This is my body: gender, behaviour, drama and power.

Christina Beardsley considers historical examples of gender variant behaviour, highlighting power relationships in the construction of gender, and the role of drama in its deconstruction...

Sex in the ancient Greek city

The television series Sex and the City offers a female perspective on love, relationships, and sexual encounters, in a culture shaped by feminism and the contraceptive pill. It contrasts sharply with the ‘man’s world’ of Ancient Greece. Some women in the ancient world exercised power, but strictly within the household, with their husband’s consent, though mutuality between husband and wife was possible.

In ancient Greek society, mature married men could also engage in relationships with younger men, but French philosopher and architect Michel Foucault explains that, especially in the (earlier) classical period, careful protocols and disciplines – ‘askesis’: from which the word ‘ascetic’ derives – protected the young from exploitation, and reveal various assumptions about male power. For instance, good management of one’s household, and of a relationship with one’s lover, demonstrated fitness for civic responsibility. However, a mature man who perpetuated the youthful phase of being ‘the beloved’ was considered shameful, as he should have become the lover, initiating a youth into public life. ‘In the eyes of the Greeks, what constituted ethical negativity par excellence was clearly not the loving of both sexes, nor was it the preferring of one’s own sex over the other; it consisted in being passive with regard to the pleasures’ wrote Foucault. Such ‘passivity’, i.e. immoderation, or lack of self-control, whether in relation to women or boys, was considered ‘effeminacy’, but having previously played ‘the role of passive, obliging objects’ of desire to other men could undermine one’s future political prospects.

The exercise of erotic power over other men as a disqualification for political power is a demarcation of beauty/intimacy from civic office/politics experienced by women in the modern era. The normally, and ideologically, placid Stoic philosopher Epictetus harangues an epilated, coiffed and finely attired pupil, in an attempt to restore his rationality and fitness for civic society. Yet, just as ‘effeminate’ men today can arouse both unease and fascination, the ancient world was also beguiled by the combination of male and female in a single individual, as the many classical statues of Hermaphroditus, depicted with both breasts and a penis, show. According to the one sex model that prevailed then, physiologically, male and female are not very different; but their social status differed, and hence the anxiety when the two were blurred.

Renaissance ‘man’

A Renaissance writer, William Shakespeare was indebted to classical literature. His play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream echoes the Latin novel by Apuleius, The Transformations of Lucius or The Golden Ass which, incidentally, satirises the effeminacy of the Galli, priests of the goddess Cybele, whose initiation included castration.

A married man, Shakespeare wrote love poetry to another, younger, male, and to a female: continuity with the classical tradition of a man with a male lover that, far from undermining his masculinity, demonstrated his social status. Shakespeare’s plays are full of gender transitions, rendered yet more complex by the conventions of the Elizabethan stage, where a boy actor played the part of a girl, who may pretend to be a boy, and then offers to act the role of a girl, e.g. As You Like It. Note Shakespeare’s ability to light-heartedly explore gender, and its power dynamics, uniquely facilitated by an all-male cast, with female roles played by boy actors.

Once women began to perform female roles, the art of young men playing female roles was almost lost in Western professional theatre. Today, the closest approximation to Elizabethan theatre is Japanese Kabuki Theatre, where the onnagata (male actors playing female roles) tradition is strictly maintained. However, all-male theatrical productions never quite disappeared in England, due partly to the persistence of single-sex education. Peter Farrer considers the amateur boy actor Maurice Pollack (1885-1914), who specialised in female impersonation, ‘the nearest equivalent to an English onnagata that I had yet come across later than the seventeenth century’. Yet photographic illustrations in Farrer’s other books depict young men convincingly portraying women in Victorian, Edwardian and inter-war theatrical productions.

As well as a recent revival of all-male productions of Shakespeare’s plays, directors have been casting women in male roles in mixed-sex productions. Notable examples include Adrian Lester as Rosalind – 1991/1995, Mark Rylance as Cleopatra – 1999 and Olivia – 2002/2012; Fiona Shaw as Richard II – 1995, Kathryn Hunter as Lear – 1997 and Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero – 2000. However, modern productions usually fail to recreate the effect of the Elizabethan boy player, choosing instead to emphasise the comic, rather than depictions of erotic power, by casting mature men as leading ladies.

