Scholar Jean E. Howard, in “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” argues that female crossdressing strengthens the notion of difference by stressing what the disguised woman “cannot” do and the notion of “true” female subjectivity. The Roaring Girl effectively shows the resistance to patriarchy and its marriage custom; The Merchant of Venice depicts how the heroine successfully regains control of her position within patriarchy; Twelfth Night calls into question the construction of men’s and women’s nature and positions in the gender hierarchy. Howard further raises questions about the role of theater in the early modern period: Did the theater form part of the cultural apparatus for policing gender boundaries,
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Male and female were placed on a continuum in the Hippocratic tradition; the Aristotelian tradition looks at the two sexes in terms of hierarchical distinction, in which male and female were assigned positive and negative values. Both theories, however, center on the idea that women were considered less developed than men in the early modern period. The hermaphrodite, as Lublin writes, could not be categorized into either tradition, posing a difficulty to medical and legal discourses. Citing ancient and Renaissance legal discourse, Gilbert shows that hermaphrodites in the early modern period must be deemed male or female according to which sex dominated, prompting the questions: What would happen if neither sex prevailed? And how could a legal judgement fix sexual identity? Though Gilbert does not provide a clear solution how the medical and legal system responses to cases involving hermaphroditism, her work indirectly raises a few points I believe will be useful to my thesis. The Hippocratic and Aristotelian traditions indirectly provide information as to why male are seen “above” female in early modern England. The treatment of hermaphrodite in the legal discourse indicates that the early modern legal system encoded a cultural anxiety about disguised and shifting sexual
Male and female were placed on a continuum in the Hippocratic tradition; the Aristotelian tradition looks at the two sexes in terms of hierarchical distinction, in which male and female were assigned positive and negative values. Both theories, however, center on the idea that women were considered less developed than men in the early modern period. The hermaphrodite, as Lublin writes, could not be categorized into either tradition, posing a difficulty to medical and legal discourses. Citing ancient and Renaissance legal discourse, Gilbert shows that hermaphrodites in the early modern period must be deemed male or female according to which sex dominated, prompting the questions: What would happen if neither sex prevailed? And how could a legal judgement fix sexual identity? Though Gilbert does not provide a clear solution how the medical and legal system responses to cases involving hermaphroditism, her work indirectly raises a few points I believe will be useful to my thesis. The Hippocratic and Aristotelian traditions indirectly provide information as to why male are seen “above” female in early modern England. The treatment of hermaphrodite in the legal discourse indicates that the early modern legal system encoded a cultural anxiety about disguised and shifting sexual