemma, and I’m glad you took the conversation back to Chemaly, too–we’re attempting here to integrate the material in a full-circle kind of way, so that’s really helpful. Yes, I completely agree about the anger-bind–there is–it seems–no way for the woman to express legitimate and justified anger (and Lee’s is so justified) without being demonized. And the more fully the woman is in the public sphere, the truer that is.

  4. After finishing the Rebecca Traister piece, I was left confounded with the tension between a politics of respectability (that many women are pushed into and that some use as a tactic) and a radical politics that instead aims to explode or destabalize or destruct (more in line with Edelman’s queer negativity from last class or Halberstam’s anti-social politics I suppose). In using the example of Barbara Lee, I was struck by the way she was able to reconfigure the forcing into a politics of respectability—Lee saying “I’ve got to be logical and coherent,” —as a strategy that allows for Lee to both get her point across and to “handle life without going ballistic.” I personally feel like this type of politic perpetuates a system that forces women to shrink one’s emotions and thus one’s self into a mold that appeases men and keeps women from being ever too much, of anything, even themselves. Being totally “ballistic” all of the time sometimes feels like the only natural response for being a woman who is awake to our world. But that feeling, coupled with Lee’s statements made me think about the tensions between how to live one’s politics vs. how to make a politics livable. It makes perfect sense to feel the impending insanity of living in a patriarchal world but in turn I suppose it also makes sense to in some forms mitigate that effect. We all know that which ever route you take (respectability, negativity, radicalism, working within the system), men won’t really care–we still be called hysteric, a bitch, medusa, etc. So how do you create a politics that you can live? Perhaps because I read Beard’s piece following Traisters, I was looking to her for an answer. But I don’t think I found much of one. The first half of the essay left me a bit in a panic–she was talking too much about women outside of power and female exteriority—it sounded to me like she would just be satisfied with women being pulled inside, into the interior. Why not explode! the nature of power in the first place, I was thinking. She got there eventually. But it took to long, I felt defeated already. Furthermore, her only actual formulation of reconstuting what power is was to treat it “as a verb” not as a possession. To me, power already is an action. It is something that is always being constructed, negotiated, seized. Does anyone ever have it, or is it a constant attempt to control or take it? It is this action of seizing/negotiating power (and thus reality) that creates an entire feedback cycle of anxious and incessant regulation, surveillance, domination that construct the present as we live through it. I finished Beard feeling like she gave no real jumping off point on how to reconsider how power operates–save perhaps for her opening on Herland. It’s utopic–a place for women-identified-women to commune, to be able to construct themselves in relation to themselves rather than in relation to men. What would anger look like not in reaction to or mirroring male rage and domination? How could we feel, relate, move through the world in relation to each other? I’m not going to take the stance of a separatist movement here but it just makes me think about one way perhaps to think about power while we are all part of the web it spins—to use our exterior positions to our advantage–to create rhythms with each other in the present—to destroy old notions of reality and create ourselves, and the world, anew in that process.

    • These are such great questions and ideas, Amy–I hope we can fold them into the conversation today. I think you make a good point about beard’s piece–she articulates the problems very well, and the symptoms of those problems, but she seems to fizzle when it comes to articulating a response. I also wondered how you might feel about Cavendish’s piece in relation to some of this–she creates a kind of “herland,” but then can’t quite imagine how to continue within a patriarchal society.

  5. I found Karlyn Kohr Campbell’s connection to Butler’s idea of femininity as a performance very relevant to both past and current politics. As part of this performance, women are expected to articulate in a particular fashion — however, as Campbell discusses, Hillary Clinton does not speak in this specific style. Campbell writes “…it is likely that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s over espousal of a non-traditional role would excite particularly powerful responses. Based on the analysis of the women speakers of the past and present, I conclude that her rhetorical style exacerbates this problem significantly” (page 14).

    Unfortunately, I find Campbell’s statement accurate. It appears that ‘Hillary Hating’ has stemmed from people’s incredulity at Clinton’s tendency to be no nonsense and direct in her manner of verbal communication. It’s helpful to compare Clinton to Michelle Obama — many would argue that the latter espouses the traditional female characteristics. She generally assumes a calm demeanor, smiles often in public settings, and exhibits a motherly persona. Her tone is usually personal and charismatic, and she is rarely known to rebuke or attack her political opponents. This differs from Clinton, who many view as impersonal and lawyer-like. Additionally, she is known to confront and debate her adversaries publicly.