When youthful, androgynous actor Eddie Redmayne was cast as Viola in the Globe’s 2002 production of Twelfth Night, David Nicol noted that his ‘performance demonstrated that boy actors in cross-dressing comedies may be convincing as women – although paradoxically, they are more convincingly ‘female’ when wearing male costume’. This was also true of Tam Williams as Viola, ‘cross- dressed’ in grey jacket and trousers as the male page Cesario, in the 2007 production by all-male Shakespeare collective, Propeller. Nicol explains this phenomenon: ‘When the actor performs the role of a woman, it may not be easy to forget that he is a man; but when the same actor performs a woman who is learning to replicate the codes of masculinity, the focus on the artificiality of those codes means that the actual gender of the actor becomes obscured, and indeed irrelevant’. This deconstruction of gender, which made sense in terms of the one-sex model, where male and female are on a sliding scale, contrasts with the more recent and restrictive two-sex model, which regards male and female as fixed and gender transition as impossible.

Anthony Dawson sees the transvestite actor in Shakespearean England as ‘a polyvalent sign: on the one hand, he is a conductor of cultural anxiety about powerful, desiring women; but he also represents and enables the potential masculinity of women, thereby helping to empower them by showing the value of ‘acting like a man’’. The latter is easier to depict, as eroticism requires androgynous beauty and a subtlety absent from contemporary all-male performances. However, men performing, and thus defining, femininity (albeit female ‘masculinity’), is problematic, and women today can play powerful roles, male or female, like the all- female Get Over It Productions’ Macbeth at the Round House in 2009. This is not new: Sarah Siddons and Sarah Bernhardt both played Hamlet, but in the early seventeenth century women struggled for the right to play even female roles. The period 1580-1620 also saw a steady attack by preachers and polemicists on women who dressed as men in public.

Marriage in the Molly Houses

In the Classical-Renaissance paradigm, women and boys share a similar lack of status compared with men, who may be paramour to someone of either sex, or both sexes, without compromising their masculinity. The late Alan Bray believed that this changed at some point during the late seventeenth. Hitherto, those engaged in sexual relations with members of their own sex could reconcile themselves to their behaviour, despite religious and ethical prohibitions, largely because their actions were inconsequential in terms of their (gender) identity. The arrival of the two-sex model, which polarised male and female, seems to have altered that.

In north-western Europe, from about 1700 onwards, a group of adult males emerged who were attracted to other males, and whose behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and dress were considered effeminate by their contemporaries. ‘They were neither male nor female but a third gender that combined some characteristics from each of what society regarded as the two legitimate genders’. Here gender roles and behaviours are becoming exclusive compared to the earlier one-sex paradigm. Female cross-dressing in this era, Trumbach notes, was about passing safely in male occupations (social power), rather than being sexually attractive to other women (erotic power).

Rictor Norton’s book, Mother Clap’s Molly House, offers a detailed impression of life in the Molly Houses, the male brothels of eighteenth century London, where male prostitutes took female names, dressed in female clothes, enacted marriages with clients, and even simulated giving birth. Sexual relationships with other males had rendered the mollies (‘molles’ being Latin for soft) feminine. Their cross-gender behaviour – like the femme names for ‘unmanly’ schoolboys in Victorian children’s fiction, and, until recently, among some gay men, including ordinands at certain theological colleges – had become transgressive.

Writing of the seventeenth-century theatre, Garber claims that ‘Transvestism was located at the juncture of ‘class’ and ‘gender’, and increasingly through its agency gender and class were revealed to be commutable, if not equivalent.’ The mainly working– class mollies assumed titles like ‘duchess’: an enduring aspirational aspect of gender transition; for example, April Ashley’s marriage to a member of the English aristocracy, the Honourable Arthur Corbett. Ashley, a glamorous model, had erotic power, Corbett, social status. He achieved the annulment of their marriage in 1970, when the judge ruled that Ashley (and thus other male- to-female transsexual people) was male; a ruling that only makes sense under the two-sex model and not overturned until the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Corbett was himself a cross dresser, and Ashley’s description of his covert cross-dressing in male brothels in the 1960s resembles the eighteenth-century Molly Houses (2006: 160,180). Ashley’s own early career as a female impersonator suggests that theatre has remained socially accommodating to gender variance.

