The Brontes have been 'queered'

[biddyboo]

For Pride month, the Bronte Parsonage museum has posted a number of Facebook posts exploring the Brontes and 'gender identity'

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/eGENRmGQPkz7omY5/

The posts talk about the Brontes using 'androgynous' pseudonyms, rather than the male pseudonyms they were necessitated to use due to the sexism of the times they lived in 😕

It hasn't gone down well. Comments were disabled, and the museum posted about commitment to equality and diversity and not tolerating bullying and hatred (I haven't seen evidence of this, just a lot of people outraged about history being rewritten to suit a narrative).

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.

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.

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

Oh.

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.

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.

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 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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

His own sexuality was famously fluid

He may have been attracted to men/a man as well as being married to a woman. That would make him possibly gay (lots of gay men lived normal heterosexual-seeming lives in the past) or bi - not "fluid". Our understanding of his sexuality may well be fluid and/or uncertain. It doesn't mean he was.

And yes there may have been some homosexual-themed joking and visual comedy in some of the scenes where boys are playing women - though as PPs say, not all, as boys would also play serious dramatic or tragic parts like Gertrude or Hermione.

But what does that have to do with gender identity? Homosexuality really has been around forever. Queer theory, and "identifying as" a sex you are not in some kind of mystical way that means other people are supposed to believe you literally are the opposite sex (as opposed to wearing a disguise for logical reasons), have not "always been here" at all. Shakespeare, like Charlotte Bronte, would have had no truck with someone's idea of themselves as the opposite sex trumping their actual sex. People's actual sex was core to the stories.

Androgenous and unisex don't mean the same thing. Unisex means have no sex markers, while androgenous means having characteristics of both sexes. So were the Brontes' literary monikers unisex or androgynous? I'm a bit confused after reading this thread.

@JustSpeculation
I think they were male names, but with just enough ambiguity for the Bronté sisters to believe that they had not practised a deception on their readers.

There may not be a Bakewell Pudding Museum but I can recommend the Bakewell Pudding Shop (on its pages you will find a brief history of the eponymous pudding, and the difference between a Bakewell Pudding and a Bakewell Tart).
https://www.bakewellpuddingshop.co.uk/

There is also the Bakewell Old House Museum for those who prefer the genuine museum experience
https://www.oldhousemuseum.org.uk/

FWR field trip anyone??😁

This is another example of the appaling treatment of women. The trans movement will not allow any female heroine (history or arts) to be female. They did the same repugnant maligning of Joan of Ark, claiming she was trans. In their perverted mindset any female who has acheieved anything of note must really be male. Stonewall has a lot to answer for.

The only reason they chose sexless names, was because they wouldn't be published under their own female names. The trans movement have no scruples or sense. They won't miss a trick to promote their deceitful ideology.

I think we need Cunk to do a mockumentary on queer history. She could do some cracking interviews with these museum professionals writing all this bollox.

Cunk on Terf

@Flickersy

You didn't say anything about their legacy being queered. You said the Brontës had been queered

You are seriously splitting hairs here...

But her given name wasn't Ellis. It was Minnie.

You're the one who brought up Virginia Woolf when everyone else was talking about Shakespeare...

I think I was the first to mention Shakespeare. Introducing another writer doesn’t justify sneering condescension.