    I would like to clarify that there is nothing wrong with the way that Clinton handles herself. She is an extremely important figure in politics, having served as First Lady for eight years, a New York Senator for eight years and Secretary of the State for four years. What I aim to bring up with my previous statements is people’s willingness to scrutinize her due to her lack of a feminine performance — it speaks to a larger theme of the public automatically criticizing and blaming women who do not adhere to society’s standards for them. Though I will not be in class today, I would love to hear what other members of our class think about this at a later time.

    • great observations, Faraz, and I particularly liked your comparison between Michelle Obama and Clinton–the ways in which the former has managed to negotiate the demands on her in a different way. I agree with your stance here–that Kohrs seems right in her diagnosis of at least some of what goes wrong publicly with HC, and yet we can’t bring ourselves to say she “ought” to do a better job of performing her femininity, either.

  6. I found Kellett’s article to be a very compelling and insightful reading of the play. In particular, I found her argument that the lack of defined lesbianism for the women in the Convent of Pleasure is what deconstructs compulsory heterosexuality (ie patriarchal heteronormativity) very convincing. Kellett states, “The play questions rather than upholds male/female and homo/heterosexual binaries that reinforce oppressive hierarchies, instead demanding new conceptions of identity” (430). Cavendish’s blurring of binaries altogether, rather than displaying opposition to the norm as the resolution to the conflict is what gives the convent a real power above the patriarchy, and thus conquers the notions of “binary” and “identity” through performativity. Cavendish “complicates the very identity categories on which heterosexuality relies to assure its dominance” (340) further in the very performance of the play, as the two characters who kiss are intended to be played by two women. The fact that the character of the prince(ss) is performed by a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman emphasizes the performativity of gender on a meta-theatrical level; an audience must follow the established indicators of gender presented on the stage, but without the context the play provides that this is in fact a character dressing up so as to embody a certain identity, one would not be able to properly identify who the character (ie what their gender) is. Thus, Cavendish presents gender as ambiguous, malleable, and available to anyone, so as to deconstruct the oppositional binary.

    I find this especially revolutionary, since I feel that liberal discourse in our current culture promotes a lot of rhetoric that seeks to be anti-heterosexual and/or anti-male by taking an oppositional stance with negative consequences. For example, anti-heterosexuality promotes bisexual-erasure (varying from casual to explicit) within the queer community. This is partly due to resentment of certain kinds of privilege one has access to in a liminal position, partly due to of one’s personal desires for a specific expression of gender through a partner’s sexuality, and partly due to one’s questioning of their own validity as a member of the community when identifying as liminal. Kellett states, “Cavendish’s characters cannot escape the power relations in which they are embedded, but they can performatively resist them, rendering heterosexual hegemony not a stable structure but a flexible one that breathes and morphs with its constituents’ reiterative discourse” (436). In this way, I think that Cavendish’s portrayal of gender and sexual ambiguity could help progress our understanding of gender and sexuality today.

    On the other hand, anti-male rhetoric perpetuates the patriarchy by re-asserting, rather than deconstructing the gender binary, and often neglects other oppressive and intersectional factors such as race and class. A classic model of this is white feminism (which for the most part, is also exclusive on the basis on class, sexuality, and gender). It’s interesting that while Cavendish proves theories of equality through “eccentric” portrayals of gender and sexuality, she fails to get to the heart of the patriarchy by explicitly upholding wealth and power inequality through “male language of property ownership” (431). Thus, patriarchal methods are slightly re-purposed and ultimately keep power in the hand of some individuals, regardless of gender—similar to what we see today through white feminism. We can read the ambiguous nature of the prince(ss)’s gender identity as the patriarchy’s persistence, which unless completely dismantled, will continue to privilege certain individuals through a system of binaries, even as other binaries are deconstructed. While Kellett states that “Cavendish subtly suggests their resistance to this seemingly stable patriarchal universe” (432), the extent to which Cavendish was willing to deconstruct the patriarchy is clear from the beginning, when Lady Happy imagines a utopia and brings a flock of servants with her to fulfill it, thus modifying, rather than upending patriarchal methods.

    • excellent work, Maya! This is a very thorough reading of the sexual and gender politics of the play, as well as a shrewd reflection on how the issues pertain to some of our struggles around these issues today. I completely agreed with your sense of her effort to sidestep a binary separatism (outside/inside; hetero-homosexual), but also with your critique of the convent’s failure to address the economic locations of power.

