Asexual Dramaturgies: Reading for Asexuality in the Western Theatrical Canon

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Asexual Dramaturgies: Reading for Asexuality in the Western Asexual Dramaturgies: Reading for Asexuality in the Western

Theatrical Canon Theatrical Canon

Anna Maria Ru9no Broussard

Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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ASEXUAL DRAMATURGIES: READING FOR ASEXUALITY

IN THE WESTERN THEATRICAL CANON

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the

Louisiana State University and

Agricultural and Mechanical College

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Theatre

Anna Maria Ruffino Broussard

B.A., Louisiana State University, 2003

M.A., Louisiana State University, 2007

December 2022

Acknowledgements

I have been extremely lucky to have had the amazing support system that made returning

to graduate school mid-career a possibility. More people than I can list deserve my gratitude for

their love, support, and guidance through this journey.

First, and foremost, special thanks goes to my dissertation chair, John Fletcher, for

challenging me and helping me make it to the finish line with his enthusiastic support, keen

editor’s eye, and invaluable guidance. Shannon Walsh deserves credit for first pushing me

towards this topic as being worthy of a dissertation-length study. Alan Sikes gave me endless

encouragement in several classes and through the dissertation writing process. I would also like

to thank my committee members from outside of the theatre department, Deborah Goldgaber,

Benjamin Kahan, and Rhiannon Kroeger, for their excellent advice and insight.

Additional faculty who warrant recognition are: Kristin Sosnowsky, Femi Euba, Elena

Castro, Ashley Mack, and Joy Blanchard. I am also grateful for the faculty from my master’s

program for giving me a baseline knowledge to help with my return to school: Trish Suchy, Ruth

Bowman, Michael Bowman, Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, Stephanie Grey, and Laura Sells. I also

wish to thank Paloma Gonzalez for helping me to stay on track with all the endless paperwork.

I would like to thank my fellow graduate students, from both my master’s and doctoral

degrees, particularly my cohort Aaron Wood, Kyra Smith, Dori Leeman, Sara Christian, Katie

Morris, Ben Munise, Simi Fadirepo, Taren Wilson, Heyjin Kwon, and Rachel Aker.

I could not have made it without the encouragement and support of my colleagues at

Nicholls State University, especially James Stewart, Farren Clark, Richmond Eustis, Barbara

Blake, Gary LaFleur, Linda Martin, Nicki Boudreaux, Chelsea Jackson, Serdave Duncan,

Marnya Forbes, and Melissa Giandelone, and many others across campus. My Nicholls students,

iii

including my Nicholls Players theatre students over the years, were a large part of my support

system. Thanks also goes to my Thibodaux Playhouse family who gave me the creative outlet

necessary to get through my final revisions.

My family and friends were the cheering section I needed, most especially Rya

Butterfield, Noël Young Smith, Wendy Armington, Kerri Jones Blache, Kit Heart, Jen LoPriore,

Nikkisa Christian, Will Heflin, and Rachel Marsh.

I would like to honor my mother, Sandra Bertoniere, whose absence has been sorely felt

over the years. I hope I have made her proud. All the love and thanks to my father, Frank

Ruffino, for cheering me on with his love, encouragement, and endless pride.

I could not have undertaken this journey without the love and support of my in-laws,

Susan and Larry Broussard, whose graciousness truly knows no bounds. I also appreciate the

love and encouragement from my stepson, Toby Broussard, who often got stuck listening to me

ramble about theatre history. Lastly, I am eternally grateful to my husband, Hunter Broussard,

for his constant love, kindness, and patience in seeing me through another graduate degree.

 
 
iv 
 
Table of Contents 
 
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii 
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v 
Introduction. Asexual Possibility in Performance .......................................................................... 1 
Literature Review: Asexuality Studies ............................................................................... 6 
Methodology: An Asexual Interpretative Lens ................................................................. 22 
Dramaturgical Sites ........................................................................................................... 36 
Chapter 1. A Virgin Soul: The Queer Myth of Hippolytus .......................................................... 41 
Aphrodite and Compulsory Sexuality ............................................................................... 44 
Phaedra and the Position of Women ................................................................................. 50 
Hippolytus and Asexuality ................................................................................................ 57 
Interpreting Hippolytus ..................................................................................................... 66 
Chapter 2. Laudable Chastity: Hrotsvit’s Rhetorical Dramas ...................................................... 74 
Chastity, Celibacy, and Virginity...................................................................................... 76 
Virgin Martyrs, Chaste Wives, and Celibate Hermits ...................................................... 84 
Reading Hrotsvit ............................................................................................................... 92 
Hrotsvit’s Nonsexuality .................................................................................................... 99 
Chapter 3. Maiden Pride: The Ambiguous Moll Cutpurse of The Roaring Girl ........................ 106 
The (Companionate) Marriage Plot ................................................................................ 108 
An Asexual Moll ............................................................................................................. 113 
An Agender Moll ............................................................................................................ 122 
Sex, the City, and Mary Frith .......................................................................................... 131 
Chapter 4. Barely Tolerated Spinsters: Rachel Loving and Laura Wingfield ............................ 139 
Constructing American Womanhood ............................................................................. 140 
Rachel, Black Femininity, and Reproductive Justice ..................................................... 149 
White Femininity and Disability in The Glass Menagerie ............................................. 158 
The Cruel Optimism of Compulsory (Hetero)sexuality ................................................. 167 
Conclusion. Performing Asexuality ............................................................................................ 176 
Our Current Moment: Representation and Backlash ...................................................... 178 
For Theatre Practitioners: An Asexual Performance Strategy ........................................ 186 
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 194 
Vita .............................................................................................................................................. 218 

Abstract

Asexuality has recently gained recognition and visibility as a legitimate sexual

orientation and identity standpoint that is usually defined as lacking sexual desire for any gender.

Popular culture and the academy have both seen the emergence of a robust conversation about

the definition and import of asexuality, recognizing the term as an umbrella concept covering an

ever-diversifying array of identities. Within the nascent critical discourse on asexuality, theorists

have sought to identify asexuality as a sexual orientation, to rethink our society’s sexual

normativity, and to question compulsory sexuality, or the assumption that sexual desire is

intrinsic to all people, thus inviting a rethinking of established notions of human sexuality. Using

this questioning as a driving force of the field, scholars have begun theorizing a way to use

asexuality as a lens to view cultural artifacts and texts to seek out places to find traces or

resonances of asexuality throughout history. I propose an asexual critical lens—a practice of

reading texts and figures to highlight the influence of and resistance to compulsory sexuality. I

apply this lens to examine several theatrical figures from dramatic literature who resist

compulsory sexuality. Without defining these characters as asexual in the twenty-first century

sense, I argue that framing them in relation compulsory sexualities past and present offers us new

insights into those texts and adds to an asexual performance archive that can render asexuality as

a possibility throughout history.

Introduction.

Asexual Possibility in Performance

This is a story about gaps, about absences, and about lack. So often these terms are

framed in the negative and measured against the more positively associated concepts of fullness,

presence, and desire. Instead of looking at such terms in the negative, there are generative

possibilities found in framing them differently. Might there be something valuable to examine

within an absence? Asexuality, which has recently gained recognition and visibility as a

legitimate sexual orientation and identity standpoint, is broadly understood as an absence of

sexual attraction for any gender or a lack of interest in sex or sexual desire. These absences are

what I am interested in pursuing and studying. I propose centering asexuality as a critical lens

and a reading practice to provide new dramaturgical choices for the interpretation of texts. The

goal of this dissertation is to create a constellation of interpretations that can offer up new ways

of viewing sexuality today while being attuned to the gaps and absences of sexuality, thus

resisting sedimentation and welcoming disagreements, additions, and subtractions.

The interpretation of scripts, characters, and themes is the lifeblood of the theatre, vital to

bringing a dramatic work to life from the page to the stage or to film. By engaging with a work’s

dramaturgical choices, theatre practitioners are participating in an act of interpretation. Geoffrey

S. Proehl defines dramaturgy as “the name given to that set of elements necessary to the working

of a play at any moment in its passage from imagination to embodiment.”

Dramaturgical

choices can thus refer to those made about a playscript in its inception all the way to the

performance of the script. For this project, however, I am primarily dealing with matters of

Geoffrey S. Prohel, Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey

(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 19.

interpretation and script analysis, not the subsequent choices made in production. Cathy Turner

and Synne Behrndt likewise view dramaturgy “as being about making connections, moving

between elements, forming organic wholes which are continually in process; this also implies

attention to audience and context.”

In other words, to title this project “asexual dramaturgies”

means to examine the dramaturgical imaginative possibilities that occur when asexuality is

centered as an interpretative option for the study of dramatic scripts and their historical context. I

argue that an asexual dramaturgical lens is a valuable and necessary tool for interpreting

dramatic texts for the stage and thus interrogating assumptions regarding human sexuality as a

whole in various historical contexts.

The present-day performance process, in much of the United States and Europe, involves

interpretation at almost every stage of a production: from the first reading that piques a director’s

interest, to the design choices, and finally to the acting choices made in rehearsals. Performance

additionally has a long history of being tied to sexual desire. Sex has infiltrated theatre

throughout history, with performers being sexualized throughout the centuries. For instance,

Kirsten Pullen notes the long historical linking between female performers and sex work, that

have often “slipped discursively into one” throughout the history of western theatre.

There is

even a link between sex and theatrical training, with Kari Barclay, asexuality scholar and

playwright, arguing “that several of the most prominent schools of actor training in the United

States posit sexual desire as inherent to subjectivity and task the director with unearthing it in

Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt, “Series Preface,” in Cathy Turner, Dramaturgy and

Architecture: Theatre, Utopia, and the Built Environment (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,

2015), x.

Kirsten Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005), 2.

hirself and hir pupils.”

Due to this omnipresent link between sexual desire and actor training,

directors have turned to intimacy choreography in order to better obtain actors’ consent in

staging sexual or intimate scenes.

The field of intimacy choreography is gaining popularity,

especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, noting the abuse of power that can and often

does happen when rehearsing sex scenes.

The need for and use of intimacy choreography

demonstrates the interconnectedness of theatre and sex, especially in contemporary theatre. Of

course, the strong ties of between theatre and sex are not inherently wrong or bad; however, it is

useful to keep in mind that the libido-theatre link is circumstantial, not essential. It may be that

theatre is so often tied to sex and sexual desire because sex has become normalized, especially in

the twenty-first century. That is, sexual desire is seen as an omnipresent, fundamental element of

human life, to the extent that its absence seems anomalous or pathological.

The driving questions of this dissertation are: what happens when we center asexuality

and read for the ways that sex is normalized? How is this normalization of sex wielded in

literature and performance? Is there a way to create an asexual interpretative lens with which to

read and stage dramatic works? What happens when asexuality or nonsexuality is used as an

interpretative choice in theatrical productions? What could this interpretation do for young

actors, directors, audiences, or even readers of these plays? How might seeking asexuality in

plays throughout history allow for new avenues of creativity that could illuminate the lived

Kari Barclay, “Willful Actors: Valuing Resistance in American Actor Training,”

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (2019): 124,

https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2019.0027.

Chelsea Pace, Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical

Intimacy (New York: Routledge, 2020), 1.

Joy Brooke Fairfield, Tonia Sina, Laura Rikard, and Kaja Dunn, “Intimacy

Choreography and Cultural Change: An Interview with Leaders in the Field,” Journal of

Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34, no. 1 (2019): 78, https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2019.0024.

experience of asexuality in our current historical moment? These alternative interpretative

options need to be made open to theatre, and this dissertation will examine how such

interpretations may have been unthinkable until recently.

Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s famous nineteenth century

novel Little Women is one example of a text that could easily be read through an asexual lens.

Alcott’s novel has been adapted into performance multiple times, including several stage plays,

television series, and feature films.

Of the many interpretations of Alcott’s novel, Gerwig’s

2019 film comes closest to allowing for an asexual reading of the protagonist Jo March.

Considered to be one of modern literature’s most famous almost-spinsters, Jo is a young woman

who laments the limitations of her sex and struggles with the expectations that she become a wife

and mother, going so far as to refuse a marriage proposal from her childhood friend. Her story

seems to be on the road to ending with her as a spinster, yet she falls in love with a foreign

professor at the end of the novel, halting her spinster status and reinforcing the stereotypical role

of women as part of a heterosexual marriage. Instead of replicating Alcott’s linear progression

towards a heterosexual love story, Gerwig’s major dramaturgical choice tells the story out of

order, presenting it as a memory of Jo’s process of writing the story of Little Women. In this way,

Jo’s writing and self-sufficiency are given center stage. Gerwig makes another important

alteration to the story: she ends the movie with the publication of Jo’s book, titled Little Women.

The 2019 film shows Jo submitting her book to a publisher who initially rejects it, stating that

she cannot end the book with her heroine unmarried. Jo quickly resubmits the “corrected”

Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig (2019, Sony Pictures); Louisa May Alcott,

Little Women (New York: Roberts Brothers, 1868-1869).

Alcott’s novel was adapted into a stage play for the first time in 1912. Marian De

Forest, Little Women: The Broadway Play of 1912 (Theatre Arts Press, 2017). There have been

at least four feature films, as well as several television broadcasts, a ballet, and an opera.

version with a tacked-on love story with a foreign professor and even frames the romance as a

concession, stating, “I suppose marriage has always been an economic proposition. Even in

fiction.”

Gerwig’s film briefly shows the romance between Jo and the foreign professor, yet it

does not give a definitive answer as to whether this relationship is real or is a fiction created for

the ending of the book within the movie. In presenting the ending as ambiguous, Gerwig rejects

the past that would not allow Jo to remain unmarried and offers up a possible revisioning of this

past in our present. Stephanie Carpenter argues that “Gerwig suggests a path for Jo that is more

like Louisa May Alcott’s own as a never-married author, a path Alcott’s publisher and her

contemporary readers couldn’t abide.”

Alcott was refused a nonsexual ending for her heroine,

but Gerwig creates an open-ended possibility and an adaptation that allows for an interpretation

of Jo as an asexual woman, opting to live a contented life as a spinster.

Interpreting texts such as Little Women as containing a trace of asexuality does not equate

to proving that Jo March is, and always has been, an asexual character. Rather, this dissertation

suggests that Jo could be interpreted as an asexual character. In so doing, I draw influence from

queer theory and queer historians to create this asexual dramaturgical lens, not to establish

asexuality as a constant throughout history, but to offer it as an interpretative possibility now, for

twenty-first century audiences. The articulation of asexuality as an identity is a recent

phenomenon that could arguably be considered the product of the twenty-first century.

The

asexual pride movement, including discourse surrounding definitions of asexuality, has largely

Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig (2019, Sony Pictures).

Stephanie Carpenter, “Marching On: Rereading Little Women and Louisa May Alcott,”

The Missouri Review 43, no.1 (2020): 193, https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.2020.0014.

Ela Przybylo, “Crisis and Safety: The Asexual in Sexusociety,” Sexualities 14, no. 4

(2011): 445, https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711406461.

occurred online through websites and social media platforms that did not exist prior to the turn of

the century.

Asexuality is thus a recently enunciated sexuality and therefore, any interpretative

lens that centers asexualtiy must consider how asexuality is defined and conceived of in the

current moment.

Literature Review: Asexuality Studies

In order to develop an asexual dramaturgical lens, several key terms and interventions are

essential for an understanding of the new and blossoming field of asexuality studies. An

exhaustive portrait of the field is beyond the scope of this dissertation, and an excellent overview

of the field’s history can be found in the introduction to Ela Przybylo’s 2019 book Asexual

Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality.

I pause here, then, to review the literature

of the field in terms of three key questions regarding asexuality that will contextualize my

project and further focus this asexual lens.

First, what is asexuality? Julie Sondra Decker defines asexuality as “as the experience of

not being sexually attracted to others. Less commonly, it is defined as not valuing sex or sexual

attraction enough to pursue it.”

Many asexuality scholars and activists likewise describe

asexuality as lacking sexual attraction, while other scholars use similar terms, defining asexuality

as an absence or as being framed in the negative, i.e., what it is not or does not do.

To further

Kristin S. Scherrer, “Coming to an Asexual Identity: Negotiating Identity, Negotiating

Desire,” Sexualities 11, no. 5 (2008): 622, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1363460708094269.

Przybylo details the various contributions to asexuality studies from asexual activists,

social science researchers, queer theorists, and feminist scholars. Ela Przybylo, Asexual Erotics:

Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019).

Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality (New

York: Skyhorse Publishing. 2015), 3.

Agata Pacho, “Estabalishing Asexual Identity: The Essential, the Imaginary, and the

Collective,” Graduate Journal of Social Science 10, no.1 (2013): 13,

http://www.gjss.org/sites/default/files/issues/chapters/papers/Journal-10-01--01-Pacho.pdf.

broaden and complicate the definition of asexuality, C.J. DeLuzio Chasin suggests that for some,

asexuality is seen “as primarily being about a disidentification with sexuality (that is, a strong

sense of being not sexual or nonsexual as opposed to being sexual)” while for others, “asexuality

is primarily about a positive identification … that is, a strong sense of being asexual/ace as

opposed to non-asexual.”

These additional conceptualizations revolve around either distancing

oneself from sexuality or embracing asexuality as an identity, though for some, asexuality could

be a combination of both. Neither option is better or more correct than the other. The variety of

definitions of asexuality are arguably an integral part of its complexity.

Defining asexuality has been a primary concern for asexual activists, many of whom

point to the creation of the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) as the

beginning of the understanding of asexuality as a contemporary identity category.

Begun by

David Jay in 2001, AVEN has provided an online community for those interested in questioning

or exploring this identity and served as a resource for a common vocabulary for asexuality.

For example, asexual activists and scholars have opted to use the term “allosexual” to

refer to those who do experience sexual desire for others, as a way of pushing against the

assumption that the allosexual experience of the world is “normal,” while asexuality is

“abnormal.” Another important distinction is the difference between being asexual (lacking

sexual attraction or desire) and aromantic (lacking the desire to form romantic attachments).

C.J. DeLuzio Chasin, “Reconsidering Asexuality and its Radical Potential,” Feminist

Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 407, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23719054, (original emphasis).

AVEN: The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network. 2001-2022.

https://www.asexuality.org/.

Erica Chu, “Radical Identity Politics: Asexuality and Contemporary Articulations of

Identity,” in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June Cerankowski and

Megan Milks (New York: Routledge, 2014), 87.

