Mulan: Shakespeare’s Parody

Never having been exposed to  Twelfth Night prior to Slope Day, seeing it for the first time that day was a truly eye-opening experience. The play deftly handled topics on gender identity and sexuality, and even though I’d never had a personal connection with these topics, I was able to quite easily have an emotional connection with the characters and their struggles.

According to Sara, the GRF sponsoring the event, older men at that time would be a sexual mentor, of sorts, to younger men, who would have these initial sexual encounters but would end up marrying women. Gay sex was usually emotionally detached, and in this way homosexuality was relatively de-stigmatized during Shakespeare’s time. In the Twelfth Night, I was shocked that homosexuality was discussed so openly and explicitly, especially for this time period. In an interesting parallel, a male (Cesario) and female (Malvolia) servant were both in love with their master (Orsino) and mistress (Olivia), respectively, although the attraction is only returned by the master.

Introduced at The Elephant, a drag queen made a quick appearance by way of a conversation with Sebastian. Drag queens have an interesting gender identity because they typically identify as men, but also have a persona who is female and referred to with female pronouns. This persona is almost seen as a separate human, a character they play, one that shares a body with the drag queen but is not the same person and at the end of the day they often still identify as male (although there are also plenty of drag queens who come out later as trans*). This is another parallel, albeit inverted, because Viola has a very similar experience in the play where she identifies as a woman but has a male persona (Cesario) who is a distinct character that she doesn’t wish to become.

I really enjoyed how this play handled sexuality and gender identity, because it was written and performed in such a way that these characteristics did not seem to affect a person’s intrinsic self. Someone can have any loyalties, interests, moral inclinations, etc. – the things that make up someone’s intrinsic self – and these aspects will be unaffected by their sexuality or gender identity.

I’ll leave you with one final, poignant question: WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH CHRISTMAS????

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