Fashioning Gender: Introduction

Gender has taken over eighteenth-century studies. At least it must seem that way to both celebrants and critics. Only a short time ago an issue devoted to gender studies would have seemed novel and even radical; now we are accustomed to reading such articles. Why has gender rather suddenly become so important to eighteenth-century scholars? Certainly much of the reason has to do with the inspiration of the feminist movement for the generation of baby boomers who are now moving into positions of authority in academic departments, organizations, and journals. The gender politics taking place in our own professional and domestic spheres leads us naturally to pursue such issues in our research. However banal, when both spouses arrive home at 6:30, it is no longer clear who should start dinner and who should bathe the baby; who folds the clothes on top of the dryer and who gets to go outside for a jog. And if such is the case in conventional homes, those of us involved in less traditional lifestyles are often blazing new paths in terms of gender and sexuality. Our interest in gender issues, however, is not simply the result of our own preoccupations. As an analytical tool, gender not only makes us more aware about ourselves, but it has also unlocked a storehouse of insights and new questions about the eighteenth century.

Take Christoph Gluck’s immensely popular opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, which played in over twenty-five cities shortly after its first performance in Vienna in 1762. ¹ Here’s an old Roman story about a passionate young husband, still desperately in love with his wife who has just died. Moved by his songs of love and despair, the gods allow him to bring back his wife from the dead, but only if he can avoid gazing directly at her until she is completely returned to earth. Thus the plot revolves around the ability of Orfeo to hold his powerful sexuality in check. He must not embrace her or kiss her—he is forbidden even to look at her. The ability to regulate one’s passions, even to the point of denying them when they were the most intense, would have been read as an important mark of civility by early modern elites. ² So far so good. But Gluck wrote the part of Orfeo for a castrato, and the voice range is quite high. A story that is about the regulation of manly behavior is portrayed by one whose manhood has been curtailed. What did it mean for aristocrats to identify with a known castrato? Clearly, we simply don’t know enough about eighteenth-century gender roles and sexuality to understand how audiences viewed a castrato controlling a non-existent virility.

Nor are we likely to fully grasp it soon, because the answer depends less on the discovery of unknown sources and more on the development of new theoretical approaches and questions applied to what until recently have been marginalized sources. Of course, that work has begun already. In the recent books of Dena Goodman, Erica Harth, Thomas Laqueur, Londa Schiebinger, Kristina Straub (the list seems endless!), we can appreciate the extent to which ideas regarding gender and sexuality were highly contested during the eighteenth century. ³ The four articles presented in this issue reflect the diverse, dynamic, and interdisciplinary scholarship that now characterizes the field. Melissa Hyde’s portrayal of Boucher’s gender politics reminds us of Gluck’s Orfeo. Just as Gluck presented an Orfeo whose gender status was somewhat indeterminate, so Boucher purposively painted figures that sought to minimize gender differences. The mixing of sexual roles, Hyde imaginatively argues, highlighted the erotic impact of the scene for viewers of both sexes. Hyde is not suggesting, of course, that Boucher’s contemporaries could not tell the difference between men and women. Rather, Hyde claims Boucher chose to ignore such differences in his quest to display “grace, pleasure, and lyrical fantasy over physical strength and intellectual rigor.” When looking at a Boucher painting, we never question the sex of the subject, but we are led into a world in which the...