While it is generally viewed as its own orientation, aromanticism is still often included under the

umbrella of asexuality.

Beneath this umbrella concept, a diversity of asexualities is recognized, delineating

sexual attraction from romantic attraction. This split attraction model rejects a simplistic binary

spectrum with poles of “has sexual attraction” or “does not have sexual attraction.” Asexuality

scholars instead propose a rhizomatic network of identity-creating potentials for human love,

sex, desire, and lack. The metaphor of a “spectrum” has found widespread usage among

asexuality activists and scholars in terms of the multitude of identities under the umbrella

concept of asexuality.

Asexual individuals may identify as any of several (ever-diversifying) combinations of an

asexual or aromantic variety. For instance, a person might be open to forming deep affectional

attachments to the opposite gender (heteroromantic) while not experiencing any sexual attraction

to anyone (asexual). Or a person might be open to falling in love with either gender (biromantic).

Or again, someone might identify as “aromantic asexual,” feeling neither romantic nor sexual

attractions to anyone. The split between romantic attraction and sexual attraction is important in

terms of actual life experiences of those who identify with asexuality, especially since most

asexual people are not simply virgins with no dating history. Other potential micro-labels under

the asexuality (or “ace”) spectrum include those who feel sexual attraction only to people with

whom they have formed a serious emotional attachment (demisexual), those whose orientation is

somewhere between asexual and allosexual (gray-asexual or graysexual), or those whose identity

fluctuates between asexual and allosexual (ace-flux). There is no single, gold-star definition of

Amanda L. Mollet and Brian R. Lackman, “Asexual Borderlands: Asexual Collegians’

Reflections on Inclusion Under the LGBTQ Umbrella,” Journal of College Student Development

59, no. 5 (2018): 624, https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2018.0058.

an asexual person. While these ever-innovating micro-labels may seem tedious, they can be

immensely helpful and meaningful for those trying to map out their own desires.

In defining what asexuality is, it is also helpful to briefly mention what asexuality is not.

The term “asexual” has been used in several different ways that do not quite jibe with current

definitions of asexuality as an identity category. For instance, feminist scholar Joan Acker notes

that the term “asexual” has historically been used as another word for “gender-neutral.”

While

Acker examines the deployment of gender-neutrality in terms of organizational theory in 1990,

her use of the term is relevant here. For Acker, when organizations are presumed “asexual” or

gender-neutral, they ignore sexuality, especially when it concerns women and non-heterosexual

individuals, thus marking “neutrality” as another term for those in a position of privilege and

power.

Asexuality studies concerns itself with problematizing what is considered “normal”

sexuality as well as divorcing the concept of asexuality from this construction of neutrality.

Additionally, the term “asexual” is sometimes used interchangeably with being not only gender-

neutral, but with lacking sexual organs. For instance, Leah DeVun, in her study on nonbinary

individuals in premodern civilization, often uses the term “asexual” to connote a form of

androgyny germane to her project.

I will be exploring these definitional slips throughout this

project in light of the ways that the concept of asexuality has shifted over time and begun to be

more broadly understood as an identity.

Joan Acker, “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,” Gender

& Society 4, no, 2 (1990): 142, https://www.jstor.org/stable/189609.

Acker, “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies,” 150-151.

Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 122.

Early research into asexuality was primarily concerned with charting out what asexuality

is and who identifies with it.

Social science researchers who have engaged in interviews with

asexual individuals (both in person and through AVEN) have noted that arriving at asexuality as

an identity or orientation is a complex process of self-questioning, self-discovery, and self-

identification.

This research indicates that asexual individuals often lack the vocabulary to

adequately describe their experiences and feelings before coming to an asexual identity. The

2011 documentary (A)Sexual notes this long process of self-identification and showcases several

interviews with asexual people who largely share this long process of self-discovery.

For many

of these individuals, it took stumbling across AVEN for them to put a name to their experience

and their sexual orientation.

I had a similarly long process that took years to finally land on an asexual or gray-asexual

identity. Several years ago, after feeling that something about my experiences of sexuality was

somehow different in a way I could not articulate, I began with the assumption of a pathology.

This was a problem that needed to be solved. Further research brought me to AVEN, and I

started to consider the possibility that maybe my feelings did not require a medical diagnosis. I

began mining my personal history for hints and traces that I perhaps did not experience sexual

desire the same way as others. It took even longer to understand asexuality as something that I

For example, among the early scholarly research into asexuality is Anthony Bogaert’s

2004 study which suggested that approximately one percent of the population identified as

asexual. Anthony F Bogaert, “Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National

Probability Sample,” Journal of Sex Research 41, no. 3 (2004): 282,

http://www.jstor.com/stable/4423785.

Mark Carrigan, “There’s More to Life than Sex?: Difference and Commonality within

the Asexual Community,” Sexualities 14, no. 4 (2011): 473,

https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711406462.

(A)Sexual, directed by Angela Tucker (2011; San Francisco, CA: FilmBuff).

could claim as an identity. After much soul searching and long talks with my partner, I came to

find a comfortable, yet perhaps slightly fluid, graysexual identity.

While many asexual individuals may share some commonalities in the journey to

discovering asexuality, those who come to an asexual identity do not have uniform experiences

of what it means to be asexual, to claim the identity, nor how their identity manifests along the

asexual spectrum. These experiences are explored in popular press books such as Julia Sondra

Decker’s The Invisible Orientation, Anthony Bogaert’s Understanding Asexuality, and more

recently, Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning

of Sex. In conjunction to the online work of AVEN, these books have helped bring asexuality to

a larger audience.

A second key question in the field of asexuality studies asks, what is asexuality’s

relationship to queerness? As asexuality has gained broader understanding, it has been

articulated as a sexual orientation in its own right, oftentimes falling under the LGBTQIA

umbrella, with the “A” coming to represent the asexual community.

Yet there has still been

some resistance to asexuality being defined as “queer” by many in the larger queer community.

Even today, debate about this issue fills online forums.

When Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks’s article “New Orientations: Asexuality

and Its Implications for Theory and Practice” appeared in the journal Feminist Studies in 2010, it

Julie Sondra Decker, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality (New

York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015); Anthony F Bogaert, Understanding Asexuality (Lanham:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire,

Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020).

Mollet and Lackman, “Asexual Borderlands,” 625.

Dominique A. Canning, “Queering Asexuality: Asexual-Inclusion in Queer Spaces,”

McNair Scholars Research Journal 8, no. 1 (2015): 67,

http://commons.emich.edu/mcnair/vol8/iss1/6.

was among the earliest academic articles to posit asexuality as a “newly enunciated sexuality”

and align it with feminist and queer studies.

Their article was also among the first to

hypothesize the emergence of asexuality studies as its own academic field, a prediction that

proved to be true only four years later with the publication of their edited volume Asexualities:

Feminist and Queer Perspectives. In the book’s introduction, they explicitly tie asexuality to

queerness, since asexuality articulates the social marginalization of those who prefer not to have

sex, as well as explores “new possibilities in intimacy, desire, and kinship structures.”

queerness can be broadly defined to include alternative ways of relating outside of sexual

normativity, then asexuality can be considered queer. Asexuality easily fits within Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick’s conception of queerness as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,

dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of

anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify

monolithically.”

When queerness is defined as a imagining a plurality of sexualities that resist

normative constructions of sexuality, then asexuality can easily be included within such a

framework.

Many asexual people, including those who are a part of the AVEN online community,

cite asexuality as an inherent part of themselves, similarly to how many queer individuals self-

define. Kristin Scherrer’s work is one of the earliest to study asexuality as an identity and discuss

Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, “New Orientations: Asexuality and Its

Implications for Theory and Practice,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 650,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27919126.

Megan Milks and Karli June Cerankowski, “Introduction: Why Asexuality? Why

Now?” in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June Cerankowski and

Megan Milks (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.

the ways in which it is articulated. She states that asexual identities “are also defined in

opposition to celibacy and celibate identities, which are described as a choice.”

Through

interviews with several asexually identified individuals, she discovered that the distinction

between asexuality and celibacy was crucial to these individuals, noting the “naturalness of their

asexuality” as being important to their overall self-concept.

However, a growing number of scholars in the field, as well as asexual individuals and

activists, complicate this distinction. For instance, Breanne Fahs explores the potential of

asexuality as a choice, especially what the refusal of sex can offer feminism. Fahs states that

women choosing to exercise political asexuality or celibacy can distance themselves from the

patriarchal imperative towards heterosexual marriage and motherhood, thus, advocating a

freedom from sex.

Fahs situates this concept in terms of the history of second wave feminism,

but she also articulates what it would mean for people to adopt asexuality as a political choice

today. Fahs suggests that “framing asexuality as a viable and politically significant choice

transforms it into a compelling and depathologized option, particularly as it elegantly mirrors our

cultural anxieties, political priorities, and deeply troubled constructions of gender, power, and

sexual life.”

While Fahs’s construction of asexuality is by no means a mainstream viewpoint, it

does contain interesting possibilities in terms of how identities are formed with regard to choice.

Scherrer, “Coming to an Asexual Identity,” 631.

Fahs is not the first to consider asexuality as a choice for women. The first of instance

of contemporary scholarship regarding asexuality at all hints at asexuality as a feminist choice

and can be attributed to Myra T. Jonson, who in 1977 describes women who seem “to prefer not

to engage in sexual activity.” Myra T. Johnson, “Asexual and Autoerotic Women: Two Invisible

Groups,” in The Sexually Oppressed, ed. Harvey L. Gochros and Jean S. Gochros ( New York:

Association Press, 1977), 97.

Fahs, “Radical Refusals,” 458.

Similarly, Benjamin Kahan problematizes the division between asexuality and celibacy,

ultimately calling for considering celibacy as a distinct sexual identity. Kahan describes a range

of meanings for celibacy, such as a synonym for the unmarried, as a performative vow, as a

political self-identification, as a period between sexual activity, and as a resistance to

compulsory sexuality.

All of these descriptors of celibacy demonstrate a plurality of potential

meanings for celibacy. Kahan further argues against conceiving of celibacy as a “‘closeting’

screen for another identity.”

This way of conceiving of celibacy as a sexual identity as opposed

to being a placeholder for another sexual identity speaks to the project of recognizing asexuality

as its own sexual identity formation. Kahan demonstrates that there is “significant overlap

between celibacy and asexuality,” which neatly aligns with the idea of asexual people choosing

to disidentify with sexuality.

The complications to the definitional boundaries of asexuality are reminiscent of

arguments regarding “born this way” discourse in the larger queer community, which has similar

reverberations for asexuality. Lisa Duggan problematizes the rhetoric of “fixed identity position”

of gay rights politics and instead offers a way of articulating queerness in terms of a religion.

Duggan thus suggests viewing queerness as analogous to a religious identity. In her view,

queerness, like religion, is not a natural or fixed orientation, but it is a deep, non-trivial mode of

self that resists suppression or forcible change. Asexuality can function in a similar manner.

Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2013); 2.

Kahan, Celibacies, 2.

Kahan, Celibacies, 151-152 and Cerankowski and Milks, “New Orientations,” 659.

Lisa Duggan, “Queering the State,” Social Text 39 (1994): 4,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/466361.

Cerankowski and Milks also echo the push and pull of defining asexuality as a choice vs.

a fixed identity position.

By viewing asexuality, like queerness, in Duggan’s framework,

asexuality can be shown as a deep commitment that resists the sort of gatekeeping that an

identarian model might foster.

I do, however, agree that asexuality should be considered a

distinct sexual orientation. Defining asexuality as an identity and sexual orientation has

important meaning for asexual individuals, but there is also value in articulating asexuality as a

choice. These multiple, shifting, and sometimes contradictory definitions of asexuality are part of

what make it exciting to study as a field. Melanie Yergeau, for example, advocates to “regard

asexuality queerly because asexuality regards both desire and identity as fluctuating and

transient,” even further questioning the stability of sexual identity categories.

I follow asexual

scholars, then, by rejecting the need to define “the asexual” exhaustively, choosing instead to

focus on asexuality’s queer existence within and resistance to normative constructions of

sexuality.

This leads to the third key question of asexuality studies, which asks, how does asexuality

queer and interrogate sexuality? If sexuality can be widely defined as “the desires, relationships,

acts, and identities concerned with sexual behavior,” then asexuality, understood as a

Cerankowski and Milks, “New Orientations,” 658.

For instance, the AVEN online forums often involve debates surrounding the definition

of asexuality or who should use what specific label. Sometimes these forums feature people

questioning their own identity, asking if they can claim the label based on their experiences.

Even among self-identified asexual people, a quick perusal of the forums shows that there are not

strict definitional parameters for asexuality. AVEN: The Asexuality Visibility and Education

Network. 2001-2022. https://www.asexuality.org/.

Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness,

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) 192.

disidentification with sexuality, can be situated outside of sexuality.

In a way then, asexuality

questions the normative assumption that sexual desire is intrinsic to all people.

Nathan Snaza, for example, suggests that we consider asexuality queer by understanding

it as a “queer orientation to sexuality,” positing that asexuality is more than merely an addition

under the queer umbrella, but in fact questions the normative assumption of sexuality in the first

place.

This problematization of sexual normativity has been one of the driving themes of

asexuality studies as a field and has led a rethinking of ostentatiously basic notions of human

sexuality. Multiple asexuality scholars have recognized and defined this normalization of sex

through a variety of terms: compulsory sexuality, sexusociety, sexualnormativity, the sexual

assumption, and sex-normative culture.

Relatedly, Elizabeth Brake defines amatonormativity,

which describes “the focus on marital and amorous love relationships as sites of special value,”

arguing that romantic (and thus, sexual) relationships are assumed to be the most valuable

relationships individuals have.

Amatonormativity is thus linked to the normalization of sex

through its privileging of romantic/sexual partnerships.

Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3.

Nathan Snaza, “Asexuality and Erotic Biopolitics,” Feminist Formations 32, no. 3

(2020): 123, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0043, (original emphasis).

For “compulsory sexuality,” see: Kristina Gupta, “Compulsory Sexuality: Evaluating

an Emerging Concept,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 1 (2015): 132,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/681774 and Elizabeth Emens, “Compulsory Sexuality,”

The Stanford Law Review 66 (2014), 306, https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_

scholarship/1786. For “sexusociety,” see: Przybylo, “Crisis and Safety,” 446. For “sexual

assumption,” see: Carrigan, “There’s more to life than sex?,” 474. For “sexualnormativity,” see:

Chasin, “Reconsidering Asexuality and its Radical Potential,” 417. For “sex-normative culture,”

see: Cerankowski and Milks, “New Orientations,” 661.

Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.

The most widely cited conception of sexual normativity comes from Kristina Gupta, who

uses the term “compulsory sexuality,” drawing from Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory

heterosexuality.

Gupta defines compulsory sexuality as “the social norms and practices that

both marginalize various forms of non-sexuality, such as a lack of sexual desire or behavior, and

compel people to experience themselves as desiring subjects, take up sexual identities, and

engage in sexual activity.”

In other words, compulsory sexuality hinges on the assumption that

everyone experiences some form of sexual attraction/desire which thus compels individuals

within this system to express their sexuality in order to be legible as human. Compulsory

sexuality, then, can be viewed as the process by which individuals are compelled to participate in

the system of erotic subjectivity, which has come to be known as sexuality. Instead of viewing

compulsory sexuality in terms of the process of claiming an identity, sexuality, and thus

compulsory sexuality, can be understood as the organizing principle for which sex and gender

are understood and policed.

The evidence of compulsory sexuality is pervasive. Sex is considered so natural and

assumed that asexuality has been historically pathologized as a dysfunction. The historical

framing of low sexual desire or lack of sexual desire as a “sexual dysfunction” in need of a cure

demonstrates compulsory sexuality at work and the history of pathologizing deviant sexualities,

which further renders asexuality unimaginable as a subject position.

When sexual desire is

normalized through the language of pathology and health, a lack of desire is construed as

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal

of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4, (1980): 632, https://doi.org/10.1086/493756.

Gupta, “Compulsory Sexuality,”132.

Jacinthe Flore, “Mismeasures of Asexual Desires,” in Asexualities: Feminist and

Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, (New York: Routledge,

2014), 18.

requiring medical and/or psychological attention. While there are those for whom a low libido

can necessitate a medical diagnosis, it is the presumption of pathology and the imposition of

“sanctions against not wanting sex” (medical or otherwise) that asexual activists find

objectionable.

By framing desire in terms of health, any deviation regarding a lack or excess of

sex is equated with unhealth and therefore undesirable enough to require medical intervention.

Within this framework, asexuality is not an option, and is more thoroughly rendered unthinkable.

This pathologizing of low sexual desire is arguably the inheritance of psychoanalysis. While

psychoanalysis was revolutionary in terms of conceptualizations of sexual desire (including

psychoanalytic feminist theories), classical psychoanalysis also leaves no room for asexuality.

Elizabeth Hannah Hanson describes the unintelligibility of asexuality within Freud’s framework,

stating “asexuality does not—cannot—exist for psychoanalysis.”

Asexuality is nearly

impossible to theorize or interpret within a framework that posits sexuality as a norm for all

humans, and asexuality scholars generally resist defining asexuality as a pathology or as

repression.

For instance, Melissa E. Sanchez states that asexuality scholars argue for “the possibility

that the absence of sexual desire may really be a desire for a sexless existence, not a sublimation

Chasin, “Reconsidering Asexuality and its Radical Potential,” 416.

For an example of a feminist response to psychoanalysis, see: Luce Irigaray, Speculum

of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, 2013. “Making Something Out of Nothing: Asexuality.”

(PhD diss., Loyola Universtiy Chicago, 2013), 83 (original emphasis). Hanson goes into detail

regarding the incompatibility of psychoanalysis as an interpretative tool for articulating

asexuality in her dissertation.

See: Megan Milks, “Stunted Growth: Asexual Politics and the Rhetorics of Sexual

Liberation,” in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Karli June Cerankwoski

and Megan Milks (New York: Routledge, 2014), 107.

or repression of drives that dare not speak their names.”

Thus, the assumption of sublimation or

repression is a function of the overall system of compulsory sexuality. Carter Vance similarly

points to the constructed nature of compulsory sexuality, which asexuality exposes “as a socially

organized, not innate, phenomenon.”

In other words, asexuality allows for a deeper look into

the ways in which sexuality is assumed for everyone and how that assumption is socially

constructed rather than a natural given.

