In classical music there has been an effort in recent years to bring to light those whose artistic output contributed to their genre or era but were not as well-memorialized as their caucasian heteronormative male counterparts. So, what about artist-musicians, and those adjacent to them, who lived outside the gender constructs of their contemporary hegemony? What contributions did they purposefully or inadvertently make? What is their reception history and how were these histories documented?
Queer Studies in- and outside of musicology has made strides to recognize the existence of historic queer and gender nonconforming individuals. Generally speaking, the aim has been to legitimize the gender spectrum and to make the lives of these noteworthy individuals known. Still it’s impossible for us to know how these gender non-conformists would have categorized their own gender in the Early Modern and Modern Periods were they to have the same terminology as we have today.
In this thesis I will cite figures from plays and broadsheet ballads of the 17th century, the developing opera genre in France in the early 18th century, the “low style” in London society and theater in the early 19th century, through to the Reconstructionist United States. By illuminating queer and gender nonconforming individuals and the performative acts that defined their personal lives, I show that these communities have always existed in some iteration and in many facets of the musical universe. What emerges is a centuries-old artistic lineage between gender non-conforming people that has yet to be fully explored.
In an effort to establish an objective framework in my approach to suggest a possible gender identity for each individual, I took inspiration from a theory asserted by Judith Butler, Professor, University of California at Berkeley, in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. In this foundational work for modern queer studies, Butler suggests that gender identity is defined through performative acts; a series of events, habits, or rituals enacted by an individual over a period of time. In effect, “these performative acts do not express an ‘innate’ gender but actually create gender itself; the performance of gender produces the identity it claims to reveal.”
The gender assigned to each of these performative acts are informed by an individual's current heteronormative hegemony. Acts that fall outside these guidelines are considered deviant, or for the purposes of this monograph “queer.” These gender inscriptions can be assigned to us even from before the time we are born. Take for instance a “gender reveal” party for an expecting parent or parents where they will celebrate the “gender”, although really the biological sex, of the fetus. Typically, the revealed gender is represented by one of two colors; blue for a fetus with typical male reproductive organs and pink for a fetus with typical female reproductive organs.
The fetus, and ultimately the baby, unaware of the significance of the color that defines their sex/gender, has now been assigned a lifetime of expectations regarding their dress, interests, romantic and reproductive lives, all specified by their heteronormative hegemony. The gender reveal party illustrates how heteronormative expectations begin before birth and permeate the remainder of our lives through a number of factors including cultural transmission and media-driven consumerism.
Gender norms have everything to do with how and in what way we can appear in public space;
how and in what way the public and private are distinguished, and how that distinction is
instrumentalized in the service of sexual politics; who will be criminalized on the basis of public
appearance; who will fail to be protected by the law,..
The assertion that performativity defines gender suggests that an individual’s gender, whether heteronormative or non-traditional, is a fiction: a wide array of performative acts and rituals, enacted over a period of time, from birth, knowingly and unknowingly and in myriad combinations, until we die. An individual’s gender is the product of their collection of performative acts, received or adopted, rather than the collection of performative acts as an organic manifestation of an already existing gender. In a sense, one manufactures their own gender.
By this metric, performative acts manufacture an individual’s gender, I was able to make quantifiable decisions that led to a plausible scenario rather than making assumptions about an individual’s emotional or psychological state. Though their choices on stage were professional in nature, this in combination with their private lives is more revealing about which of the myriad genders they would have chosen with which to identify or express had they had the vocabulary or even the consideration. It is not my intent to prove that the individuals mentioned in this monograph are or are not gender-fluid, non-binary, or transgendered but to make space for the possibility that some, certainly not all, were outside the gender binary.
In the introduction of the individual I have used pronouns that I found applicable after considering the criteria amended from Butler’s work. When telling of the individual’s history I will use biological pronouns until the performative acts of the person call for otherwise. Any mention of “she/her” or “he/him” refers solely to the biological sex assigned at birth. With the Chevalier D’Eon, since legally declared a woman in later life and choosing to remain so until her death, I have chosen “she”.
Traditional sources proved to be less helpful than usual in researching a gender identity for the figures presented in this monograph. Mainly because of the nature of this research and the vocabulary available to scientists, doctors, thinkers, writers, and society in general through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In Female Masculinities, Jack Halberstam speaks to this when he writes “that using the term ‘lesbian’ in historical contexts ‘erases the specificity of tribadism, hermaphroditism, and transvestism.’”
Language surrounding sex and gender was limited until the last few decades. For this reason much information has been derived from journals, independent researchers, and blogs found online.
Many of the sources used in this monograph concerning early performances in the music universe were theatrical reviews of musicals, operas, and operettas archived at Bishopsgate Institute in London. Because they are opinion-based they lack a quantitative facet, however, they reveal the polarization of opinion in the 18th and early 19th centuries about both cross-dressing on- versus off the stage. The fact that the authors of these reviews were not only writing of the performances and their actors, but were doing so in a sensationalist style meant to gain and retain readership, brings into question their credibility. However, their value to this study is not lost. Though they may lack objectivity, they act as a mirror reflecting the emotionally and politically, rather than intellectually-based, opinions held by the hegemony in regard to activities outside their contemporary prescribed gender roles.