Drag/drab

The use of the word ‘drag’ to describe female impersonation is thought to be an acronym for ‘dressed as a girl’ and to derive from Elizabethan theatre. The modern term ‘Drag King’, for male impersonators, is preferable to ‘dressed as a boy’, which would contract as the unflattering ‘drab’ – which is hardly the effect.

As an art form, drag seems to have occurred among all social classes in Britain. In 1880s London, Boulton and Park, and most of their circle, were middle-class young men, with the exception of the aristocrat, Lord Arthur Clinton, who did not cross-dress, unlike the fictional Lord Southdown, who performs the female roles in the second charade-tableau in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. My nineteenth century namesake, the artist Aubrey Beardsley, wrote ambiguously of ‘going to Jimmie’s dressed up as a tart’, and drew himself as a wide-hipped Pierrot, while his actress sister Mabel appears in Sir Oswald Birley’s portrait dressed as an Elizabethan pageboy. Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) was inspired by the androgynous appearance and cross- gender behaviour of her upper-class lover, Vita Sackville-West. The eponymous hero/heroine, introduced as a young man in the Elizabethan period, changes gender during the eighteenth century; unconscious recognition, perhaps, that a significant shift in the construction of gender occurred then.

Might there be continuity between the working-class drag performances of the mollies, and later pantomime dames like Dan Leno (1860-1904), or the principal ‘boy’ played by a young woman? What about the female and male impersonators of the music hall era (for example, Rex Jameson, 1924-1983, who performed as the char, ‘Mrs Shufflewick’, and Vesta Tilley, 1864-1952), and the drag queens and drag kings of today’s pubs and clubs? Or even the cross-dressing at the stag night or rugby club dinner? If so it probably stems from social anxiety at the fixed roles and presentations of men and women in modern society imposed by the two-sex model of gender.

Popular performance

Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1991), documents the West’s enduring fascination with androgyny (from the Greek words for man and woman). Conceiving Western perception as primarily visual, related to what she calls the ‘pagan western eye’ that would reach its apotheosis in cinema, she revels in similarities across the centuries. Androgyny has been pervasive in recent popular culture, including musicians like Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Boy George, k.d. lang, Annie Lennox, and Grace Jones. This ‘camp’ approach to gender, where one can experiment without being labelled, is where the pre-modern world of Shakespeare’s theatre resembles the post- modern theory, expounded and developed by Judith Butler, that gender is performative, or acted out; the notion that female, feminine, male, masculine behaviours are learned rather than innate, and consolidated by practice and repetition.

When I was considering transition in 1997 I found an experimental space at the five-day ‘gender in performance’ Workshop led by Drag King, Diane Torr. It was a safe place to explore my gender, working from the inside outwards, from the unconscious, and emotions, through visualisation and physical workouts, to outward expression in posture and movement, and only then, through make- up, clothes and image. During the Workshop I became acutely conscious, and said so, of having lived much of my life in the head rather than in the body; presumably because to have fully inhabited my body would have exposed its lack of congruity with the way I felt ‘inside’.

Fleshing it out

Some forms of spirituality encourage the splitting of mind and body; even Jungian idealisation of androgyny as an internal balance of masculine and feminine can encourage avoidance for transgender people. Before accepting that I ought to transition, this psychic androgyny seemed attractive. Hearing someone had transitioned, I recall exclaiming: ‘they should be resolving this in their inner world.’ Gender, though, is not just about our inner world; it involves embodiment and relationships. Historically, this has entailed negotiating power dynamics and changing constructions of gender. The rise of the two-sex model, and its increasing and unthinking endorsement by Western Christianity, has made such negotiations exceptionally challenging for gender variant people. Transgender people highlight the limitations of that model, and the theological and counter-cultural importance of Christianity’s focus on being human, rather than male or female.

This is an extract from This is my body: Hearing the Theology of Transgender Christians edited by Christina Beardsley and Michelle O’Brien, available now in paperback, priced £14.99.