Since asexuality has often been pathologized or seen as a deficit, the fields of asexuality

studies and disability studies are deeply intertwined.

The relationship between disability and

asexuality is complicated, because to suggest that asexuality is disempowering, as Eunjung Kim

notes, erases the experiences of disabled people who do identify as asexual. For Kim, asexuality

should be “viewed as one of many creative possibilities” within our culture of compulsory

sexuality.

Kim further explores how asexuality is assumed as a given for disabled people,

stating that desexualization “produces a form of objectiﬁcation and dehumanization that denies

the humanity of disabled and neurodiverse people, for it is taken for granted that every normative

body – and thus ‘all’ human beings – possesses sexual ‘instincts.’”

Kim is careful to note the

Melissa E. Sanchez, “Protestantism, Marriage, and Asexuality in Shakespeare,” in

Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, edited by Jennifer Drouin

(London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 102.

Carter Vance, “Towards a Historical Materialist Concept of Asexuality and

Compulsory Sexuality,” Studies in Social Justice 12, no. 1 (2018): 149,

https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v12i1.1537.

Karen Cuthbert, “You have to be Normal to be Abnormal: An Empirically Grounded

Exploration of the Intersection of Asexuality and Disability.” Sociology 51, no. 2 (2017): 242,

https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038515587639.

Eunjung Kim, “Asexuality in Disability Narratives.” Sexualities 14, no. (2011): 487,

http://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711406463.

Kim, “Asexuality in Disability Narratives,” 483.

difference between asexuality as an identity and the process of desexualization which ascribes

asexuality onto certain bodies and is thus another byproduct of compulsory sexuality, a point

which is also noted by Karen Cuthbert.

Compulsory sexuality does not merely compel people

to be sexual; it polices who is allowed to be sexual and thus desexualizes those it deems unfit for

sexuality.

The history of desexualization also has a long history of being tied to race. Ianna

Hawkins Owen argues that the discourses of asexuality have been used forcibly desexualize

people of color, particularly black women, as a means of controlling their bodies. Owen thus

problematizes the growing field of asexuality and challenges the field to avoid erasing previous

incarnations of asexuality that have functioned to control the bodies of people of color.

short, the term “asexual” is still haunted by histories of racialized desexualization, which Owen

reminds asexuality scholars needs to be fully addressed. However, what Owen describes is more

often considered “desexualization,” so named by Karen Cuthbert as the preferred terminology to

specifically distinguish desexualization from asexuality as orientation.

Theresa N. Kenney

makes a similar point noting that asexuality is thus intricately tied to race and requires

intersectional approaches that avoid “positioning asexuality around whiteness,” meaning that

scholars of asexuality need to be attuned to the intersection of race with asexuality.

Karen Cuthbert, “Disability and Asexuality,” in The Routledge Handbook of Disability

and Sexuality, ed. Russell Shuttleworth and Linda R. Mona (London: Routledge, 2020), 374.

Ianna Hawkins Owen, “On the Racialization of Asexuality” in Asexualities: Feminist

and Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks (New York: Routledge,

2014), 121.

Karen Cuthbert, “Disability and Asexuality,” 374.

Theresa N. Kenney, “Thinking Asexually: Sapin-Sapin, Asexual Assemblages, and the

Queer Possibilities of Platonic Relationalities.” Feminist Formations 32, no. 3 (2020): 17,

https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0038.

When broadened to further consider intersectional approaches with gender in mind,

recent scholarship has begun linking asexuality studies to trans studies. The intersection between

people who identify as both asexual and transgender has been noted by Cuthbert, who finds that

these studies into the lives of asexual and gender-variant people “highlight the ways in which

asexuality is an inherently gendered phenomenon, as it involves understandings and practices of

sexual desire, sexual activity, and agency, all of which are intimately tied to gender.”

Rather

than indulge the push to separate out gender from sexuality, Cuthbert demonstrates that for some

people, this separation is impossible, and to force such a separation between gender and sexuality

renders them unintelligible. Both asexuality and trans studies call for a renewed focus on

difference and a relinquishing of our attachment to essentialist definitions of sex, gender, and

sexuality.

The scholarly arguments regarding the above intersections with asexuality will be

analyzed more deeply in later chapters. Ultimately, this research on the various intersections of

asexuality further questions the shifting definition of asexuality and the constellation of

possibilities for asexual identifying individuals.

These three key questions regarding how asexuality is defined, how it relates to

queerness, and how it queers sexuality are the starting points that will aid in the creation of an

asexual reading strategy that goes deeper than simply finding asexual characters in theatre

history. Being attuned to the shifting and complicated definitions of asexuality, as well as

reading for asexuality in terms of queerness allows for an expansive conception of what can

count as asexuality. Asking how asexuality queers sexuality offers an opportunity to delve into

Karen Cuthbert, “When We Talk About Gender We Talk About Sex: (A)sexuality and

(A)gendered Subjectivities,” Gender and Society 33, no. 6 (2019): 845,

https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243219867916.

assumptions about human nature, sexuality, and romance often found at the crux of theatre.

These three questions regarding asexuality will guide a methodology in terms of finding

characters who are resistant to normative sexuality in theatre history.

Methodology: An Asexual Interpretative Lens

Examining representations of asexuality in art, literature, and theatre is one potential

avenue for revitalizing our understandings of sexuality as a whole. However, since asexuality is

generally considered to be either an invisible orientation or a newly enunciated sexual

orientation, there are very few representations of overt asexuality in popular culture. Since

representations of asexuality have until recently been scarce, it is rare to find scholars engaging

in critique of representations of asexuality in popular culture and history, though this has

expanded in more recent years. Ela Przybylo and Danielle Cooper have mapped out a

methodology to broaden the scholarship in asexuality studies to include representation and

interpretation by locating what they call “asexual resonances,” understood here to mean traces,

touches, moments, or ephemeral fragments of asexuality in unexpected places where it may not

be overtly mentioned.

They state that a “queer broadening of what can ‘count’ as asexuality,

especially historically speaking, creates space for unorthodox and unpredictable understandings

and manifestations of asexuality.”

Rather than focusing on creating a proper or “correct”

definition of asexuality, Przybylo and Cooper make room for possibilities of asexuality where it

may have been hidden, invisible, or otherwise ignored by a sex normative society. For instance,

they reference Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto” as a work that contains resonances of

Ela Przybylo and Danielle Cooper, 2014. “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly

Asexual Archive,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 3 (2014): 298,

https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2422683.

Przybylo and Cooper, “Asexual Resonances,” 298.

asexuality, considering Solanas’s distrust of the centrality of sex, even though she does not

specifically use the term “asexual.”

In her book, Asexual Erotics, Przybylo continues her project of seeking asexual

resonances “to think about the critiques, forms of reading, and modes of relating that are made

possible when asexuality is centralized.”

Her work considers various tropes surrounding

asexuality, such as radical feminist political celibacy, lesbian bed death, childhood, and

spinsterhood. She views these tropes as places to find asexual resonances that feature different

ways of relating. The sites she chooses within these tropes all feature artistic works and texts

from the mid-twentieth century to the present, leaving room for other scholars to apply her

strategy to texts from other times as well. She analyzes her artifacts from an asexual standpoint,

utilizing the metaphor of the “erotic” (as articulated by Audre Lorde) as a critical lens that

imagines ways of relating that do not center sex.

Since asexuality is a new concept that is still being articulated, “perfect” examples of

asexuality are difficult to find. This holds true for history as well as for contemporary definitions

of asexuality as an identity or orientation. Asexuality is defined as a lack of sexual attraction, and

thus it is hard to articulate how one can be oriented towards nothing, which makes asexuality

trickier to pin down than other orientations. Personally speaking, when I first heard of asexuality,

I thought it was nonsense. Even to this day, after all the research and self-reflection, I still

question if I am “asexual enough” to even claim the identity. For this reason, the idea of “asexual

Przybylo and Cooper, “Asexual Resonance,” 309 and Valerie Solanas, SCUM (Society

for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto (1967),” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed.

Barbara A. Crow (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 213.

Przybylo, Asexual Erotics, 26.

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider: Essays and

Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 57.

resonances” is helpful as a critical stance. Resonances of asexuality do not need to have a

definitive asexual definition to be considered asexual enough; they can be imperfect traces. In

searching for these imperfect traces, it is helpful to consider a queer rhetorical gesture that

imagines queerness (or asexuality, in this case) as a lens for interpretation.

In addition to using Przybylo and Cooper’s “asexual resonances” as a starting point, I

pattern my methods after Stacy Wolf’s reading practice that queers twentieth century American

musicals by using a rhetorical gesture to read ostensibly straight characters (and by extension,

actors) as “lesbian.”

For Wolf, “the challenge is to determine how lesbians appear where none

officially exist,” using “lesbian” as a reading/viewing practice as well as an identity.

“Lesbian”

then becomes a queer interpretive position from which to engage with a text. She draws in part

from Jill Dolan’s feminist spectator who views works that are not meant for her and constructs

the feminist spectator as both a theoretical standpoint and an identity standpoint.

It is in this

manner that Dolan uses a critical lens to access theatre that was not made for her as a feminist

spectator as well as critique feminist performance with rigor and earnestness. Wolf however,

primarily uses her lesbian spectator not as a critical standpoint in the way of Dolan, but as more

of a “what if.”

Wolf’s “what if” is similar to Richard Schechner’s concepts of “is” and “as”

performance.

For Schechner, “something ‘is’ a performance when historical and social context,

Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 4.

Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 4.

Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: Universityy of

Michigan Press, 2012), 2.

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002),

30.

convention, usage, and tradition say it is,” meaning that definitions of performance depend on its

context.

Conversely, he states that “any behavior, event, action, or thing can be studied ‘as’

performance, can be analyzed in terms of doing, behaving, and showing.”

In other words, if

one attempts to study something “as” performance, all that would be needed would be to use

“performance” as a lens for analysis. Wolf takes a similar approach with these musicals by

reading famous musical theatre actresses and their most well-known performances as a lesbian

spectator and through a lesbian lens. Wolf claims that in order to read a body onstage as a

lesbian, one must first have some identity that comes to mind. Wolf calls this a certain “circular

knowledge,” suggesting that there must be some already existing representations of lesbians

from which to base these readings.

Wolf is careful to note that said circular knowledge is often

derivative of possibly damaging stereotypes of queer women. To avoid this, Wolf looks for

places where she sees lesbianism as being relational, since there are no overt depictions of

lesbians in the musicals she analyzes. These instances include women, such as Eliza in My Fair

Lady, who defy gender norms by not being part of a heterosexual couple, as well as the

homosocial environment seen in the convent of The Sound of Music.

This brings up an important point regarding how one might read for asexuality onstage:

there is no circular knowledge of asexuality from which to draw upon. Asexuality is only just

now beginning to even be understood as a possibility, and representations of it are so scarce that

it lacks the visibility of other queer identities. It is for this reason that the idea of “resonances” or

“traces” are so important – these may be the only images of asexuality that are available. In

Schechner, Performance Studies, 30.

Schechner, Performance Studies, 32.

Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 38.

Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 151 and 228.

taking a similar approach to Wolf, sites or identities that likewise defy gender and sexual norms

or create an eroticism that does not centralize sex can be used to read for asexuality. This

approach allows for a look backwards into history, before asexuality or even heterosexuality and

homosexuality were articulated, to find these sorts of traces or resonances of asexuality.

Several queer scholars have set a precedent in looking backward into history in order to

read for queerness. Carolyn Dinshaw, for example, argues for “a queer historical impulse, an

impulse toward making connections across time between, on the one hand, lives, texts, and other

cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other, those left out of

current sexual categories now.”

In other words, Dinshaw seeks to bridge the queer past with the

queer present to illuminate queer possibilities in the present. Through this bridge, Dinshaw is

attempting to engage with Muñoz’s “backwards glance that enacts a future vision,” by looking to

the queer past to find ways of envisioning a queer future through traces or resonances of

queerness.

Similarly, Christine Varnado uses this backward impulse as a mode for a literary critique

of early modern drama. She calls for “a literary trace of queerness” that considers how

nonnormative desires are communicated through literary texts.

For Varnado, this literary trace

of queerness is not the same thing as conveniently “discovering” homosexuality in past contexts

that do not resemble our own. Instead, Varnado offers a queer reading practice, that exists as “a

meso-level space in between the best-guess reconstructions of historical inquiry (what happened,

Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and

Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press. 1999), 1.

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New

York: New York University Press. 2009), 4.

Christine Varnado, Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern

Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2020), 8.

and how people thought about it) and the motivated ideations of presentist interpretation (what

we read into texts).”

Simply put, while it is impossible for us to know authorial intent, we as

readers and interpreters of texts can create meaning relevant to our own contemporary audiences.

Reading then, for Varnado, is “the reader’s act of assembling meaning, through a dynamic

process akin to a performance’s realization of a script, from the repertoire provided by the

formal features of the text.”

This reading practice, the process of finding a literary trace of

queerness, lends itself easily to a queer dramaturgical practice of interpretation. While Varnado

articulates a trace of literary queerness in dramatic literature, I argue that an asexual

dramaturgical lens can be used to follow a similar trajectory. Of course, the pendulum can swing

too far in the other direction, meaning that texts should not become open playgrounds wherein

any sort of interpretation can be added. That is why the idea of asexual resonances is so

important. While it may be next to impossible to find asexual characters in dramatic literature

prior to the twenty-first century, characters that may resonate with asexuality or disidentify with

sexuality may be easier to locate.

Elizabeth Hanna Hanson engages in a similar attempt to read for an asexual narrative

structure, seeking instances of what she terms “asexual possibility” within a story’s structure.

Rather than searching for an individual character upon which to ascribe asexuality, Hanson

resists the pull to find “asexual people in history or literature.” Instead, she looks for the

possibility of reading for asexuality within a narrative’s structure that is identified with stasis and

Varnado, Shapes of Fancy, 16.

Varnado, Shapes of Fancy, 21, (added emphasis).

Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure,” in Asexualities:

Feminist and Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks (New York:

Routledge, 2014), 346.

with an absence of desire.

She examines two works by Henry James, the short story “The Beast

in the Jungle” and the novel The Sacred Fount. This asexual possibility as an interpretative

gesture, as opposed to pointing to proof of asexuality in past literature, is useful in broadening

the potential sites where asexual resonances can be found and explored.

In the Winter 2020 special issue of Feminist Formations, Ela Przbylo and Kristina Gupta

open up the possibility of putting asexuality into conversation with nonsexuality. “Considering

nonsexuality broadly as including those areas where sex and sexuality are not central, are absent,

or are questioned, it becomes possible to apply asexuality studies’ unique contributions to other

fields of study.”

Nonsexuality, then, would refer to a marked divergence from and resistance to

regimes of compulsory sexuality that includes but is not limited to asexual identifications. In

other words, and for the purpose of this dissertation, asexuality can be understood as being the

term for the twenty-first century identity as a sexual orientation, while nonsexuality can more

broadly refer to behavior. Broadening conceptions of asexuality to include nonsexuality allows

for a richer understanding of what could be read as asexuality and can help create a “what if” to

read for asexuality, similar to Wolf’s onstage lesbian. This move also brings asexual possibility

into conversation as a potential reading strategy. Instead of looking for perfect images or

asexuality that do not exist, nonsexual behaviors can be viewed relationally and more broadly.

In looking to nonsexualities, several adjacent fields can be knitted together to create a

richer understanding of asexuality. Works such as Benjamin Kahan’s Celibacies: American

Modernism and Sexual Life, Peter Cryle and Allison Moore’s Frigidity: An Intellectual History,

Hanson, “Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure,” 354.

Ela Przybylo and Kristina Gupta, “Editorial Introduction: The Erotics of Asexualities

and Nonsexualities: Intersectional Approaches,” Feminist Formations 32, no. 3 (2020): xi,

https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0034.

Angus McLaren’s Impotence: A Cultural History, Theodora A. Jankowski’s Pure Resistance:

Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama, Kara French’s Against Sex: Identities of Sexual

Restraint in Early America, and Michael Cobb’s Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled are just

some examples of scholarship that have left a mark on studies of asexuality and contribute to the

field through their tie to nonsexualities.

These larger works have also engaged in literary

criticism and cultural theory regarding various articulations of nonsexuality or asexuality-

adjacent subjects.

There are several scholars who have contributed to the search for asexuality and

nonsexuality in a variety of literary texts and media, in present and past contexts. While some

examine current representations of overt asexuality, others have branched off of Przbylo and

Cooper’s concept of searching for places in history or literature where asexuality may not be as

overtly described. For instance, several chapters in Cerankowski and Milks’ anthology

Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives are devoted to an examination of film and

literature from an asexual perspective.

The Winter 2020 special issue of Feminist Formations

Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies; Peter Cryle and Alison Moore, Frigidity: An Intellectual

History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer

Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2000); Kara French, Against Sex: Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2021); and Michael Cobb, Single: Arguments for the

Uncoupled (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

Cynthia Barounis, “Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual/Crip Resistance in John

Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus,” in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June

Cerankowski and Megan Milks (New York: Routledge, 2014) 174-198; Jana Fedtke, “‘What to

Call that Sport, the Neuter Human...’: Asexual Subjectivity in Keri Hume's The Bone People,” in

Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, ed. Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks

(New York: Routledge, 2014) 329-343; and Elizabeth Hanna Hanson, “Toward an Asexual

Narrative Structure,” 344-374.

includes several articles that follow a similar impulse regarding asexuality and nonsexuality.

Other research examining asexuality or nonsexuality in literature have been appearing with more

frequency in the past decade. Some examples of such scholarship include Simone Chess’s

research on the convergence between asexuality and anorexia in The Woman Killed with

Kindness and The Broken Heart, Megan Arkenberg’s examination of the asexuality of Galahad

in Le Morte D’arthur, and Jordan Windholz’s study of queer male chastity in All’s Well that

Ends Well.