  7. I was deeply compelled by Kellet’s argument on the showcasing and valuing of queer performativity in Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, finding the ways in which she linked the theories of Edelman and Butler to examine the concepts of stability, resignification, and identity most intriguing. In the piece, she complicates and expands Butler’s contention of a phenomenological subject by asserting that performance, as seen in the play, is inherently performative, linking what Butler had previously opposed as distinct categories. In doing so, Kellet is able to argue that instead of performance creating a stable subject within a theoretical context, it, when coupled with performativity, deconstructs the concept of a stable identity, not just in the material conceptions of the body, but in the discourse that produces such bodies as well. In queering the concept of performance by putting it up against its own limits, she states that the play is ‘able to complicate the very identity categories’ that produce and make visible certain subjects (such as a homosexual one within a heterosexual economy).
    While I found this argument compelling, there were a few points that I am not sure I entirely agree with or fully understand. I think my hesitation comes from her employment of Edeleman’s theory of queer negativity as always inherent disturbing identity, and never itself an identity at all. While I do think that queerness exists in the world and the play in this nature, I also see it functioning as a productive space for the resignification of bodies–specifically women’s bodies. It is through this process of ‘the power of bodies to rearticulate themselves’ as what calls into question the stability of hegemony in the first place. This is exactly why things like drag, as Butler would argue, or, in this sense the play, contain a subversively productive value. I do not think that this productivity has to be stable—as it can be immaterial, discursive, and flowing—and thus I disagree with Kellet’s argument about Butler. It seems to me against what she many times says about the value of women rearticulating their own bodies in this discursive space they create for themselves. I feel as if her argument is more in line with someone like Deluze, who would say that desire is productive (as she does touch on the productive force of pleasure in the piece), and that the women, through the process of resignifcation, are constantly reconstructing themselves, in infinite assemblages within the space they create. I don’t buy that resignification has to align with stability, and I think looking at it in terms of assemblages is helpful to see this. I think that’s what Butler is perhaps arguing, and Edelman’s conception of queer-as-lack leaves little room for this potential. I suppose a counter-argument to this could be that disturbance or deconstruction is a form of creation, but I would say that way Edelman posits queerness’ negative potential is not in line with what Kellet is arguing throughout the piece about the productive force of resignification within the play. I find the focus on pleasure as productive, creation as assemblage, and perfomance as reinscription much more compelling and in line with her thesis…but perhaps that is just because I find Edelman uninspiring, unproductive, and just a bit boring.

    • this is great, Amy–a very sophisticated untangling of the complicated threads of identity in the play (and the article). I tend to agree that the presentation of queer as only available for negative, deconstructive purposes rather than productive ones is unnecessarily limiting, and the re-signification doesn’t have to (indeed really doesn’t) imply stability. I think this is particularly helpful way of thinking about the little plays within plays that take up a surprising amount of room in the convent’s “space.”

  8. In her article, Katherine Kellett writes “The ‘performances’ in the convent…are…’performative’ in that they unveil the contingent nature of patriarchy, of identity, of bodies themselves” (page 423). I feel that The Convent of Pleasure is the first play we have encountered that includes explicit tones of homosexuality integrated into the plot. It presents an active effort to oppose the patriarchal concept of marriage, or in other words, the expectation that a man and a woman will marry and settle down.
    In the second scene of the first act, Lady Happy says “Men are the only troublers of women, for they only cross and oppose their sweet delights and peaceable life; they cause their pains but not their pleasures.” I’m especially intrigued by ‘sweet delights and peaceable life’ — this seems to be represent the impure thoughts that many women may have, but are forced to suppress. Lady explicitly cites men as the reason for women’s troubles, giving the reader the sense that this play will present women in an empowering manner. For the majority of the text, it does. Earlier, Kellett writes “Queerness does not describe the women at the convent, but instead represents their ability to resignify their bodies and disrupt the coherence of any system that attempts to regulate them (page 422). The relationship between Lady Happy and Princess exhibits a dynamic that readers of Margaret Cavendish’s generation were not used to being exposed to. By breaking the heteronormative cycle, these two characters set an example of freedom for other members of the convent to do what they choose with their own bodies.
    However, I find it a little contradictory that the Princess is actually a Prince — it appears to shift the message of empowering women’s bodies to hiding who you truly are. I’m curious to hear what others in our class think about this.

    • Well done Faraz–you point to the central tension in this text; on the one hand Cavendish is doing all these experimental things with gender, identity, sexuality in the discursive realm of the convent, and then in turns out that there has been a “man” in the convent all along…? what is she getting at here? More later!

