Shakespeare without men: gendered violence and genderqueer performance

Abstract

Between 2003 and 2016, director Phyllida Lloyd staged five productions – The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare’s Globe 2003, The Public Theatre 2016) and the Donmar Trilogy (BBC 2016) – with genderqueer casts. In this thesis, genderqueer casting is broadly defined as the casting of actors in roles in a way that subverts the gender of the character in the text. Specifically, I use ‘genderqueer’ to describe the casts of these four productions, which were billed as ‘all-female’ at the time. In this thesis, I examine instances of violence and gender performance in these productions. I combine the work of theatre theorists like Keir Elam, Elaine Aston, and George Savona with the foundational gender theory of Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, as well as more recent work, including writing by Nora Williams, Sawyer Kemp, Ambereen Dadabhoy, and Nedda Mehdizadeh, to approach Lloyd's productions from a trans and anti-carceral perspective.

I will investigate how genderqueer casting affects Shakespeare’s text and performance, as well as how genderqueerness intersects with other marginalities. Primarily, I will demonstrate the ways in which gendered violence is a key component of the stringent and arbitrary gender categories that delineate ‘male’, ‘female’, and ‘other’, and that its depiction by non-cis-male performers is a useful tool in highlighting the role of violence in the upholding of hegemonic norms. I will also examine these productions as sites on which liberation is contested – and sometimes left in the balance.