These works offer up rich critical and theoretical explorations of asexuality,

nonsexuality, and compulsory sexuality. They all commonly look to instances of nonsexuality,

virginity, or celibacy that seem to queer or to push against the normative (or compulsory)

sexuality of the times within which the works appear. Many of these studies tell stories of

absence, viewing the lack of overt sexual desire as containing a possibility or traces of

asexuality. Megan Arkenberg argues that “reading asexuality anachronistically into historical

texts can contribute to contemporary efforts at asexual community building,” echoing the queer

impulses of Dinshaw, Varnado, and Muñoz. These sorts of backwards glances into literary and

Anna Kurowicka, “‘The only story I will ever be able to tell’: Nonsexual Erotics of

Friendship in Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Tana French's The Likeness,” Feminist

Formations 32, no. 3 (2020): 24-50, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0039; Justin Smith, “‘[T]he

happiest, well-feddest wolf in Harlem’: Asexuality as Resistance to Social Reproduction in

Claude McKay's Home to Harlem,” Feminist Formations 32, no. 3 (2020): 51-74,

https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0040; and Min Joo Lee, “Intimacy Beyond Sex: Korean

Television Dramas, Nonsexual Masculinities, and Transnational Erotic Desires,” Feminist

Formations 32, no. 3 (2020): 100-120, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0042.

Simone Chess, “Opting Out: Anorexia, Asexuality, and Early Modern Women,” Early

Modern Women, 15, no. 1, (2020), https://doi.org/10.1353/emw.2020.0009; Megan Arkenberg,

“‘A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood’: Galahad’s Asexuality and its Significance in Le Morte

Darthur,” Arthuriana 24, no. 3 (2014): 3-22, https://doi.org/10.1353/art.2014.0039; and Jordan

Windholz, “The Queer Testimonies of Male Chastity in All's Well That Ends Well,” Modern

Philology 116 no. 4 (2019): 322-349, https://doi.org/10.1086/701950.

dramaturgical sites throughout history have value for readers and audiences today.

In a sense,

these sorts of backwards glances create a loose archive of sites where asexual resonances can be

glimpsed. To quote Przybylo and Cooper, “to be archivable thus means to be self-identified and

identifiable;” in other words, to be archivable is to be thinkable.

The value of seeking out

asexual resonances is that it provides a way to imagine the possibility of living a nonsexual life,

in the past, as well as in the present and into the future. This imaginative possibility is vital for

those who begin to come to an asexuality identity.

More recently, the “Early Modern Asexuality and Performance: An ACMRS

Roundtable” in October of 2020 featured several scholars similarly playing with how to craft an

asexual reading strategy, offering up readings of early modern dramatic works, primarily those

of Shakespeare.

A common theme among the participants dealt with the process of creating this

reading strategy and theorizing how to read asexuality onstage. Even though there has been a

significant increase in literary analysis of asexuality, there is still a dearth of work on asexuality

in performance, leaving performance texts and practices as a largely untapped resource for

asexuality studies. As evidenced by the roundtable and few articles mentioned above, this is

changing, and the field of asexuality studies is blossoming.

So why attempt to create an asexual reading strategy? What is the significance of creating

an interpretive lens to read asexuality into past literary texts? Rather than consider this

dissertation as an attempt to overlay asexual identity onto past performance practices

Arkenberg, “A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood,” 4.

Przybylo and Cooper, “Asexual Resonances,” 302.

Jeff Wade, et. al, “Early Modern Asexuality and Performance: An ACMRS

Roundtable,” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, October 20, 3030, video,

1:00:31, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vSgG02fH6M.

anachronistically, instead, I seek to craft an interpretive lens with which to create readings and

performances today. While these characters may have existed in the past, an assertion that is

impossible to prove, we are reading and performing their stories now. Our current moment

within which asexuality is newly legible is the moment that we as readers, audience members,

and theatre practitioners would be reading and producing these texts. An asexual lens could bring

new life to these characters that could be seen on our stages or in our pages. Louisa May Alcott’s

Little Women, for instance, has been adapted well over a dozen times, and each adaptation,

particularly the feature films, exists as a microcosm of the time within which it was released.

Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film comes closest to creating an ending for Jo March where she could live

happily as a spinster and an author. It is no coincidence that in 2019 we see a film that gives a

trace of nonsexuality, an opening that allows for an interpretation of Jo as asexual. Arguing for

Jo’s asexuality in 2019 does not ascribe it to Alcott’s Jo from 1868, or Katherine Hepburn’s Jo in

1933, or Winona Ryder’s Jo in 1994.

Instead, it is an interpretative possibility for twenty-first

century audiences who are newly enunciating asexuality as its own sexual orientation.

Such interpretations provide visible representations of asexuality as a possibility today.

When representations of asexuality are made visible, the lived experience can be recognizable

and thinkable. And frankly, to make the stakes personal: these interpretations help me recognize

myself in an imperfect mirror. It took a long time to discover asexuality as an identity rather than

something for which I should seek unwanted medication. While some may consider visibility a

trap, for others, having this identity represented and visible is a way of recognizing oneself that

does not end in a clinical diagnosis.

Little Women directed by George Cukor (1933; RKO Radio Pictures); Little Women,

directed by Gillian Armstrong (1994; Columbia Pictures).

And yet, power is not automatically granted simply by becoming more visible. There are

price tags to visibility. One such price tag is the misrecognition of asexuality and the coopting of

the discourse by the toxic masculinity/white supremacy of the incel movement, which treats the

absence of sex, what they term “involuntary celibacy” as an injury towards (specifically white)

men, using the language of injustice to wrest agency from antiracist and antisexist discourse as

validation.

Casey Ryan Kelly and Chase Aunspach likewise argue that “Incel discourse, along

with the discourse of the alt-right, are a logical extension of the demands of compulsory

sexuality.”

Unlike asexuality or political celibacy, the incel movement advocates for and

proves the existence of compulsory sexuality.

Another trap of visibility is the danger of positioning asexuality in binary opposition to

sexuality, which could flatten out any nuance with respect to the lives of asexual individuals. A

further potential danger is that with the proliferation of micro labels under an asexual spectrum,

there are more labels with which to misrecognize and misrepresent lived experiences of asexual

individuals. Visibility can lead to further examination and surveillance, and always the threat of

pathologization. Other possibilities include potential gatekeeping and the push to prove an

unassailable identity to have a seat at the table under the asexual umbrella. Micro labels are

prone to even further examination and surveillance, and even to commodification and

commercialization, as can be seen through the proliferation of pride flag paraphernalia for sale.

These dangers are a struggle for the larger queer community, and asexuality is not immune.

A final cost of visibility is the backlash that tends to occur as sexual minorities gain

representation and visibility. Amidst the current backlash against the larger queer community,

Przybylo, Asexual Erotics, 141.

Casey Ryan Kelly and Chase Aunspach, “Incels, Compulsory Sexuality, and Fascist

Masculinity,” Feminist Formations 32, no. 3 (2020): 148, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2020.0044.

asexuality is similarly experiencing backlash, even from within the queer community. On April

6th, 2022, asexual activist and model Yasmin Benoit launched the “Stonewall x Yasmin Benoit

Ace Project” which seeks to better understand the experiences of asexual people living in the

United Kingdom.

Although there was an outpouring of support from the ace community,

Benoit has received criticism from not only conservative groups, but also from some members of

the queer community, as well as from “gender-critical” feminists, who tend to espouse

transphobic, as well as acephobic views.

Benoit’s work calls for a nuanced understanding of

asexuality as an orientation, but also for the recognition of equality for all sexualities and

genders.

The point of creating an asexual reading lens from which to interpret characters as

asexual is not simply to tout visibility as the paean, but to help create the space for an asexual

identity to exist. Since an understanding of asexuality is still developing, there are many people

who do not realize asexuality exists as an option until they see asexuality represented, and the

popular representations of asexuality are few. Performance makes things visible and possible. As

evidenced by the amount of bourgeoning research into asexuality, the field is signaling the future

of sexuality studies.

Centering asexuality in literary and dramatic texts can not only be used to view asexual

or nonsexual possibilities but can be used to interrogate oppressive structures of our current

constructions of sexuality. Using an asexual lens to read dramatic texts also involves an

Stonewall, “Stonewall x Yasmin Benoit Ace Project,” https://www.stonewall.org.uk/

stonewall-x-yasmin-benoit-ace-project.

Yasmin Benoit, “I Set up a Groundbreaking Asexuality Project with Stonewall – The

Came the Culture Warriors,” Inews Opinion, April 26, 2022, https://inews.co.uk/author/yasmin-

benoit.

interrogation of previously taken for granted assumptions about how compulsory sexuality

functioned throughout history. While asexuality can be considered an identity category for the

twenty-first century, nonsexuality can be of more use. By using asexuality as a critical lens rather

than assuming it as an identity category, sites where nonsexuality is experienced or where

compulsory sexuality is resisted can be opened up to examination. This asexual lens also allows

for an interrogation of the way that compulsory sexuality works as a tacit interpretative

assumption that the behavior of all characters in plays are assumed to be at least in part

motivated by and therefore explainable in terms of (usually heterosexual) libido. In using an

asexual lens to find resonances of nonsexuality, I aim to unsettle the interpretative assumptions

of sexuality as a character motivation.

When asexuality is used as an interpretive lens, it allows for the lived experiences of

people who identify as asexual to be made known. While gaining visibility is an important

outcome, it is just as important to interrogate and question the mobilization of compulsory

sexuality and to imagine what asexuality as an ideality might look like. I think the future of

asexuality studies will involve a branching out to imagine possible asexual worlds and literary

and dramaturgical sites within which to find more asexual resonances.

Theatre and performance studies also have something to gain by using asexuality as a

lens. Performance has become a driving metaphor in theory writ large over the past half century,

with gender and sexuality studies using performance as a central metaphor. Performance studies

has blossomed into an academic discipline and has expanded concepts regarding what

performance does and how it shapes our society.

From there, “performance” has been used as a

Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge.

1996).

central metaphor for several fields, including feminist and queer theory. Performance as a

conceptual tool has thus become embedded in many theories of sexuality.

Since performance

has been used as a way of theorizing sex and gender, performance is also ripe to articulate how

compulsory sexuality is connected to subject formation. The possibilities of how this new lens

can enrich studies of dramatic texts is almost endless.

Dramaturgical Sites

The scope of this project is limited to performance texts rather than broadening to include

novels, poems, or epistles. I have also limited myself to the western theatrical tradition, to avoid

the potential colonizing gesture of applying a sexuality that has primarily been articulated in

“WEIRD” (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) countries onto another

culture.

For instance, in 2018, Two-spirit storyteller Joshua Whitehead was nominated for a

Lambda Literary Award in the Trans Poetry category and withdrew from consideration, stating

“[m]y gender, sexuality, and my identities supersede Western categorizations of LGBTQ+.”

100

Trans identities, like asexuality, are western constructions, as are the apparatuses of compulsory

sexuality and gender dichotomization, which is not to say that western culture has a monopoly on

the lack of sexual desire. However, the ways in which sexuality is defined and deployed in

For example, Judith Butler’s foundational work in both performance studies and queer

theory argues that we humans perform our sexuality through daily repetition of social acts. Judith

Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist

Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no.4 (1988), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893.

Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the

World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2-3 (2010): 61,

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.

100

Joshua Whitehead, “Why I'm Withdrawing from my Lambda Literary Award

Nomination,” Tiahouse: The Insurgent Architect's House for Creative Writing, March 14, 2018,

https://www.tiahouse.ca/joshua-whitehead-why-im-withdrawing-from-my-lambda-literary-

award-nomination/.

western culture is different from that of other cultures. I prefer resisting the pull to ascribe a

western construction onto another culture. Limiting the scope to western theatre will allow for an

interrogation of the definitions of sexuality and how sexuality is deployed and weaponized

against marginalized people.

While this project is limited in terms of culture and location, it is more fluid in terms of

eras. It functions genealogically by locating various resonances of asexuality in dramatic

literature throughout much of the western dramatic canon. Many of the plays chosen are well

known, while some are lesser known. Each of the historical sites contain characters that can be

seen to invoke traces of asexuality (as it is understood today), yet these characters do not fit

neatly into any one box or identity formation. Consider these to be a series independent case

studies wherein asexuality will be centered. In each chapter, I analyze how compulsory sexuality

has influenced extant critical readings of specific characters throughout theatre history, specify

what sexuality may have meant in the original context of these plays, and offer counter-readings

that frame these characters as exiting outside of or in resistance to diegetic and interpretative

regimes of compulsory sexuality.

Each chapter also centers asexual resonances that are perhaps more broadly understood as

instances of nonsexuality as the starting point. Thus, each chapter will feature recognizable

forms of nonsexuality that contain asexual resonances (such as staunch virginity, religious

celibacy, agender asexuality, and spinsterhood) as a way of orienting my examination of

compulsory sexuality. In this manner, I hope to further Melissa Sanchez’s hypothesis that “there

may be as many forms of asexuality across different historical, national and cultural contexts as

there are of sexuality.”

101

Thus, with this asexual critical lens, I aim to create a richer exploration

101

Sanchez, “Protestantism, Marriage, and Asexuality in Shakespeare,” 102.

of asexualityChapter one begins with Euripides’s Greek tragedy Hippolytus, which features an

unwavering male virgin.

102

Hippolytus, a young man who dedicates himself to Artemis and vows

to eschew sex, finds himself as the object of his stepmother’s desire. He refuses his stepmother’s

advances, citing his lack of desire for all things sexual, with his refusal culminating in his death.

Over the centuries, there have been several interpretations of Hippolytus’s virginity. Even though

a refusal of incest does not automatically make Hippolytus into an asexual, it is his stringent tie

to virginity that allows for reading the character as potentially asexual. This chapter examines the

peculiar virginity of Hippolytus, as well as how his virginity has been treated in further

adaptations of Euripides’s play.

Chapter two focuses on religious dramas as sites where asexual resonances can be articulated.

Hrotsvit of Gandershiem, medieval dramatist, writes about the struggles of Christian women,

centering these struggles around themes of chastity and virginity. Typically, her plays are read as

extolling the triumph of religious celibacy; however, asexuality has not been centered in these

discussions. By using an asexual lens, I analyze the ways that religious nonsexuality both resists

and upholds the system of compulsory sexuality in the Medieval era.

Chapter three spotlights The Roaring Girl, in which Thomas Middleton and Thomas

Dekker present audiences with a strangely ambiguous character: Moll Cutpurse, a cross-dressing

woman and thief, sometimes called a “virago” (a masculinized woman), who is used by a pair of

young lovers as a foil in a fake marriage plot.

103

In the play, Moll often boasts of her virginity,

yet she has not been articulated as espousing an explicitly asexual identity. Further, the character

102

Euripides, Hippolytus, in Euripides: Medea and Other Plays, trans. James Morwood

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

103

Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl (1611), in Thomas

Middleton Four Plays, ed. William C. Carroll (London: Methuen Drama, 2012).

of Moll Cutpurse was based on Mary Frith, a real historical figure and infamous cross-dresser

who was a fixture of the London theatre scene.

104

This chapter examines the links between

asexuality and transgender studies and considers the implications of putting a real historical

figure onstage.

Chapter four examines asexual resonances in two American plays of the early twentieth

century: Angeline Weld Grimke’s Rachel and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.

105

Both plays feature young women who end their plays as tragic spinsters. Grimke’s play features

the title character, Rachel, who refuses marriage and motherhood because she does not feel safe

bringing a black child into a white world. This play could be seen as a deliberate mobilization of

asexuality as a (limited) means of fighting for reproductive justice. In The Glass Menagerie,

Laura, the main character’s younger sister, often described as frail and disabled, fails to secure an

eligible suitor for herself, and ends the play unmarried. While being unmarried does not

automatically equate to an asexuality identity, Laura’s singleness highlights a typical

construction of disabled people as automatically asexual. Both plays thus speak to the

interconnectedness of eugenics and sexuality in twentieth century America. These plays also

speak to the larger American culture of the twentieth century, not just in terms of race and

sexuality, but also in terms of the seemingly tragic dissolution of the “American dream” for both

women.

104

William C. Carroll, “Introduction,” Thomas Middleton: Four Plays: Women Beware

Women, The Changeling, The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. William C.

Carroll (London: Menthuen Drama, 2012), xi.

105

Angelina Weld Grimke, Rachel (1916), in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by

American Women, ed. Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Bloomington, Indiana

University Press, 1998) and Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1945), (New York, New

Directions Publishing Corporation, 1999).

The conclusion considers the future of asexuality studies. Beginning with contemporary

asexual characters, such as Todd Chavez from the animated series BoJack Horseman, the

conclusion presents the ways that asexuality is currently represented today.

106

Along with

exploring current representations, the conclusion also analyzes the current acephobic backlash

more fully. Finally, the conclusion offers up a guide for performance practitioners in using an

asexual lens as a dramaturgical strategy. By creating more representations of asexuality, either

through writing new asexual characters or by reinterpreting existing characters as asexual, this

project seeks to offer up new directions for future scholarship and performance.

The general interpretative leap of this project then is to question how an asexual lens can

be added to the conceptual and heuristic toolbox of an actor, a director, a dramaturg, audience

member, or reader. The goal is not to find the hidden asexual individuals in history, but rather to

offer up an asexual interpretative possibility, one where asexuality can be read and performed

today. What I am proposing here is instead of a backwards queer glance, perhaps a backwards

tr(ace) of asexuality. While a queer reading strategy certainly has relevance to asexuality,

perhaps it is more fitting to describe an asexual reading strategy that will exist alongside queer

reading strategies to help bring light to asexuality as it is understood and experienced today. This

constellation of asexual interpretations is by no means exhaustive, nor is it meant to be. Consider

this a contribution and a means of articulating how an asexual dramaturgical lens can be applied

to theatre.

106

BoJack Horseman, season 4, episode 3, “Hooray! Todd Episode!” directed by Aaron

Long, written by Elijah Aron and Jordan Young, featuring Will Arnett and Aaron Paul, aired

September 8, 2017, Netflix.

Chapter 1.

A Virgin Soul: The Queer Myth of Hippolytus

Hippolytus is perhaps the character that comes closest to representing asexuality in the

Western theatrical canon. As one of the only recognizable and easily marked as asexual (or at

least nonsexual) characters in theatrical history, it is natural to begin this exploration of an

asexual dramaturgical lens with Euripides’ Hippolytus.

107

In the play, Euripides tells the story of

Phaedra and her unnatural desire for her stepson, Hippolytus. Her lust for Hippolytus is brought

on by the goddess Aphrodite, in part because Hippolytus had spurned her by refusing to marry

and devoting himself entirely to virginity and the virgin goddess Artemis. His stringent defense

of his virginity has been remarked about by several scholars, including Simon Goldhill, who

refers to Hippolytus as “the most famous abstinent of classical literature.”

108

Other scholars

explicitly suggest that Hippolytus exhibits an asexual identity.