  9. There were numerous instances in the play in which blurring happened between oppositional binaries, similar to when Kellett refers to the “blurring of the homo/heterosexual binary” (Kellett 429). One of things I noticed is reality vs. imagination. I thought that Cavendish sometimes makes it unclear whether or not the character in the play are still playing their parts in their different plays within the play or whether they are back to their normal characters, i.e. as Princess and as Lady Happy. In the different characters that the Princess and Lady Happy embody in their ‘metaplays,’ each perform heteronormative gender roles. The Prince(ss) always dresses as a man (as a shepherd, or a sea god) and Lady Happy always dresses as herself i.e. a woman. In Act V.I, however, none of them are engaging in a metaplay. Yet, the Prince(ss) is still dressed as a man even though their last metaplay is already over (as the stage directions specifically say on the last scene of Act IV: “The SCENE Vanishes” (Cavendish 243)). Here, the line between imaginary and real becomes blurred. Cavendish, here, might be pointing to the performativity of each role, especially the Prince(ss)’, and the fact that Lady Happy is forced to play along, to also perform as the heterosexual partner, in this heteronormative activity.

    I think what the adviser states in Act V.II also refers to the Prince(ss) and Lady Happy, in that they “only wooed in Imagination but not in Reality” (Cavendish 245). The distinction between reality and imagination is contingent on which character one is reading. If we see things from the Prince(ss)’ perspective, the reality is something privy to him alone–the fact that s/he is actually a man crossdressing as a woman–and is operating with the knowledge that both him/her and Lady Happy are participating in a heteronormative activity. In this Foucoldian “knowledge is power” idea, the Prince(ss) monopolizes the situation unbeknownst to both the audience and Lady Happy. If we read it in Lady Happy’s perspective, however, the reality becomes queered. She believes that the Prince(ss) and her are partcipating in a homosexual act, but also complicated by the Prince(ss)’ doubled and reversed tranvestism. What is imaginary to her is the Prince(ss)’ performance of a man, while this same act is the reality for Prince(ss). This discrepancy between what each character perceives as reality and imaginary (before the revelation of the Prince as male) shows that both Lady Happy and the Prince(ss) are imperatively bound to perform. The Prince(ss), in accordance to Lady Happy’s belief that s/he is a woman, performs the role of a female lover. Lady Happy, in accordance with the Prince(ss)’ unknown reversed transvestism, participates in this heterosexual performance.

    • very interesting ideas here Isabella, particularly on the ways in which the imagination/reality binary affects the performance of sexuality–is the kiss Lady H enjoys any less “queer” because the princess is in “reality” a prince if she believes him to be a woman? I do think it’s important to note how late the cross-dressing plot is revealed–and that the cast of characters lists “Princess” and not “Prince.”

  10. I found Kellett’s discussion of the lack of corporeal form in the play to be interesting in instances beyond what she discussed. Her focus was on the queering of heterosexual resistance that Cavendish achieves by not creating a purely oppositional space, instead “to challenge the systems of power that try to define the contours of women’s lives and limit them to heterosexual marriage” (Kellet 436). I really liked this idea of this being used as a form of resistance against thinking in a binary of sexuality, but when applied to class in the play it works differently because the lack of corporeal form causes the theoretical of class to be emphasized further. It felt notable to me that the moment when the Princess and Lady Happy kiss for the first time, the first active demonstration of an erotic relationship between the two of them, occurs when they are dressed as shepherd and shepherdess. The discrepancy between their existence as lovers in their actual class state where they both dressed as women and did not have a sexual relationship and that of their performance as shepherds seemed to indicate a sexualized portrayal of the lower class and also a perpetuation of heterosexual norms within the class. This “bad” thing that they’ve done, according to Madame Mediator later, only occurs when they are dressed as lower class, and they only felt comfortable kissing when dressed in this way, perhaps indicating the presumed acceptance of more untethered sexuality within this class. During the scene that follows, the princess pushes the value of heterosexual relationships which Lady Happy sort of rejects through her valuing the immaterial aspects of people rather than the body. Again, this is the only context within the convent where this type of rationale is being presented, which feels related to class, since the gender element is removed through the lack of corporeal form. The maypole celebration of fertility and marriage was being celebrated through the lens of heterosexuality, which seemed related to the reliance of farmers and shepherds on the heterosexual system, because often serve their work force, and that system would fall apart without consistent reproduction and the family unit curated by heterosexual norms. Thus, there’s an increased pressure amongst the farming class to instill the idea that a woman’s “purpose is to participate in this ‘transmigration’ of bodies by sexually reproducing” (Kellet 431).

    • interesting thoughts, Colleen. I agree that the class element in Cavendish’s play requires comment–Lady Happy seems to dismiss the realities of lower class women, who she says “are only fit for men”–although I wonder if Cavendish actually intends this ironically, given what happens later in the play. At any rate, it is interesting that she uses the pastoral as the genre in which the collapse back into heteronormative structures occurs. I agree with your analysis about class and pastoral, and yet at the same time there is a long history of “queer” pastoral in which homosexual love is the theme…

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