The Brontes have been 'queered'

Different times. But I would agree with you. I pointed out that the boys were also prostituted. That dressing as women is a gay trope is also true. But for the audience watching the play - and suspending disbelief which must be done to watch any performance - the female roles were female. They all probably knew the boys were prostituted and certainly knew some men enjoyed dressing up in women's clothes. Generally they let everyone get on with it, as long as the Queens' peace was kept.
The convention probably stems from the Church in England. The Renaissance (as opposed to the Middle Ages) was a time when misogyny grew and women's rights (I speak only of England) diminished e.g. Blanche Beauchamp could inherit her father's earldom (Warwick) in the fifteenth century (and bestow it in marriage on her husband - Richard Neville, the Kingmaker, since you ask - but the property was hers) but Anne Stanley could not inherit the earldom of Derby on her father's death in 1594 (though she did inherit his right to the throne, two/three Queens Regnant having solidified the principle that the throne could pass through women as well as men).

You can replace famously with allegedly if you like. But I don’t think many question was bi? The sonnets addressed to a man - “fair youth”; the sheer volume of homosexual puns and bawdy; the male characters in close relationships with “fair youths” who are women disguised as boys.

Going by the text, I think Iago is in love with Othello not Desdemona, and jealous of her not O. He shows very little interest in D & has few scenes with her. The whole hankerchief plot is to get Othello’s attention and keep hold of him. The play has the most homosexual innuendo and references of all the plays that I have noted.

The boy actors were extensively trained to both speak and walk like women, and act as women (stereotypes, I know!). Though the audience knew that boys and young men played the female parts yet they accepted that the role was female. It is difficult for us to understand that since women (in England) could not go on stage the use of boy actors was totally without innuendo. The Nurse is comic because she is a comic part. The Duchess of Gloucester, berating her husband, as she does penance for treason against Henry VI, is not comic and never was - but was nevertheless played by a boy and not a woman.

So silly and pointless 🙄 And no, their “gender” wasn’t “hotly disputed”. It was their sex, and their sex was the reason they faced sexism.

I’m as terf as they come but imo S uses the construct of “disguise” to explore
gender and sexuality. His own sexuality was famously fluid

Was it? I thought that we don't have enough information about Shakespeare (starting with how he spelled his name) to make statements as definitive as that.

I think it's more that they treat sex and gender as exactly the same thing except in the very specific scenario of a person wanting to adopt a cross sex identity.

Basically, the rules change to let special people slip through the door but bang shut again before we can ask obvious questions like "if some women are going to be male, shouldn't we re-look at all the Women's stuff that was based on the assumption all women are female in case we need to tweak it to fit a mixed sex group? And shouldn't we check whether some of this Women's stuff is actually just female stuff and should remain so?"

Boy actors in the 16th and 17th centuries often graduated to acting male roles once too old to play women.

Joseph Taylor, for instance, started as a child actor in the first decade of the 17th century. Once older he remained in the acting profession and developed into an important leading man, replacing Richard Burbage in the King's Men company. He played Hamlet, Othello, and all the major Shakespearean roles.

I thought the whole point of this incoherent dribble is that you CAN'T tell other people what they are you can only say what YOU are?

Presumably this courtesy is not extended to dead women, because just like alive women, their purpose is to serve the cause. It's the only consistent feature of this entire clown car is that women exist to serve.

And who came up with this convention? Men. Men who chose to exclude women from public life and banish them to the domestic sphere, while in the theatre cast boys as women whom they also engaged with sexually in real life. (I mean exploited of course).

Underlying much of men’s endeavours - whether military or sport or art for example - is a not particularly latent homoeroticism.

Within homosexuality there has always been a stream of men who like to dress as women and experience their attraction to men in female garb. Which is distinct from the autogynephilic cross-dressing of straight men.

It seems strange to me to insist there’s no ambiguity of gender (or sexuality) in a boy playing a woman acting in love with a man playing man; or as in Shakespeare - a boy playing a woman dressed as a man acting in love with a man.

Whatever next? Hadrian’s Wall is queer or something?

Oh.

I’m as terf as they come but imo S uses the construct of “disguise” to explore
gender and sexuality. His own sexuality was famously fluid.

I think everyone is confused about everything in his plays: who they are, who they’re in love with, their sexuality, and the gender of the person they’re in love with. Women fall in love with women dressed as men, women dressed as men fall in love with men, and men have bromances with women dressed as men. Viola and Rosalind are not confused as to their gender but they enjoy exploring their male personas and confusing their lovers.

Derailment : In Singapore my niece went to a Learnwell nursery and there was a Get Well Clinic nearby. Alas no Bakewell pudding nor Sleepwell mattress shops. It would have been so fun if the neighbourhood was full of these silly names.