109

By using asexuality as a lens

with which to read Hippolytus, I argue that this lens can be used to interrogate compulsory

sexuality as it is understood in Euripidean drama. This chapter thus analyzes the character of

Hippolytus and what his potential asexuality says about compulsory sexuality in ancient times,

while also analyzing further adaptations of the story of Hippolytus that each deal with

compulsory sexuality in their own respective times.

107

Euripides, Hippolytus, in Medea and Other Plays, trans. James Morwood (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997).

108

Simon Goldhill, Foucault's Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of

Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22.

109

Thomas K. Hubbard and Maria Doerfler, “From Ascesis to Sexual Renunciation,” In

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. Thomas Hubbard, (West Sussex: Wiley

Blackwell, 2013) 169.

The City Dionysia of Athens in the fifth century BCE represents an ancestral cultural

phenomenon for the modern Western theatrical tradition. While only about three dozen Athenian

plays survive in full, they show glimpses of the desires, philosophies, and concepts of citizenship

of their society. Alongside other texts from that era, the plays also index Athenians’ ideas

governing sexuality. The goal of this chapter then is to read the extant script of Hippolytus to

analyze Euripides’s representation of sexuality (and thus, nonsexuality). In so doing, I will rely

on the robust critical tradition of interpretations of Hippolytus as well as the wealth of

scholarship on Ancient Greek sexuality in general.

Yet before considering potential traces of asexuality in ancient drama, an understanding

of ancient sexuality is necessary. For starters, most of what is known about sexuality is tinted

with a modern Western conception of sexual categories in terms of heterosexuality and

homosexuality.

110

David Halperin makes this point, arguing that various “sexual experiences and

forms of erotic life are culturally specific,” meaning that the ways in which humans make sense

of and categorize sexuality is dependent on culture.

111

What this means for the study of ancient

sexuality is that contemporary classifications of sexuality do not transfer easily across time and

place.

Foucault’s multivolume History of Sexuality plays an important role in considering how

sexuality has been articulated throughout history. There Foucault frames sexuality not as an

inherent or cemented biological phenomenon but a cultural production based around how power

110

While asexuality is the focus of this dissertation, it is a far cry from being considered

an assumed category of sexuality, even today. Bisexuality is likewise similarly not as often

assumed as a category of identity, but it has had more time and understanding than asexuality.

Thus, this comment should not be taken as ace- or bi-erasure.

111

David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990),

is conceived.

112

His second volume focuses on the world of Ancient Greece and the articulation

of sexuality, in particular, “to take note of some general traits that characterized the way in which

sexual behavior was considered by classical Greek thought as a domain of moral valuation and

choice.”

113

Foucault here was setting out to discuss how sexuality in ancient Greece was

conceived of in moral and behavioral terms, and his arguments have become touchstones for

later work on classical Greek sexuality. While there have been many scholars who have critiqued

Foucault’s methods of writing history, his overarching argument in his four-volume work that

our concepts of sexuality differ dramatically across cultures is a logical starting point for this

analysis.

114

Halperin, for instance, in refining Foucault’s argument, explains that “what we call

sexuality nowadays is in fact a distinctly modern, bourgeois production” that is not biological in

nature but historically produced.

115

In other words, the contemporary notion of sexuality as being

tied to identity formation is relatively recent and culturally specific. Contemporary ideas about

sexuality—understood as an inherent, durable shape of one’s sexual desires—being an intrinsic

part of a person’s identity did not exist in the ancient world. Halperin points out,

“[H]omosexuality and heterosexuality, as we currently understand them, are modern, Western,

bourgeois productions” that cannot be found in classical antiquity.

116

112

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 105.

113

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 32.

114

For example, see Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in The

New Cultural History ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 31.

115

David Halperin, How to do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2002), 88.

116

Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 8

If the ancient Greek world is considered “before sexuality,” must it also be “before

asexuality” as well? Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz argues that the Greeks are not necessarily “before

sexuality” but instead are perhaps before our sexuality.

117

In other words, while ancient sexuality

may look different to how current sexuality is understood, there is still some manner of

organizing and understanding sexual and erotic life. Sexuality, referred to as “the cultural

interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities,” can be studied with

the caveat that contemporary Western understandings of it are radically different from other

cultures.

118

Along these lines, Ancient Athens had norms and restrictions surrounding their

interpretation of the body’s sexual capacities that could be called compulsory sexuality.

In considering how compulsory sexuality may have functioned in the ancient world,

Euripides’ Hippolytus presents an excellent case study. Scholars have long used this play, along

with several other works by Euripides, to glean insight into the world of ancient Greek

sexuality.

119

Not only is the title character one who resists the system of compulsory sexuality,

but the consequences of said resistance are made apparent in the tragic outcome of the play.

Aphrodite and Compulsory Sexuality

Euripides begins Hippolytus by giving the prologue to the goddess Aphrodite

(occasionally referred to as Cypris in the text) wherein she explains that Hippolytus, the young

117

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 18, (original emphasis).

118

David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, “Introduction,” Before

Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, eds. David M.

Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3.

119

For examples, see: Marilyn B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture

(Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society

in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Rabinowitz,

Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women.

prince of Trozen, has slighted her in not demonstrating proper reverence. She states that

Hippolytus calls her “the vilest of the gods. He spurns sex and keeps clear of marriage.”

120

She

laments his devotion to Artemis, virgin goddess of the wild hunt and vows revenge on the young

man for spurning her.

Right away compulsory sexuality appears. For the ancient Greeks, the nearest way of

conceptualizing sexuality, in our sense of the word, would be that which is related to the

Aphrodite. Marilyn B. Skinner claims that “Greek culture regarded as the preserve of the

goddess of love was an ensemble of separate but closely related physical phenomena – sexual

acts, urges, and pleasures.”

121

Distinguishing this from a modern conception of sexuality,

arguably the Greeks viewed sexuality as less an abstract concept that described a person’s

identity, and instead in more concrete terms, linking sex to the purview of Aphrodite. Similarly,

Skinner suggests that Eros, Aphrodite’s son, is associated with desire (for both sexual wants and

other appetites).

122

The term “eros” is commonly synonymous with desire. Barbara Goff also

argues that for the Greeks, “the activities of desire were known as ta aphrodisia,” aka, under the

“sign of Aphrodite.”

123

Keeping this in mind, I would argue that Aphrodite is the personification

of compulsory sexuality, as it is understood by Euripides. In other words, the figure of Aphrodite

makes sexuality an explicitly compulsory affair—Phaedra is inflicted with it, and Hippolytus is

punished for denying it.

120

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 39.

121

Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 3.

122

Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 4.

123

Barbara E. Goff, The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence, and Language in

Euripides’ Hippolytus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 28.

More specifically, this compulsory sexuality is more than merely a compulsion towards

experiencing and surrendering to sexual desire. Rabinowitz argues that “Aphrodite is not some

general sexuality but the sexuality that means heterosexuality for women and the exchange of

women between men.”

124

In other words, compulsory sexuality exists to police sexuality and

constitute individuals into power structures that tend to favor the privileged, i.e., male citizens.

Aphrodite, in vowing revenge against Hippolytus for spurning her power, is thus

invoking a form of compulsory sexuality. In the prologue, she declares that “of all who dwell

between the Black Sea and the bounds of Atlas and look on the light of the sun, I give

precedence to those who revere my power, but those who are arrogant towards me I cast

down.”

125

Here already her influence can be seen. Silvio Bär maintains Aphrodite’s prologue

establishes her as one of the more powerful goddesses, noting that “no one is immune to the

infliction of sexual and emotional passion; everyone falls in love, and everyone feels sexual lust

and physical attraction towards others.”

126

Since Aphrodite can be understood as the

personification of love and lust, she is arguably also the personification of compulsory sexuality,

especially when her influence is questioned. Bär continues, stating that in his rejection of

Aphrodite, “Hippolytus does not simply insult the goddess, but he also indirectly threatens to

overturn the natural order of things by not submitting himself to the most fundamental emotions

and driving forces.”

127

Hippolytus thus upsets the natural order of compulsory sexuality. His

124

Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, 168.

125

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 2-8.

126

Silvio Bär, “I Honour Those Who Reverence My Power”: Gods, Humans, and the

Breaking of Social and Religious Rules In Euripides’ Hippolytus.” Graeco-Latina Brunensia 25,

no. 2 (2020): 23, https://doi.org/10.5817/GLB2020-2-2.

127

Bär, “I Honour Those Who Reverence My Power,” 24.

rejection is a threat and must be punished. It is here that Aphrodite explains the “terrible love”

that she has inflicted upon Phaedra’s heart, causing her to feel a sexual desire towards

Hippolytus, her stepson.

128

She openly testifies that this revenge scheme will take the lives of

both Phaedra and Hippolytus, desiring her enemy (Hippolytus) to “pay a penalty great enough”

to satisfy her, even though Phaedra will be collateral damage.

129

The depth of the revenge plot against Hippoltyus and Phaedra can possibly be explained

by their standing as “other” in Greek society. Both characters have ancestors that strayed beyond

the ordinary parameters for sexual relations in Greece. Hippolytus stands to be othered by Greek

society, since he is the bastard son of the Amazon Hippolyta (sometimes referred to in

subsequent adaptations as Antiope), and it is suggested that he is the product of Theseus’ rape of

his mother.

130

Phaedra is a foreign-born woman from Crete, whose mother succumbed to a lust

for a bull, and thus birthed the minotaur. Phaedra’s love for Theseus was also controversial, since

her sister Ariadne had originally fallen for Theseus, but he abandoned her after escaping from

Crete to marry Phaedra instead.

131

Phaedra’s past is thus already dotted with several

questionable sexual episodes. Edith Hall argues that due to Phaedra’s past, the “implication is

that Aphrodite can use her as her instrument in a false rape allegation only because, as a Cretan

woman, the daughter of Pasiphae and sister to Ariadne, she is genetically vulnerable to sexual

aberration.”

132

Her past allows her to be the perfect tool for Aphrodite’s revenge, demonstrating

128

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 28-29.

129

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 51.

130

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 1082.

131

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 337-339; Seneca, Phaedra, in Six Plays, trans. Emily

Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 114-123.

132

Edith Hall, “Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave: Euripides’ Hippolytus and

Epistemic Injustice toward Women,” in New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-

that subversive or deviant sexual behaviors will be punished, and may even have generational

consequences.

This penalty of death for both Hippolytus and Phaedra demonstrates the gravity of any

form of subverting the system of compulsory sexuality. Phaedra’s foreign ancestry puts her in

the precarious position of being “other” in Greek society. Hippolytus’s rejection of sexuality

renders him dangerous enough to warrant the death penalty, and his status as a bastard makes

him expendable. Even his devotion to Artemis, which Aphrodite observes in the prologue,

cannot save him from the slights against Aphrodite.

As Aphrodite exists after her opening monologue, Hippolytus enters with his servants,

and immediately lays a garland of flowers at the statue of Artemis. He prays to her, asking to

remain a virgin and “finish the race of my life as I began it.”

133

In essence, he desires to remain

virginal for his entire lifetime.

Seeing his reverence for Artemis and not Aphrodite, the young prince is warned by a

servant not to spurn the proud goddess Aphrodite, to which Hippolytus replies, “Since I am pure,

I greet her at a distance.”

134

When he is chastised by his servant for not paying Aphrodite her due

honors, Hippolytus replies, “No god who uses the night to work her wonders finds favor with

me.”

135

So here, early in the play, Euripides sets up Hippolytus’s devotion to purity and general

disinterest in anything sexual. The distance he puts between himself and Aphrodite further

signals his rejection of the goddess and the domain of her influence. Simon Goldhill claims that

Roman World, eds. Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2021), 18.

133

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 12-13.

134

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 86-87.

135

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 105.

“Hippolytus’ rejection of Aphrodite, then, is not just a desire for chastity or purity, but also a

subverting of his passage to manhood.”

136

By rejecting the maturity that comes with fulfilling

marriage and conjugial duties, Hippolytus essentially rejects society. J.H. Kim On Chong-

Gossard also notes the way Hippolytus subverts gender by stating that “his chastity makes his

experience of gender problematic,” since his chastity is not simply a transitional phase between

boyhood and manhood.

137

Since Hippolytus refuses sex and marriage, he is not performing his

familial and civic duties, thus bringing his manhood into question.

Sissel Undheim similarly brings attention to the strangeness of Hippolytus’s virginity and

the traditionally gendered conception of virginity in the ancient world. Undheim states that

Hippolytus comes across “as an uncharacteristic male, not only in his devotion to Artemis, but

also by his devotion to the goddess’ (for him) paradigmatic virginity. It is exactly this unnatural

and unmanly disinterest in love and sexuality that in the play is punished by Aphrodite.”

138

virginity is usually the concern of women, Hippolytus is thus transgressing gender norms as well

as sexual norms.

When Hippolytus exits, the servant stays behind to honor Aphrodite, noting the

foolishness of the young prince and asking for forgiveness. In this, Euripides marks Hippolytus’s

rejection of Aphrodite and devotion to virginity as unusual. This moment with the servant also

stands as a warning to avoid the same mistakes as Hippolytus.

136

Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1986), 120.

137

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 185.

138

Sissel Undheim, Borderline Virginities: Sacred and Secular Virgins in Late Antiquity

(London: Routledge, 2018), 111-112.

Phaedra and the Position of Women

The focus of the play is soon turned to Phaedra, Hippolytus’s stepmother who has been

cursed by Aphrodite to fall in love with him in her husband’s absence. The chorus of Trozen

women laments that Phaedra has been letting herself waste away, neither eating nor drinking.

She soon enters, carried by servants and accompanied by the Nurse, who likewise bemoans

Phaedra’s condition. Phaedra’s monologue recalls Hippolytus’s entrance speech in that she

describes a longing for nature and the hunt. In his earlier speech, Hippolytus also discussed his

love of nature, hunting, and the absence of civilization. Phaedra even prays to Artemis, wishing

that she “could be on the ground of your precinct taming Venetian horses.”

139

The Nurse refers

to her longings as madness and tries to discover the cause of her suffering.

After much coaxing, Phaedra reveals her sickness to be her love of Hippolytus. Both the

chorus and the Nurse react in horror to this pronouncement. Phaedra’s desire for her stepson is

an affront to the social order. In Ancient Greece, sexuality was built upon a hierarchy. Male

citizens were at the top of the hierarchy, while women, young boys, and slaves were considered

below male citizens and thus sexually available. David Halperin explains that “an adult male

citizen of Athens can have legitimate sexual relations only with statutory minors (his inferiors

not in age but in social and political status): the proper targets of his sexual desire include,

specifically, women, boys, foreigners, and slaves.”

140

In this way, compulsory sexuality

functioned to keep a strict hierarchy between active and passive partners. It was not uncommon,

139

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 230-231.

140

Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 30.

for example, for an older man to consider a younger man sexually desirable.

141

In falling for her

stepson, Phaedra is in essence taking on the role of an older male citizen while casting

Hippolytus as the object of her affection. Hippolytus, however, was likely aging into manhood

and was to be considered eligible for marriage, thus taking his place among the Greek men for

whom being the active partner was expected. By refusing marriage, he is refusing to take the

man’s role in a family. Likewise, by holding a desire for a younger man, Phaedra is taking on the

role of the male citizen, and thus reversing the expected sexual order.

In the play, Phaedra is already planning on suffering a slow demise, rather than give into

her unnatural desire for her stepson, which is framed as a sickness. One point that should be

made is that it is not her sexual desires that are pathological, but that she is desiring her

husband’s son. Not only is this desire a role reversal, as noted above, but it is also an affront to

her husband’s honor, who is absent at this point in the play. Thus, Phaedra is thus unable to

direct her desires towards an acceptable object. To keep her honor intact, Phaedra explains to the

chorus her plan to first endure her desire quietly, and then attempt to “conquer [her] madness

through self-control.”

142

Rather than speak her desire, Phaedra, up until this point, has chosen

instead to suffer in silence. Rabinowitz states that in Phaedra’s vacillation “between her initial

desire and subsequent shame, her behavior forges links between sexuality and speech, chastity

and silence.”

143

In other words, Phaedra is trapped between two polarities, confessing her desire

or suffering in silence. Even as she confesses, speaking her desire into the world, she realizes

141

For a deeper exploration of the practices and ethics involved with this sort of

relationship, see: Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 10-16 and John Boswell,

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 53-107.

142

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 399.

143

Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, 162.

that she has only one course left: she must die. She proclaims, “my third course – since I was

failing to win victory over Cypris by these means – was to resolve on death.”

144

In order to keep

her honor, and thus Theseus’s honor, the only societally acceptable course of action is death.

However, her nurse has other ideas. Out of love for her mistress, the Nurse suggests that

Phaedra tell Hippolytus of her desire, in an attempt to save her from starving herself. She even

references the power of Aphrodite, stating “no one can bear the force of Cypris when she comes

in spate,” again affirming the compulsory sexuality that is personified in the goddess.

145

The

Nurse goes so far to say that the goddess wants Phaedra to act on her desires, suggesting it to be

preferable to death. The Chorus vehemently disagrees with the Nurse and praises Phaedra on her

honor. Phaedra then begs the Nurse to not tell Hippolytus of her desire. After swearing to

secrecy, the Nurse immediately goes inside and tells Hippolytus of Phaedra’s love for him

anyway. Phaedra, horrified, overhears the exchange from outside the door and decides that death

is now her only option.

Hippolytus reenters in a fury, followed by the Nurse, who quickly reminds him of the

vow of silence he took before she told him of Phaedra’s unnatural love. He then launches into a

misogynist tirade against women, wishing that men could buy children as opposed to needing

women for procreation. He goes as far as to state that even hearing about Phaedra’s desire

“makes [him] feel impure.”

146

Throughout this rant, becomes clear that he wants nothing to do

with women at all.

144

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 400-401.

145

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 443-444.

146

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 656.

Rabinowitz takes a feminist reading of the play and suggests that Hippolytus’s diatribe

against women falls in line with the Greek view of women as the symbolic of the ruin of

mankind. Rabinowitz claims that this rant “cannot be discounted as idiosyncratic; rather, it

heightens and starkly expresses the cultural beliefs that define the ways in which the female

threatens social structures, and therefore define as well the place she is supposed to occupy

according to male desire.”

147

Rabinowitz further argues that Hippolytus demonstrates the typical

hierarchical gendered view of Greek society. In such a view of society, women functioned as

objects of exchange. By wishing that men should “buy their children through a means test, each

paying an appropriate sum, and they should live in their houses free from women,” Hippolytus is

in effect desiring to remove women from this system of exchange.

