Gender Identity In Othello

Gender is socially constructed through key institutions within society. A person’s sex is biologically determined, but it is nurture not nature which defines a person’s gender identity. Gender can also be defined from Judith Butler’s novel, Gender Trouble, she states “Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualisation inequality between men and women” (2007, P.9). Gender does define the difference between men and women and can be seen as the cause of inequality as men are always stronger than women. It is seen as unnatural for someone to try and create an alternative gender identity that they are not given from society.

Furthermore, language also plays a role in the construction of gender within literature because there are male and female authors; they both have a particular style of writing. In Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, Virginia Woolf

Critic Jodi Mikalachki argues that:

Gendering and sexualising of the nation, generally presented as having emerged in the eighteenth century, had become current by the early seventeenth century in England and involved both an exclusion of originary female savagery and a masculine embrace of the civility of empire (2003, P.119)

Therefore, Shakespeare did not see gender when writing his plays, particularly in Othello and Macbeth as both female protagonists have strong leading roles. Usually, when plays were performed live, men would dress up as women to play the roles. Women were allowed to perform in plays in 1660 after the Restoration period. This could be considered shocking as there were many female roles in Shakespeare plays, such as Lady Macbeth, Desdemona and Juliet. It could possibly be suggested the identity of women were controlled by men as they played both male and female parts. Before the Restoration period, women did not have a gender identity as they weren’t authorised to have any