Homosexuality And Homoeroticity In Twelfth Night By William Shakespeare

The play, Twelfth Night, written by William Shakespeare was originally written and intended to be performed by males. Twelfth Night developed as a center of discussion for homosexuality and homoeroticism, which are presented in the play. This is seen between the characters, Antonio and Sebastian, and Viola. As seen in the play, a lady called Viola also disguised as Cesario. To survive in Illyria, Viola decided to act as a male to be able to secure a job as a eunuch for Duke Orsino who she later developed feelings for. This raises the question about gender identity in the Shakespearean play, which suggests that homosexuality is acceptable. Viola, in the play indicates that gender is an identity a person chooses to recognize as, not a sexuality.

Gender identity is a sexualized norm that is continually pronounced as foundational ideals by reasons of their repetition. According to Casey Charles, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana. People are not necessarily born with gender; it is learned to perform what gender is about. Viola’s dressing as a man introduces the subject of cross-dressing which can be unruly in the play. Casey Charles, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana said, “the performance of cross-dressing can be disruptive… to the extent it reflects the mundane impersonations by which heterosexually ideal genders are performed or exposes the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals” (Charles 123). Viola’s dressing as a man concentrates on the topic of gender in Shakespeare’s play. A person can choose to be a man or a woman based on the individual’s cultural meanings. Viola’s decision to cross-dress reveals transvestism in the Shakespearean play. Casey Charles argues that Viola’s cross-dressing not only upsets essentialist constructs of gender hierarchy by successfully performing the part of a man as a woman, but in her hermaphroditic capacity as a man and a woman, she also collapses the polarities upon which heterosexuality is based by becoming an object of desire whose ambiguity renders the distinction between homo- and hetero-erotic attraction difficult to decipher. (Charles

Viola’s use of gender imitation serves a purpose to demonstrate how the power of love can be a method that undermine gender binarism and its importance. This brings forth the theory of the hermaphrodite, an individual possessing both male and female sexual organs or other sexual attributes. Charles argues that the theatrical convention of cross-dressing and the androgyny it comes to symbolize thus challenge the regulatory parameters of erotic attraction through the vehicle of performance, a performance that shows gender to be a part payable by any sex (Charles 126). Gender can be performed by any sex, either male or female. It is not perceived as being sexually nor does it affect the societal rules during the Elizabethan period. Charles argues that Shakespeare’s play arguably introduces patterns of homoerotic representation in order to disrupt that binarism and to show how gender identities that uphold such duality are staged, performed, and playable by either sex (Charles 129-130). Shakespeare 's play apparently presents examples of homoerotic representation keeping in mind the end goal to disturb that binarism and to show how sex personalities are maintained on stage. “… discussion of these cross-dressed performance is informed by Judith Butler’s influential notion of gender role is performative… the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’ are no more than compulsory citations of sexual norms… provide an illusion of their own