148

For Hippolytus, “it is clear

that a woman is a great evil” and that men would be better off avoiding women altogether.

149

Rabinowitz indicates that “buying children would bypass women’s sexuality,” which while

excessive, is not outside of the general purview of Greek society.

150

Women’s sexuality was

tightly controlled, a point Rabinowiz makes by arguing “[a]ny form of female desire could be

perceived as a theatre to the family and the Athenian polis.”

151

Phaedra, then, is not merely a

threat to Hippolytus and their immediate family, but her desires are a threat to society as a whole.

While I take Rabinowitz’s point on Hippolytus’s misogyny, I would add that his attitude

is not merely misogynist. He desires to remove himself from the system of compulsory sexuality.

By wishing to secure offspring in a nonsexual manner, he is desiring for an option outside of

147

Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, 157.

148

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 621-623.

149

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 627.

150

Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, 157.

151

Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, 19.

sexuality. Ketevan Nadareishvili argues that “Hippolytus by his action and speech arguing for

asexuality and sterility stands in opposition to the marriage institution altogether.”

152

Hippolytus

does not just wish for a world outside of women, but outside of the marriage and more broadly,

society itself. He repeatedly eschews the space of the household for the space of the wilderness,

and repeatedly avoids Aphrodite and women in general. His misogynist rant against women

confirms his rejection of compulsory sexuality entirely. He ends his speech by stating that if it

was not for his oath he swore, he would have immediately told his father of Phaedra’s desire. He

leaves the palace in a rage, not seeing Phaedra at the back of the stage, who has overheard

everything.

This scene where Hippolytus confronts with Nurse is considered one of the changes from

Euripides’ earlier version of this play, Hippolytus Veiled. Though all that remains of this script

are fragments, some scholars have suggested that it was one of the less popular plays, and that

the extant Hippolytus is a correction.

153

According to Hanna Roisman, the original version of this

scene is hypothesized to involve Phaedra herself confessing her love to Hippolytus, in which the

young man, so ashamed, covers his eyes before leaving the stage, hence the title.

154

Roisman

further suggests that not only did Phaedra confess her love, but she also offered Hippolytus the

152

Ketevan Nadareishvili, “The Conception of Woman in Greek Tragedy in the Context

of the Binary Oppositions of Sex Roles,” Phasis 2, no. 3 (2000): 304,

https://phasis.tsu.ge/index.php/PJ/article/view/2188.

153

Hanna M. Roisman, Nothing is as it Seems: The Tragedy of the Implicit in Euripides’

Hippolytus (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 9. For a full exploration of the

first Hippolytus, see also: Bruce Snell, Scenes from Greek Drama (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1964), 29.

154

Hanna M. Roisman, “The Veiled Hippolytus and Phaedra,” Hermes 127, no. H.4

(1999): 397, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4477328.

throne in his father’s absence, which would have been an even greater reason for his shame.

155

These glimpses of an earlier version of the play give us an insight into Euripides’

characterization of Hippolytus and Phaedra. However, since the first Hippolytus Veiled exists

merely in fragments, these differences are not certainties. Textual evidence that the second

Hippolytus is a correction also comes from Aristophanes’s play The Frogs wherein the character

of Euripides is criticized for his female characters, most particularly his characterization of

Phaedra as an indecent woman.

156

In both versions, Hippolytus remains staunchly devoted to his chastity, and yet it is

Phaedra’s honor which changes between the plays. In Hippolytus, she is seen as a victim of a

goddess’s wrath and a woman’s betrayal, keeping her honor intact. Following his exit from the

stage, Phaedra despairs and makes one more plan to recuperate her honor for the sake of her

children: she will leave a note for her husband Theseus, laying the blame for her impending

suicide at the feet of Hippolytus by accusing him of raping her. She gains an oath of silence from

the chorus of Trozen women, and then exists for the last time and hangs herself, just in time for

Theseus to enter to find his wife dead.

Her last act before dying was to write a false accusation of rape. Edith Hall points out the

dearth of scholarship examining the false rape accusation and hypothesizes that “that the

Euripidean Phaedra’s function as archetypal maker of a false rape allegation has drawn less

attention from explicitly feminist scholars than it might have done because it has partly been

155

Roisman, “The Veiled Hippolytus and Phaedra,” 401.

156

Aristophanes, The Frogs, in Aristophanes: Four Comedies, trans. Richmond

Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) lines 1054-1055 and J. Michael

Walton, Euripides Our Contemporary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 44.

obscured by her status as stepmother.”

157

Hall suggests that the familial relationship between

Phaedra and Hippolytus takes precedence in most discussions of the rape allegation, more so that

any exploration of the false rape allegation has been undertheorized. Much of the scholarship

focuses instead on the status of Phaedra as a woman and her silence than on the implications of

her written confession.

158

This is perhaps yet another function of compulsory sexuality: while it

compels people to participate in society in a way that privileges the sexual appetites of male

citizens, it also demonstrates these same male citizens’ anxieties over who has the ability to

choose and refuse sexuality. Hall contends that perhaps “men watching Hippolytus come away

with the conviction that any accusation of rape made by a woman is likely to be untruthful, and

that an accused man may be innocent even if he does not use all the legal defenses at his disposal

because he may well be an honorable man and have sworn someone an oath of silence.”

159

What

this means is that plays such as Hippolytus do ideological work with regard to sexuality, and that

by painting a picture of a false rape accusation, this play implicitly suggests that women who

make such accusations do so out of revenge and cannot be believed.

Theseus, however, does believe the accusation, and his anger seems to focus on

Hippolytus usurping his place in the marriage bed. He then immediately calls for his son’s death

by invoking Poseidon to destroy Hippolytus before the young prince has a chance to even defend

himself. Even though the chorus pleads for Theseus to renounce his prayer, he refuses. They do

not speak up to defend Hippolytus, but instead beg for Theseus listen to his son’s words. While

157

Hall, “Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave,” 17.

158

James Harvey Kim On Chong-Gossard, Gender and Communication in Euripides'

Plays: Between Song and Silence (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 134-135.

159

Hall, “Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave,” 25.

they know that Hippolytus is innocent, their silence seems to support Phaedra, even though this

renders them complicit in the coming downfall of Hippolytus.

Hippolytus and Asexuality

When Hippolytus reenters, he finds his father returned, Phaedra dead, and himself

accused. The young prince is stunned at the accusation. He fiercely defends his virginity yet

remains silent about Phaedra’s desire and the Nurse’s confession, thus remaining true to his

word. In his defense, he begs his father to believe his chastity and purity. It is here that his

potential asexuality is most apparent. He details his innocence and disinterest in all things sexual:

And one thing has never touched me – the thing through which you believe you

have now caught me. To this day my body has been pure, unsullied by sex. I know

nothing of that activity apart from what I have heard through talk and seen in

pictures. And I am not eager to look at even these since I have a virgin soul.

160

These lines are the most often cited to explain Hippolytus’s peculiar relationship to nonsexuality,

with Undheim arguing that by locating his virginity in his soul, “Euripides’ Hippolytus enhances

his claim of indifference towards sex.”

161

This indifference towards sex is seen as peculiar

because while female virginity abounds in antiquity, male virginity is almost singularly

represented by the myth of Hippolytus. For instance, Chong-Gosserand states that female virgins

in tragedy are usually depicted as serving the social roles of sacrificial victims (such as Polyxena

and Iphigenia), as spinsters due to circumstance (Electra and Antigone), and lastly as priestesses

(Iphigenia and Cassandra).

162

That Hippolytus defies these categories is part of what makes his

virginity unique and requires explanation. Various reasons for his virginity have been explored

160

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 1003-1008.

161

Undheim, Borderline Virginities, 111.

162

Chong-Gossard, Gender and Communication in Euripides' Plays, 184.

by numerous scholars over the years, with most agreeing that his absolutist position regarding

celibacy is peculiar for the Greek world.

One popular explanation for his virginity is that he is dedicated to sophrosyne, loosely

translated as temperance. Christopher Gill, in his examination of Hippolytus, suggests four

possible meanings of sophrosyne, which are sexual purity, virtue, self-control, and good sense.

163

Gill suggests that Hippolytus presents this sophrosyne “as a fundamental part of his nature, as

something ‘assigned’ or ‘given’ to him… but also, in principle, a lifelong property.”

164

This

innate dedication to temperance and chastity suggests a potential asexuality, which many

contemporary asexual people describe as a fundamental part of their nature, as given to them at

birth and consistent throughout their lifetime. And yet, this stringent dedication to sophrosyne

would have likely been considered excessive to the ancient Greek audiences. Kevin Calcamp

suggests that “Hippolytus’ chastity—derived from his ability to maintain self-control over his

body and mind—gives him a sense of self-righteousness; thus hubris becomes his fatal flaw.”

165

Instead of excessive chastity being Hippolytus’s undoing, it is the excessive pride that

accompanied his chastity that was part of his undoing.

Marilyn Skinner also remarks on the strangeness of Hippolytus’s virginity, in that such

strict abstention from sex was unusual in Ancient Greek culture. She delves into the possible

explanations of his absolute refusal for sex, citing the Orphic religion and a psychoanalytic

163

Christopher Gill, “The Articulation of the Self in Euripides' Hippolytus,” in Euripides,

Women, and Sexuality, ed. Anton Powell (London: Routledge, 1990), 80.

164

Gill, “The Articulation of the Self in Euripides' Hippolytus,” p. 86

165

Kevin Calcamp, “Reflections of Hippolytus: An Examination of Sexuality through

Adaptation,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 31, no. 1 (2016): 115,

https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2016.002.

reading of Hippolytus’s attitude towards his father. On the subject of Orphism, she notes that

“the Orphics drew an absolute distinction between soul and body” and that “abstention for sex

notionally fits into this framework as one additional way to prevent contaminating the soul with

an attachment to the body.”

166

Even as Skinner proposes this as a possibility, she quickly shows

the flaws inherent with her theory, since the extremism demonstrated by Hippolytus was not to

be found in Orphism. Also typical of those adherents of Orphism was a dietary abstinence in

addition to a sexual asceticism, which Hippolytus the hunter did not follow. Even Theseus does

not believe Hippolytus’s claim as a follower of Orphism, claiming him to be a hypocrite who

will “play the huckster with [his] vegetable diet.”

167

Indeed, followers of Orphism would not

have called for a full table after a hunt, as Hippolytus does in the beginning of the play. So,

Hippolytus being a devotee to Orphism seems an unlikely possibility.

On a similar note, Thomas Hubbard and Maria Doerfleur observe that “comparative

study of ascetic practices shows that dietary abstinence is usually accompanied by a degree of

sexual abstinence.”

168

While they show that dietary and sexual abstinence were both part of the

Orphic religion, what is equally important here is the word “degree,” suggesting that total sexual

abstinence was not typical of Greek religious practices. They further note that this moderate

ascetism was “far from a total rejection of family and sexuality”

169

Returning to the idea of

sophrosyne, this total rejection could be considered an excess of virginity, which went against

the concept of temperance. So even if Hippolytus was citing his chastity as a religious principle,

there were no religions at the time that required such a refusal, a point Skinner makes as well.

166

Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 135.

167

Euripides, Hippolytus, lines 951-952.

168

Hubbard and Doerfler, “From Ascesis to Sexual Renunciation,” 172.

169

Hubbard and Doerfler, “From Ascesis to Sexual Renunciation,” 172.

Skinner’s second possibility relates to a psychoanalytic reading of the relationship

between Hippolytus and his father. Hippolytus was born the bastard child of Theseus, who raped

his mother, the Amazon queen Hippolyta (dead by time of the events in the play). Skinner

suggests that Hippolytus’s “chastity could be a reaction against his father’s domineering

sexuality and his worship of the Amazons’ tribal divinity a symptom of a sublimated longing for

a mother-substitute.”

170

In other words, Hippolytus could be using his celibacy to reject his

father’s hypersexuality and further bring himself close to his absent mother.

Anne Rankin likewise suggests a psychoanalytic reading of the play, noting both his

extreme misogyny, excessive worship of Artemis, and his status as a bastard. For Rankin, “[h]is

society's attitude to his illegitimacy has profoundly influenced Hippolytus’s character and

behaviour, and is one of the main causes of his shame in the sphere of sexuality.”

171

By linking

his anxiety over his legitimacy with his worship of Artemis, she is suggesting a Freudian

identification with the mother. She reasons that Hippolytus takes Artemis as a surrogate mother,

stating that this “equation would also enable him to ‘restore’ his mother's virginity by the

unconscious syllogism ‘My mother = Artemis; Artemis is a virgin; therefore my mother is a

virgin.’”

172

In interpreting Hippolytus’s virginity as being tied to shame and a psychoanalytic

desire for his mother, she is linking his virginity automatically to shame and pathology. Like the

Greeks at the time who would note his virginity as excessive, Rankin here is suggesting the

same, and by linking his abstinence to a pathological desire to identify with his mother, she

implicitly suggests that a lack of sexual desire needs correcting.

170

Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 134.

171

Anne V. Rankin, “Euripides’ Hippolytus: A Psychopathological Hero,” Arethusa 7,

no. 1 (1974): 76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26307454.

172

Rankin, “Euripides’ Hippolytus: A Psychopathological Hero,” 79.

Rabinowitz offers a similar reading of Hippolytus, focusing on the title character’s

misogyny while providing a feminist psychoanalytic reading of the play. Seen from this point of

view, Hippolytus seeks identification with his father, and by displacing and disavowing Phaedra,

he can form a reconciliation with his father. She continues this reading by suggesting that

“[h]orizontal desire for one like oneself is the repressed, unconscious desire of this text; it is

gratified by being transformed into a vertical (asexual) desire of father for son.”

173

Here the evoking of the word “asexual” lends itself to some interesting interpretations,

considering the hints of psychoanalysis. First, her use of “asexual” connotes a somewhat

negative view of the term and is reminiscent of Freud’s Oedipal object desire for the father. In

this way, her use of “asexual” is not at all in line with contemporary definitions of asexuality,

which is understandable considering that her book was written thirty years ago, before asexuality

was fully enunciated as a sexual orientation. Also, her psychoanalytic and feminist reading gives

no other interpretation for Hippolytus’s chastity except for a pathological misogyny, which yet

again depicts his commitment to nonsexuality as a pathology in need of correction.

Both Rankin and Rabinowitz point out the inherent misogyny of Euripides’ play, and

while this is an important feminist interpretive gesture, it should not be the only heuristic option.

Neither theorist considers a non-heteronormative approach to the text. Since both theorists

implicitly suggest Hippolytus’s virginity is a pathology, the level of unthinkability of asexuality

is made apparent.

At the end of the play, it is revealed by a servant that Hippolytus met with disaster as he

was leaving Trozen in exile. From the sea “the wave sent forth a bull” that spooked Hippolytus’s

horses and caused him to tangle in their reins. The young prince was thus dragged and fatally

173

Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, 174.

wounded.

174

Artemis swiftly enters in a deus ex machina and affirms Thesus’s part in the demise

of his innocent son. Soon after, Hippolytus is brought to his father, broken and dying. Artemis

affirms the young man’s innocence, and father and son share a moment lamenting the cruelty of

Aphrodite. Here the play comes full circle: Aphrodite, and thus compulsory sexuality, wins.

I underline, however, that it is not enough to say that it was merely his rejection of

Aphrodite that led Hippolytus to his death. He was not killed because he lacked desire or lacked

sexuality; rather, his lack is simply not believed. Nonsexuality, in the world of the play, seems

unthinkable to everyone except Hippolytus. His potential asexuality and desire to live a

nonsexual life are never considered to be genuine or even taken seriously in the play.

Before his death, Artemis vows that he will forever be honored by unwed girls cutting

their hair in tribute to Hippolytus before their marriages, and that “maidens’ care for [him] will

always find expression in song,” effectively immortalizing his virginity.

175

While Artemis is

considered the virgin goddess of virgins, she also presides over childbirth. For instance, Simon

Goldhill points out the importance of Artemis in the life journey of young women, noting the

festival of Artemis at Brauron which marked a transitional time for young women before

marriage.

176

Jennifer Larson acknowledges another function of the goddess, stating that “Artemis

is goddess of transitional periods, and is associated with cases where some aspect of the normal

transition goes wrong.”

177

Usually this took the form of a young woman dying while still a

virgin, dying while avoiding a rape, or failing to make the transition to motherhood by dying in

174

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 1214.

175

Euripides, Hippolytus, line 1429.

176

Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, 122.

177

Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1995). 117.

childbirth. Larson also brings up the hair offerings given to Hippolytus, who she refers to as “a

male version of the person failing to make the transition to married adulthood.”

178

Artemis then

presides over not just the virginal, but the virginal woman’s passage into motherhood or a

virgin’s failure to make the transition into marriage. Artemis functions as part of compulsory

sexuality, honoring virginity in service to fertility and reproduction.

Froma Zeitlin comments that “Hippolytus’s virginity in the service of the goddess

Artemis seems to tell us that the untouched body can only be imagined as feminine, but it also

suggests that untouchability bears a metaphysical charge transcending the laws of nature and

even gender.”

179

His association with Artemis then, effectively feminizes him. It is no wonder

then that he is honored in death by female virgins. In this way, it can be said that the social order

is restored, and the virginal is reinforced as the purview of women, before their entrance into

marriage. Hippolytus, in death, presides over a corrected virginity, which is a temporary state in

the lives of women.

Compulsory sexuality can be seen here through both Hippolytus’s punishment and

reward. As I have argued, Hippolytus’s transgressing of the sexual and gender norms by ardently

proclaiming himself a celibate was cause for his punishment. This theme was present in several

other myths in ancient Greece, though usually these myths occurred with female virgins being

punished for refusing either marriage or sexual access to either a man or a god. For instance,

Elizabeth Abbot chronicles the tales of these virgins, such as Daphne who caught the eye of

Apollo, begged to be made ugly in an effort to preserve her virginity, and was transformed into a

178

Larson, Greek Heroine Cults, 117.

179

Zeitlin, Playing the Other, 235.

laurel tree.

180

Abbot discusses other virgin myths, including the story of Hippolytus, noting how

his story demonstrates the Greek’s perspective on love as “the direct outcome of Aphrodite’s

caprice or will.”

181

Like many virgins, Hippolytus is punished for his transgressions against

Aphrodite, even though he receives a reward from Artemis.

