Gender Trouble in Twelfth Night

The emergence of queer studies in the academy has led to many influential rereadings of Renaissance works, including those of Shakespeare. ¹ While Twelfth Night continues to be one of the major textual sites for the discussion of homoerotic representation in Shakespeare, interpretive conclusions about the effect of same-sex attraction in this comedy are divided, especially in light of the natural “bias” of the heterosexual marriages in act 5. ² The relationship between Antonio and Sebastian has proven the most fertile ground for queer inquiry; for example, Joseph Pequigney recently has set out, in New-Critical fashion, to prove the “sexual orientation” of these two characters as unquestionably “homosexual” in a play whose “recurring theme” is “bisexuality.” ³ Although Pequigney’s observations are refreshing as well as important, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love” unproblematically applies contemporary constructions of sexual identity to an early modern culture in which the categories of homo- and bisexuality were neither fixed nor associated with identity. In fact, as I will argue, Twelfth Night is centrally concerned with demonstrating the uncategorical temper of sexual attraction.

The other main focus of queer study in this drama continues to be the relationship between the Countess Olivia and the cross-dressing Viola/Cesario, though critics, tellingly, have discussed the lesbian erotics that are integral to the first three acts of the play much less often. ⁴ In her recent Desire and Anxiety: The Circulation of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama, Valerie Traub has acknowledged the lesbian overtones of the erotic scenes between Olivia and Viola as part of what she calls the play’s “multiple erotic investments”; but her careful and ground-breaking study warns us that Viola’s homoerotic investment is not celebrated in the play and concludes that Twelfth Night is less “comfortably” open in its representation of the “fluid circulation” of desire than As You Like It. ⁵ In my view, the Olivia-Viola affair is more central to Twelfth Night than previously has been acknowledged. This centrality—along with the homoerotics found in relations between Antonio and Sebastian as well as between Orsino and his page—establish same-sex erotic attraction as a “major theme” in the play, to use Pequigney’s shopworn term. But this theme functions neither as an uncomplicated promotion of a modern category of sexual orientation nor, from a more traditional perspective, as an ultimately contained representation of the licensed misrule of saturnalia. ⁶ The representation of homoerotic attraction in Twelfth Night functions rather as a means of dramatizing the socially constructed basis of a sexuality that is determined by gender identity.

Judith Butler’s critique of the notion that there are fixed identities based on the existence of genital difference provides a useful model for understanding how Twelfth Night uses the vagaries of erotic attraction to disrupt paradigms of sexuality. In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that the cultural meanings that attach to a sexed body—what we call gender—are theoretically applicable to either sex. Initially, Butler questions the idea that there is an essential, prediscursive subjectivity that attaches to the biology of either male or female, arguing that the “production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural constructions designated by gender.” ⁷ In other words, what she calls the law—the cultural, social, and political imperatives of social reality—actually produces and then conceals the “constructedness” that lies behind the notion of an immutable, prediscursive “subject before the law” (2). Her attack on the concept of biological inherence is followed by an equally strong indictment of the “metaphysics of gender substance”—the unproblematic claim that a subject can choose a gendered identity, that the self can “be a woman” or a man (21).

In Bodies That Matter, Butler’s subsequent work, she partially retreats from this position of radical constructivism, returning to the sexed body by shifting the terms of the debate from the “construction” of “gender” through an interpretation of “sex” to an inquiry into the way regulatory norms “materialize” the sexed body, both in the sense of making it relevant and fixing or “consolidating...