Exactly @Startingagainandagain

They did publish under different names but that had nothing whatsoever to do with exploring gender identity...

It was simply because as women they would not have been taken seriously as writers by publishers or the general public at the time.

It is awful to try to rewrite history like this and it betrays the memories of these writers.

Not to mention that there are many examples of celebrated female writers who were gay or bisexual and they should be the ones highlighted when discussing the topic of gender, creativity and sexuality.

You see, it's the anachronistic approach we see all the time now. It totally infuriates me.

Imposing today's obsessions on the past demeans- totally demeans- and distorts-their achievements.

Yes they took androgynous noms de plume, but as anyone knows who has the slightest interest knows that was a way to circumvent the sexism of the time. Their themes were not 'womanly' and they knew it, so stood little chance of publication if submitted in their real names.

But they stood by their art. They were trail blazers, all of them, in different ways.

To suggest otherwise, or even infer it, is utterly ludicrous. Totally ashamed of the Brontë society.

But as another poster perceptively observed, maybe they have boxes to tick on grant applications.

It does everyone a disservice. The authors more than anyone. I can only imagine Charlotte's wry and ascerbic comments on this lunacy.

Bwa ha ha 🤣

We the audience are complicit in this cruel bullying, and we should own this, make a stand , and demand that Bottom is given the opportunity to be himself, both to celebrate his assness and embrace and be embraced for his bravery in coming out of the stable

Surely Bottom was just trying to bring his hole self to work?

The existence of Minnie Gertrude Ellis Jeffreys doesn't make 'Ellis' a recognisably unisex first name in the 19th century any more than her mother's name, Elizabeth Anne Mann Corker, means that 'Mann' was a unisex name.

It wasn't unheard of for boys to be given surnames as first names, sometimes their mother's maiden name or another family name. I haven't come across it for girls. (The literary among us may note Linton Heathcliff and Pitt Crawley.) Middle names, yes.

Regardless, ascribing gender identity nonsense to 19th century women on the basis of pseudonyms used to hide their sex is ludicrous and anachronistic and I'm glad they're getting pushback for it.

Add in a pink version and Bob's your new 'auntie'.

An unfortunate misprint, A Womb of One’s Own was what she meant to write, but no one spotted it until the first copies had been sent out for review, by which time it was too late. An object lesson to us all to be very careful with articulation whether we are dictating our masterpieces to slightly deaf shorthand typists, or using voice activated word programmes.

'For we think back through our mothers, if we are women'.

Seems someone took the idea of author-matrilineage a little too literally!

True. Woolf oscillated between models of androgyny and essentialism constantly throughout her writing. That opposition is starkly illustrated in A Room of One's Own as opposed to Three Guineas, to cite two very obvious examples.

Her own sexuality also likely informs her best-known essays and some of her novels. Of course we can't know anything about Shakespeare, other than a possible sexual ambivelence detectable in his writing.

But this has little to do with what's now come to be thought of as gender identity. If Foucault is right, and our gendered 'subject positions' vary vastly between historical time and geographical space, then such questions would simply have been irrelevant in those times anyway. As would, for instance, the idea of childhood.

'These hostile comments are bullying our staff'. No, it is not 'bullying' it is people not agreeing with you, just the same as any other disagreement on a point of literary or historical interpretation. Live with the disagreement and/or refute their arguments if you choose to do so.

I am pretty sure Charlotte Bronte herself would have disagreed vehemently with this shite and been pretty good at putting her thoughts into words. I wonder if they'd have slapped her down too.

An unfortunate misprint, A Womb of One’s Own was what she meant to write, but no one spotted it until the first copies had been sent out for review, by which time it was too late. An object lesson to us all to be very careful with articulation whether we are dictating our masterpieces to slightly deaf shorthand typists, or using voice activated word programmes.

I would also like to take this opportunity to celebrate Shakespeare’s little recognised attempt to bring Therian culture into the mainstream of popular theatre. People see Bottom in his asses head as a figure of fun, but no one acknowledges the inner pain and despair of a soul in transition whose only way of expressing his true identity for a few brief moments is to allow himself to be ridiculed and mocked by other characters. We the audience are complicit in this cruel bullying, and we should own this, make a stand , and demand that Bottom is given the opportunity to be himself, both to celebrate his assness and embrace and be embraced for his bravery in coming out of the stable.

Brilliantly done @MagpiePi , and this is also a beguiling description in spite of the mockery.

You could work for J Walter Thompson as well as be a Rainbow garnerer for museums.

For a moment I thought there might actually be a Bakewell Pudding Museum, but alas it seems not.