Compulsory sexuality is also seen in the reward that Hippolytus receives, since he is

honored by virgin girls who are in a liminal space before they move on into the world of

compulsory (hetero)sexuality of marriage. In other words, Hippolytus is honored after his death

by being recuperated into the system of compulsory sexuality. Within this system, virginity

exists solely as a transitory space between childhood and marriage—or, specifically, girlhood

and motherhood. This suggests that virginity was more often defined in terms of womanhood

rather than manhood. In transgressing his culture’s sexed and gendered norms, then, Hippolytus

could be viewed as queer.

I thus argue for the interpretative possibility of viewing Hippolytus as not merely virginal

or celibate, but as queerly asexual. In examining Hippolytus, it is possible to suggest him as

being an asexual character, and several scholars have similarly observed his overt asexuality.

Thomas Hubbard and Maria Doerfleur cite contemporary definitions of asexualtiy from AVEN

and claim that Hippolytus “offers the example of an even more perfected practice of askesis—

not in the Foucauldian sense of ongoing struggle, for this play’s Hippolytos [sic] never has to

struggle with sexual passion at all, but in the form of a complete aversion to sexuality, an

essentially asexual identity.”

182

They further discuss what this means for ancient drama, stating

180

Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1999), 29.

181

Abbot, A History of Celibacy, 30.

182

Hubbard and Doerfler, “From Ascesis to Sexual Renunciation,” 175, (added

emphasis).

“Euripidean drama was interested in exploring all varieties of sexual dissidence, including

adultery, incest, bestiality, transvestism, pederasty, and asexuality.”

183

This suggests that even

for the Greek world, asexuality, though not termed as such and framed as tragically

marginalized, was made thinkable in antiquity by Euripides. While it is tempting to identify

Hippolytus as asexual, it would be more accurate to suggest that Hippolytus is rather a character

who embodies a form of nonsexuality and rejects the compulsory sexuality of his time period.

Rather than saying that Hippolytus is asexual, he is easier read as exhibiting resonances or traces

of asexuality. In centering asexualtiy as a lens, it allows for the apparatus of compulsory

sexuality to be more thoroughly interrogated.

When asexuality is centered, it allows for a rethinking of previously sedimented

articulations of sexuality and its functions. By using an asexual lens, these ancient myths can

additionally be used to explain asexuality to a contemporary audience. For instance, Chris

Mowat uses Euripides’ Hippolytus as a tool to dispel myths surrounding contemporary

asexuality.

184

They reference five myths surrounding asexuality: (1) “asexuality just means

virginity,” (2) “asexuals think they are better than allosexuals,” (3) “you’re not asexual, you are

just misogynist/misandrist/gay and in denial,” (4) you’re not asexual because you do [whatever

activity],” and (5) “asexuality is a modern invention.”

185

Mowat uses Hippolytus to move

between dispelling these contemporary myths and demonstrating, with their fifth point, that

asexuality might be a modern term, but the potential for such sexual diversity existing across

183

Hubbard and Doerfler, “From Ascesis to Sexual Renunciation,” 175.

184

Chris Mowat, “Queering Hippolytus: Asexuality and Ancient Greece” NOTCHES:

(Re)marks on the History of Sexuality, May 17, 2018, http://notchesblog.com/2018/05/17/

queering-hippolytus-asexuality-and-ancient-greece/. This article was the inspiration for this

chapter.

185

Mowat, “Queering Hippolytus.”

time is a distinct possibility. More to the point, Mowat uses asexuality as a lens from which to

articulate and understand asexuality as a contemporary identity formation. Rather than

suggesting that Hippolytus is and has always been an asexual figure, Mowat uses the character of

Hippolytus as a tool to dispel contemporary myths surrounding asexuality. These asexual myths

also generally happen to coincide with the various interpretations of Hippolytus throughout the

years, as demonstrated above.

Further, since Mowat uses drama of Hippolytus to discuss asexuality in our time, perhaps

it is not too far off the mark to argue that likewise, Euripides uses the myth of Hippolytus to

demonstrate a form of nonsexuality that is resistant to the system of compulsory sexuality seen in

his time. Hippolytus does not merely create a character who disidentifies with compulsory

sexuality, but the play also provides a unique look at the sexual anxieties of the time. While a

first glance reveals Hippolytus to be resistant to the power of Aphrodite, Phaedra is just as

resistant to the goddess’s machinations. The play showcases the dangers of resisting the

compulsions of Aphrodite, the personification of sexuality, and the consequences to those who

do. In Hippolytus, compulsory sexuality appears only as a controlling, vengeful force, and

functions as an engine of tragedy. In other words, an asexual lens opens up a new and productive

interpretation of viewing the play as a demonstrating a negative characterization of sexuality

itself.

Interpreting Hippolytus

The Hippolytus myth has been retold often over the years, reimagined as plays, operas,

ballets, and films.

186

These various adaptations have taken on different lenses with which to tell

186

Tori Lynn McKee, “A Rich Reward in Tears: Hippolytus and Phaedra in Drama,

Dance, Opera and Film” (PhD diss., The Open University, 2017).

the story and articulate contemporary issues surrounding sexuality. Yet before delving into

adaptations of Hippolytus that come after Euripides, it is worth remembering that Hippolytus is

Euripides’s second attempt at telling the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra. Additionally,

Sophocles is said to have written a version of this myth, entitled Phaedra, but like Hippolytus

Veiled, it exists only in fragment form.

187

This evidence suggests that the myth of the virgin

prince was popular enough to warrant several dramatic retellings.

188

For example, Kevin Calcamp examines the story of Hippolytus through the most famous

versions of the play by Euripides, Seneca, and Racine. He contends that “Euripides, Seneca, and

Racine altered the character of Hippolytus and his sexuality to reflect the cultural attitudes of

sexuality, masculinity, and philosophical thought inherent in their societies.”

189

He notes that

while Euripides’s play focuses on the hubris of Hippolytus’s pride in his self-control, Seneca’s

Hippolytus displays the Roman interest in Stoicism, and Racine’s Phedre reflects Jansenist

teachings and contends with the Neoclassical ideals of the French Académie. Racine’s adaptation

went so far as to significantly mute Hippolytus’s asexuality, bringing in a love interest for the

young prince in order to make his death garner less pity. Racine thought he “should give him

some weakness which would make him a little guilty towards his father,” and thus brought in the

character of Aricia, the daughter of an enemy of Theseus, who Hippolytus loves against his

187

Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 2: Aeschylus, Sophocles,

and Euripides (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 128-129.

188

Rosanna Lauriola, “Hippolytus,” in Brill's Companion to the Reception of Euripides,

eds. Rosanna Lauriola and Kyriakos N. Demetriou, (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 443-503. See also

Graeme Miles, “Hippolytus, the Lamia, and the Eunuch: Celibacy and Narrative Strategy in

Philostratus’ Life of Appolonius,” Classical Philology 112 (2017): 201,

https://doi.org/10.1086/691538. This article describes several Greek novels which feature

characters based on Hippolytus in their extreme ascetism, again noting how popular the figure of

Euripides’ Hippolytus was in classical culture subsequent to the play’s premiere.

189

Calcamp, “Reflections of Hippolytus,” 125.

will.

190

While Racine did not invent the character of Aricia, his version popularized the story of

Hippolytus and Phaedra, and in many subsequent adaptations, Hippolytus’s asexuality is

virtually nonexistent.

Several adaptations of Hippolytus explore the themes play through theories of sexuality

in their own time. For example, a prevailing theory of sexuality in the early twentieth century

was Freud’s theories of the Oedipal complex and works such as H.D.’s Hippolytus Temporizes

(1927) and Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms (1924) examine the story of Hippolytus

through a psychoanalytic lens.

191

Both playwrights were heavily influenced by Freud’s theories,

using them to transform Euripides’s drama into new stories which articulate theories of sexuality

in their time. Toril Lynn McKee states that playwrights such as “Eugene O’Neill and H.D., with

their close proximity to, and, in the case of H.D., personal relationship with, Freud, were looking

for stories with which to showcase the Freudian lens,” and thus, they turned to the Greeks, and

specifically to Hippolytus.

192

H.D. was concerned with the sexual innocence and purity of

Hippolytus, and her play features Phaedra seducing Hippolytus by pretending to be Artemis.

Conversely, O’Neill’s play creates a sexual world of incest and murder, focusing on the

reciprocated sexual relationship between Eben (Hippolytus) and his stepmother Abbie (Phaedra).

Similarly, Robinson Jeffers’s play The Cretan Woman (1954), heavily hints that Hippolytus’s

190

Jean Racine, Phedre, in Five Plays, Translated into English Verse, trans. Kenneth

Muir. (London: Hill and Wang, 1962), 176.

191

H.D., Hippolytus Temporizes (Redding Ridge, Black Swan Books, 1927) and Eugene

O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms, in Three Plays (New York: Vintage International, 1995).

192

McKee, “A Rich Reward in Tears,” 95.

refusal of Phaedra is not due to his virginity, but due to homosexuality and a lack of attraction to

women.

193

Hallie Flannagan’s 1931 production of Hippolytus at the Vassar Experimental Theatre

emphasized the “triumph of Aphrodite,” or the inevitability of desire.

194

Suzanne Walker details

the production by Flannagan, known for her work with the Federal Theatre Project, and notes

that the production stemmed from her work with classics professor Philip Davis, who she

married three years after the production. Walker states that “much of Flanagan's personal work

with the Hippolytus was defined by her growing affections for Davis, for she would later admit

that her focus on the unstoppable power of Aphrodite was more than a mere artistic choice.”

195

Even in production, the story of Hippolytus is so often tied up with lust and desire, that a

nonsexual reading is buried.

Modern adaptations tend to turn the focus generally to the character of Phaedra, and the

state of Hippolytus’s celibacy remains vaguely unclear. Mariana Carr’s Phaedra Backwards

(2011) focuses on how Phaedra’s family shaped her by exploring the generational violence that

was enacted through her mother’s encounter with the bull that birthed the minotaur.

196

While

Phaedra still attempts to seduce Hippolytus in this play, his attraction to her in return remains

vague and unclear. Some adaptations play explicitly with the hypersexuality of the characters,

193

Jeffers, Robinson. The Cretan Woman. In Phaedra and Hippolytus: Myth and

Dramatic Form, edited by James L. Sanderson and Irwin Gopnik (Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1961).

194

Suzanne Walker, “‘Now I Know Love’: Hallie Flanagan and Euripides’

‘Hippolytus,’” The Classical World 108, no. 1 (2014): 102,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24699889.

195

Walker, “‘Now I Know Love,’” 102.

196

Marina Carr, Phaedra Backwards, in Plays: Three (London: Faber and Faber, 2015),

ix.

such as Susan Yanowitz’s Phaedra in Delirium (1998) which directs the characters of Theseus

and Hippolytus to be played by the same actor, thus using one body to showcase the polarity of a

“lusty womanizer at age fourty-five and his own virginal son at age twenty.”

197

This double

casting of Theseus and Hippolytus shows the difficulty that a young and innocent man could

have traversing a hypersexual world. Moving further towards the hypersexualization of the

characters is Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996) which is oversaturated with sexual imagery

and rape.

198

This play even ramps up Hippolytus’s misogyny, painting him as a present-day

misogynist, who uses women sexually, even participating in a sexual assault of Phaedra, before

ultimately dying at the end. Hippolytus here is far from asexual; instead, he is portrayed as

grotesquely pansexual and abusive, which makes Phaedra’s lust for him horrifying. Kane’s play

presents compulsory sexuality as inherently pathological.

Recently, Donna Zuckerberg uses the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra to engage with

contemporary rhetoric surrounding men’s rights activists and the incel engagement with classical

literature to promote misogyny and white supremacy. In particular, Zuckerberg argues that “the

use of the ancient world to understand gender and sex is bidirectional: the men of the

manosphere see their own misogyny reflected back at them, theorized, and celebrated in ancient

literature.”

199

As noted above, the story of Euripides Hippolytus (and Seneca’s Phaedra) both

heavily feature misogyny and a false rape accusation. These plays articulated the anxieties of

ancient Greek and Roman men, and Zuckerberg makes the argument that these plays could

197

Susan Yankowitz, Phaedra in Delirium, in Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays

Inspired by the Greeks, ed.Caridad Svich (New York: Backstage Books, 2005), 377.

198

Sarah Kane, Phaedra’s Love (London: Bloomsbury Mentheun Drama, 1996).

199

Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital

Age. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 6.

similarly articulate the anxieties felt by certain members of our contemporary society, even

suggesting that Hippolytus could appear to be an “ancient prototype” of the Men Going Their

Own Way (MGTOW) community, i.e. men who have decided to opt out of the sexual

marketplace, as a form of misogynist protest against gynocentrism.

200

A surface level feminist reading could view Euripides’ Hippolytus as a story that glorifies

a hatred of women by showing the destruction of an innocent young man by the lies of a

conniving woman. A deeper reading, as I have argued, suggests that this play lays bare the

workings of compulsory sexuality that presumes everyone is desiring of sex and fortifies this

desire for the benefit and privilege of a few. Ela Przybylo maintains that “compulsory sexuality

is not only the celebration of sex or sexual desire but it is the uneven application of this

celebration – the idea that white men deserve sex and that women owe them this sex”

201

Pryzbylo is specifically discussing the “tyrannical celibacy” of the contemporary incel

movement, a point that can be shared with Zuckerberg’s argument regarding the MGTOW

community. In becoming attuned to how compulsory sexuality functions, a reading such as

Zuckerberg’s, which models a strategy that could be used to combat the rhetoric of misogynist

groups such as the incel movement or the MGTOW community.

202

The feminist critiques that point out the misogyny inherent in Euripides’ drama as well as

those that problematize the various adaptations that come after Euripides are important readings

into the Greek drama. They illuminate the system of compulsory (hetero)sexuality that had

200

Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men, 166.

201

Przybylo, Asexual Erotics, 138, (original emphasis).

202

Aven McMaster, “Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital

Age,” review of Not All Dead White Men, by Donna Zuckerberg, Atlantis Journal, 41 no.1

(2020): 86, https://doi.org/10.7202/1074019ar.

written women out of the sexual economy and demonstrate that their position in these tragedies

is tenuous at best. These feminist readings are helpful in pointing out men’s anxieties over sexual

access towards women, their assumptions of women’s sexual indiscretions, and their fears of

false accusations. However, these feminist reading do not negate an asexual reading lens. First,

queerness can exist alongside misogyny. Queer characters are not necessarily feminist, and

feminist characters are not necessarily queer-friendly, as seen in the recent explosion of trans-

exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourse. Pointing out the possibly queer nonsexuality of

a character does not negate a feminist reading of that character. The reverse is also true:

Hippolytus’s queerness and asexuality do not dismiss his misogyny. While he might be asexual,

and thus be heavily discriminated against because he does not perform his masculinity properly

in terms of sexual appetite, he is still a misogynist. Secondly, a feminist lens, when read

alongside an asexual reading lens, opens up the idea that throughout history, only certain bodies

have been able to disidentify with sexuality because only certain bodies have been allowed to

claim a sexuality. In order to disidentify with sexuality, one must be able to have access to

sexuality and be read as a subject within it. For the ancient Greeks, a very limited section of the

population was able to access a form of sexuality that allowed them agency. While this sexuality

is not equivalent to the identarian model of sexuality of contemporary western society, there was

still a form of compulsory sexuality that created a hierarchy of sexual experiences.

Asexuality is only now gaining traction as named sexual orientation. My interest lies in

using it as an interpretative lens to breathe life into works that contain an asexual possibility as a

dramaturgical choice. With this asexual dramaturgical lens, I argue that Hippolytus works as an

allegory for compulsory sexuality’s negative effects. Reading classical works such as Hippolytus

and its adaptations through such a dramaturgical lens allows for an exploration of compulsory

sexuality that can encompass multiple themes of how sexuality functions. This dramaturgical

lens could lead to new directions for future playwrights keen on creating an asexual-centered

adaptation the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra or for future directors interested in tackling

Euripides’s play. Anton Bierl remarks that “Euripides makes hypersexuality and asexuality,

hubris and noble ideas, drive and repression meet and collapse on stage,” noting the playwright’s

radical exploration of his contemporary ideas and concepts.

203

Euripides’s surviving Hippolytus

may be the closest thing in ancient dramatic literature to an asexual identity that can be viewed

onstage. That this potential asexual resonance takes the form of a privileged male prince with

misogynist ideals should not be ignored. Rather, scholars of asexuality must remain attuned to

the ways that sexuality is oftentimes imposed on certain individuals through various hierarchical

mechanisms, such as gender, race, class hierarchy, and power. Hippolytus demonstrates these

interconnecting issues through a complex tale of problematic characters that are trapped

underneath the yoke of compulsory sexuality.

203

Anton Bierl, “Phaedra: A Tragic Queen in Turmoil Between Violent Love and Its

Chaste Suppression: An Interpretation of Euripides’ Hippolytus in Initiatory Terms,” SKENÈ:

Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 6 no. 1 (2020): 80,

https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v6i1.270.

Chapter 2.

Laudable Chastity: Hrotsvit’s Rhetorical Dramas

Hrostvit of Gandershiem, tenth century canoness and playwright, is widely considered to

be one of first extant female playwrights on record.

204

Her six plays extol the virtues of chastity

by featuring virginal characters as protagonists and centering themes of celibacy and virginity.

There has been much discussion regarding the ideological undertones in her play in recent years

from feminist scholars, but one option that has not been considered is the possibility of seeing

her plays as exhibiting traces of asexuality. In this chapter, I offer up the possibility of reading

her plays through an asexual lens while situating her plays within the larger context of medieval

sexuality.

Hrotsvit’s six plays are all based on saints lives from the early Christian church.

205

Historians and critics of Hrotsvit have discussed both her use of these hagiographies and her

reworking of the comedies of the Roman playwright Terrence.

206

In the preface of her works,

Hrotsvit explains her reasoning for modelling her six plays on Terrence’s as an act of imitation

meant “to glorify… the laudable chastity of Christian virgins in that self-same form of

204

There has been much variation on the spelling of Hrotsvit’s name. For this

dissertation, unless quoting from a source, I will use the most widely used spelling: “Hrotsvit,”

See also: Katharina Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works (Cambridge:

D.S. Brewer, 1998), 3-4. There are also a variety of names for her six plays that will be

discussed, and thus, I will be using the titles found in the translation I will be citing for this

chapter. See: Christopher St. John, The Plays of Roswitha, trans. Christopher St. John. (New

York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1966). While Hrotsvit herself named several plays after

the female protagonists, the most widely used versions are the titles that later (male)

translators/editors chose to name, which I will use for the sake of clarity.

205

Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works, 10-15.

206

Katharina Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance (Leiden:

E.J. Brill, 1988), p. 55-86. See also Carole E. Newlands “Hrotswitha’s Debt to Terence,”

Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-2014) 116, (1986) 373,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/283926.

composition which has been used to describe the shameless acts of licentious women.”

207

coopting the works of Terrence to make them more palatable for her Christian audience, Hrotsvit

is in essence subverting his plays. This argument has been made often by many scholars of

Hrotsvit. Most notably, Katharina Wilson, asserts that Hrotsvit “attempted a perfectly logical and

masterfully conceived fusion of two mimetically defined genres by grafting her hagiographic

plots and liturgical prayers onto the Terrentian form.”

208

In short, this decision to blend the two

genres was a rhetorical gesture, likely used for pedagogical purposes.

209

This dramaturgical

decision highlights the interrelated nature of the mythos Hrotsvit was using for her inspiration.

While the blending of pagan and Christian sources demonstrates a duality at work within

Hrotsvit’s writing, another duality between sexuality and nonsexuality is also apparent. Her

interest in virgins speaks to a common resonance with asexuality, that of celibacy. Asexuality is

often confused with celibacy, with those unfamiliar with asexuality often mistaking as merely a

religious choice.

210

As noted in the introduction, many asexual scholars and activists have drawn

a firm line between asexuality and celibacy, arguing for asexuality to be a distinct sexual

orientation. Even so, there is still some ambiguity between the concepts of asexuality and

celibacy, as well as definitional haziness among such terms as celibacy, chastity, and virginity.

Thus, it is useful to begin with an exploration of how these terms are used currently and how

they were used in Hrotsvit’s time. Before delving into the definitional slipperiness of these

various terms, a few points are worth mentioning.

207

St. John, The Plays of Roswitha, p. xxvi

208

Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works, 112.

209

Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance, 104.

210

On the misunderstanding of asexuality as a religious statement, see: Decker, The

Invisible Orientation, 112-115.

First, while this chapter deals with the particulars of Hrotsvit’s dramatic work, it also

deals with European medieval sexuality writ large. Hrotsvit was writing in the tenth century,

while modeling her plays after the lives of third and fourth century saints and the second century

comedies of Terrence.

211

Furthermore, her writings and the ideals for Christian virgins supported

the push by other theologians (such as Odo of Cluny) for a celibate clergy, which had

reverberations into the eleventh century and beyond.

212

Thus, this chapter deals with medieval

sexuality as it applies to a specific instance while also discussing how sexuality functioned

across several centuries, thus taking a broad-strokes view of medieval sexuality.

Secondly, since the concepts of chastity and celibacy at this time can be fluid, this

chapter also requires a broadening of scope from exploring asexuality as an identarian position to

looking at nonsexuality as a lens. Indeed, forms of nonsexuality, including chastity and celibacy,

involve traces or resonances of asexuality. So, while asexuality as an orientation may be

impossible to ascribe to the characters in Hrotsvit’s work, they all exhibit traces of nonsexuality,

which refers to a deviation from sexuality that includes, but is not limited to, asexuality. How

this nonsexuality manifests itself with the system of compulsory sexuality in the medieval era is

the focus and driving question of this chapter.

Chastity, Celibacy, and Virginity

Today, definitions of chastity, celibacy, and virginity are practically interchangeable.

Contemporary connotations of “chaste” usually indicate virginity. Likewise, celibacy is typically

211

Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works, 111-112.

212

Gary Macy, “Hrotsvit’s Theology of Virginity and Continence,” in A Companion to

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (fl. 960), ed. by Phyllis R. Brown and Stephen L. Wailes (Leiden: Brill,

2013), 82.

associated with an individual who has chosen to either remain a virgin or chosen to forego sexual

activity.

These three terms are distinct from asexuality, yet these terms are all forms of

nonsexuality. To fully understand the nonsexuality of Hrotsvit’s characters and their relationship

to compulsory sexuality, these terms need to be unpacked and explained in their historical

context of early Christianity, as well as situated in terms of what they mean today in contrast to

asexuality. As previously noted, the definitions of asexuality are fluid and shifting, with

asexuality and celibacy having a fraught relationship. I hope to show that the overlap between

the two becomes blurred when viewed from different historical perspectives.

Ruth Mazo Karras delineates the differences between these terms in her study on

medieval sexuality. For instance, she claims that term “virgin” was meant to denote a woman

who was not yet married (this term was rarely used for men), since “women’s sexual activity

began with marriage.”

213

Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie explain that the use of the

term “virginity” (for women or sometimes men) depended on the context, making it an unstable

term that could refer to being unmarried, never having experienced sex, biological intactness, or

a commitment to religious celibacy.

214

Conversely, in the Middle Ages, chastity “generally

meant the absence of sexual activity, but it could also be used to mean the absence of illicit

sexual activity.”

215

In other words, while chastity is typically thought of as the state of biological

213

Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (London:

Routledge, 2012) 38.

214

Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, “Introduction: The Epistemology of

Virginity,” in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed.

by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 16-

17.

215

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 37, (added emphasis).

virginity today, it was possible in the middle ages and early modern era to define a marriage as

chaste if both parties (especially the wife) were faithful and used sex only for reproduction.

Karras further defines “celibacy” as the unmarried state, meaning that celibacy and chastity, at

least in the medieval usage, were not synonymous.

216

However, Karras maintains that while

celibacy generally implied chastity, “the term ‘celibate’ was generally reserved for those for

whom the unmarried state was permanent.”

217

In other words, “celibate” could signify those for

whom an abstinence of sex and commitment to chastity was a valid, lifelong commitment.

Karras argues then that “the choice to abstain often came as a result of what medieval people

would have described as a vocation or call from God, and what modern people might consider an

inner compulsion or an orientation.”

218

The choice then to commit to celibacy was, for medieval

people, akin to a contemporary sexual orientation. Karras further problematizes this assertion,

exploring the ways that sexual desire, religious devotion, and sex drive contributed to this

commitment to celibacy. For instance, she states that “to a few absence of desire came naturally,

for others it was achieved, but for all it meant an identity of chastity that went beyond mere acts

(or absence of acts),” noting how sexual desire was a part of an identity that was broader than

only sexual acts.

219

Yet while Karras makes the argument that this commitment to celibacy was akin to a

sexual orientation, she does not refer to it as asexuality. Instead, she explicitly argues against

reading this as asexuality, stating “the chastity these people sought to achieve was not asexual; it

216

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 38.

217

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 38.

218

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 38, (added emphasis).

219

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 49.

was achieved not by repressing their sexuality but by redirecting it.”

220

I would argue that this is

a misapprehension of asexuality as defined by contemporary scholars. Asexuality does not

repress desire; rather, it describes those who do not experience desire. So asexuality, in the

contemporary identarian definition of it as a sexual orientation, is arguably in line with Karras’s

description of the commitment to celibacy.

Benjamin Kahan makes a similar argument for celibacy as a distinct identity formation

and “historicizes celibacy as a sexuality in addition to exploring celibacy’s impact on and

intersection with other sexual formations.”

221

In configuring celibacy as a sexuality, Kahan

problematizes the distinction many asexual scholars make between asexuality and celibacy,

demonstrating an overlap between the two. Celibacy, like asexuality, can be (and often is)

experienced as an enduring, innate, and stable mode of life.

What then can be garnered from these overlapping definitions? All of these terms as

understood in the Middle Ages and in the early doctrines of Christianity point to nonsexuality as

a preferred way of life. Chastity and celibacy, along with lifelong virginity, became markers of

the Christian faithful, and strongly influenced the hagiography of the early church.

Hrotsvit’s plays all feature hagiographic stories from centuries before her time that

contributed to the mythmaking of early Christianity. Elizabeth Abbot states that “early

Christianity’s major thrust was its preoccupation with sexuality, and with virginity and celibacy

in particular.”

222

Arguably, this preoccupation with virginity and celibacy became central to the

blossoming doctrine and mythmaking of early Christianity. Additionally, this preoccupation with

220

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 70.

221

Kahan, Celibacies, 1.

222

Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 54.

celibacy was part of the striving to distinguish the new religion of Christianity from the pagan

religions of late antiquity. Sissel Undheim explores the differences between Christian virgins

with the pagan vestal virgins, noting that the early Christian fathers, specifically the writings of

Ambrose, sought to distinguish between the two by contrasting the Christian virgins’ free choice

with the vestal virgin’s forced service.

223

In this manner, chosen virginity becomes a marker of

distinction for a religion still in its infancy.

The church fathers became legendary for both their writings and their extreme acts of

ascetism that included celibacy, fasting, and exposure.

224

Patricia Cox Miller frames the ascetic

practices of these desert fathers as a form of performance art, viewing “ascetic persons as

performance artists, enacting the spiritual body in the here-and-now.”

225

Miller further broadens

her view of the desert fathers into a larger performance lens, suggesting that “[c]onceptualizing

ascetic behavior as performative practice enables the interpreter to focus on the doing and acting

which are creative of meaning in the ascetic context.”

226

In other words, the desert fathers

performatively enacted and created the beliefs surrounding ascetism as a Christian practice.

227

Miller is therefore arguing that through these performances of ascetic acts, these desert fathers

223

Undheim, Borderline Virginities, 16.

224

One such example of extreme ascetic practice is St. Simeon, who lived atop a 60-foot

tall pillar to be closer to God. See: Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 88-90.

225

Patricia Cox Miller, “Desert Aestheticism and ‘The Body from Nowhere,’” Journal of

Early Christian Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 137, https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.0.010.

226

Miller, “Desert Aestheticism,” 147-148.

227

I use “performatively” here in the same manner as J.L. Austin, noting that a

performative utterance does not merely say or describe something, but through the saying, does

something. An example of a performative utterance would be the placing of a bet or an

auctioneer making binding legal contracts with speech. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with

Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 6-7.

actively shaped Christian theological thought that would come to have a great influence on how

the Middle Ages viewed expressions of sexuality, and thus, nonsexuality.

In a similar vein, James Whitta describes the process by which “[m]onks, as celibate

ascetics, are interpellated into a discourse of angelic asexuality developed by fourth-century

desert hermits in Egypt and incorporated soon afterwards into Western monasticism by Jerome,

John Cassian and others.”

228

While Whitta primarily analyzes a late eleventh/early twelfth

century liturgical drama, coming a few centuries after Hrotsvit, he also explores how the third

and fourth century desert ascetics influenced subsequent interpellations of religious life. Further,

it is worth pausing to interrogate Whitta’s use of “asexuality” here. Whitta invokes asexuality in

terms of “ascetic discipline and liturgical devotion,” to achieve a “mimetic transcendence.”

229

Though Whitta is likely not using “asexuality” in terms of the contemporary sexual orientation,

this definition of asexuality is similar to how celibacy is understood. In other words, Whitta’s use

of asexuality here shows the fluidity of these two terms, especially in the medieval era.

Definitional intention aside, Whitta’s argument that the early Christian church founders desire

for an angelic asexuality shows the process by which a nonsexual life became a signifier of the

Christian faithful.

Sissel Undheim similarly states that “virginity and virgins might have been understood as

asexual and ‘ungendered,’” suggesting that the gender and status of virginity oscillated between

228

James Witta, “Adest sponsus, qui est Christus: Performing the Male Monastic Body in

Sponsus,” Didaskalia: The Journal for Ancient Performance 4, no. 1 (1997): 2,

http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol4no1/whitta.html, (added emphasis). On the writings and

ascetic practices of the early Christian hermits, see also: Peter Brown, The Body and Society:

Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1988).

229

Whitta, “Adest sponsus,” 1 and 3.

notions of fixity and flexity.

230

In other words, the gendering and sexuality of medieval virgins

was not tied to a fixed identity nor to a particular gender. Leah DeVun similarly explores the idea

of nonbinary sex circulating in the premodern and early modern eras and how these ideas

mapped onto human reality, noting that “[a]t least some early Christians craved a release from

sexual and social conventions, preferring a path toward the agender, asexual emulation of

God.”

231

This process of transcending social conventions sought by early Christians may have

been a way to escape the bounds of socially imposed gender hierarchy. Like Whitta, both

Undheim and DeVun are using a different usage of the term “asexual” than denoting the sexual

orientation and are instead invoking this idea of transcendence away from bodily limitations of

gender. Abbott observes that “even the poorest Christians were offered the virginity of their

bodies as vehicles to carry them to an angelic life, with access to the holiest of holies, the one

God.”

232

Virginity for the early Christians was thus a way of becoming one with God and

transcending their earthly constraints to experience a spiritual freedom while experiencing

terrestrial repression.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the church founders, noted the necessity of the soul being

guided to bodily purity. He states,

In such a life, every effort is made to insure [sic] that the loftiness of the soul is

not brought low by the insurrection of pleasures, for then the soul turns down

towards the passions of flesh and blood instead of occupying itself with lofty

things and looking upwards … It was for such a disposition of the soul that the

virginity of the body was intended, to make the soul forget and become unmindful

230

Undheim, Borderline Virginities, 108. On the use of “fixity and flexity,” see also:

Undheim, Borderline Virginities, 22.

231

Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance.

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 37.

232

Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 56.

of the passionate movements of its nature, affording it no necessity to descend to

the lowly guilt of the flesh.

233

Virginity, then, was necessary to achieve this upwards direction of the soul, and while not

everyone chose to work towards this goal, some did. This chosen virginity required

effort, both physical and spiritual. Foucault suggests that virginity required constant work

and self-monitoring, in a way making “the practice of virginity… as a type of relation to

the self, that concerns not just the body, but also the relations of the body and the

soul.”

234

Virginity thus becomes what Foucault calls a technology of the self, requiring

diligence and sacrifice, and “must be not a rejection of the body, but a labor of the soul

upon itself.”

235

This labor of virginity was spiritual as well as physical.

Jankowski claims that the early church provided an acceptable place for virginity to

flourish. She states “Catholicism provided a socially/culturally/theologically acceptable place for

female (and male) virgins. Although that place – and the power accorded women – was often

contested, it always existed.”

236

In other words, religious nonsexuality had a place within the

system of compulsory sexuality. This system sometimes allowed for a nonsexual life to be

possible for some, but it also likely forcibly desexualized others. John Boswell remarks that “in

matters sexual, it would be a mistake to imagine that the theological program of ascetic Christian

theologians was instituted uniformly and en masse.”

237

The practices of chosen celibacy were

233

Gregory of Nyssa, “On Virginity,” The Fathers of the Church: Saint Gregory of Nyssa

Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of

America Press, 1967), 28.

234

Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4, trans.

by Robert Hurley, ed. Frederic Gros (New York: Pantheon Books, 2021), 165.

235

Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, 133.

236

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 74.

237

Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, 109.

therefore not likely adopted by many across the board. Karras similarly notes that “the fact that

chastity is so remarkable in saints’ lives would seem to indicate that it was not expected in

normal people’s behavior.”

238

These practices required effort and were meant for the devoted

few.

This nonsexuality has traces of asexuality and even blurs the boundaries between

asexuality as a sexual orientation and as a choice. This brings me to a specific point regarding the

celibate characters of Hrotsvit’s plays: they cannot be painted as asexual characters, but they can

be read as exhibiting asexual resonances. In other words, they can be read as nonsexual. What

nonsexuality in this sense does is allow for a reading of Hrotsvit’s characters that registers

resistance to the system of compulsory sexuality without necessarily establishing the etiology of

that resistance as either an orientation or a choice. As noted by Charles Nelson, the conflicts in

Hrotsvit’s plays “between male and female conclude either with one or the other or both

espousing a virginal, or secondarily, a chaste life; the recalcitrant are damned… the sexed must

become unsexed to lead exemplary lives.”

239

Nonsexuality, then, was part of the system of

compulsory sexuality, to the point where it could be expected of certain people in order to

achieve spiritual fulfillment, even in the afterlife.

Virgin Martyrs, Chaste Wives, and Celibate Hermits

The centuries between the martyrdom of virgins and the writings of Hrotsvit saw the

sedimentation of these martyrs into legends.

240

Abbott states that the Church fathers also helped

238

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 33.

239

Charles Nelson, “Hrotsvit von Gandersheim: Madwoman in the Abbey,” in Women as

Protagonists and Poets in the German Middle Ages: An Anthology of Feminist Approaches to

Middle High German Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1991),

53, (added emphasis).

240

Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 52.

shape the new church through these dangers, and through both their acts and the persecutions,

the mythos of Christianity developed. While the extreme ascetic practices were one option for

achieving an angelic asexuality, martyrdom was another avenue which “canceled out all sin and

elevated one to angel status.”

241

Jankowski makes an important point regarding these virgin

martyrs, stating that while virginal women were afforded a laudable place in terms of their

holiness, “a virgin martyr was superior to a virgin nonmartyr.”

242

The Christian position on

virginity thus lauds the sacrifice of virginity and the dedication to a spiritual triumph over the

body.

It is this legendary spiritual triumph that Hrotsvit taps into in the plays Dulcitius and

Sapientia. Both plays feature the martyrdom of three young virgins, and while Sapientia does not

overtly discuss the virginity of the young girls, they are still considered virgin martyrs. Dulcitius,

on the other hand, centers the virginity of the young women in question, Agape, Chione, and

Irene, who choose death rather than renounce their faith and marry Roman men. Their stringent

ties to virginity win out at the end. When entreated to deny their faith and marry by Diocletian,

Agape tells him not to bother making preparations for marriage, since they will not convert “or

let our purity be stained.”

243

Diocletian then has them imprisoned to be questioned by the

governor, Dulcitius, who immediately lusts after the young women. He orders the young women

to be locked in the kitchen so that he may have sexual access to them. In a comedic turn of

events, he enters the kitchen at night and ends up fondling the pots and pans instead of the young

women, ultimately becoming covered in soot and shaming himself in front of his soldiers. The

241

Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 51.

242

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 52.

243

“Dulcitius,” The Plays of Roswitha, scene i.

young women watch from another room, noting the absurdity of his error. In his embarrassment,

he then orders the young women to be stripped in public, but the soldiers are magically unable to

remove their clothing. The two elder sisters are sentenced to burn alive, but since their spirits

depart from their bodies, leaving their clothes unscathed, they keep their modesty intact. The

youngest sister, Irena, is taken to Count Sisinnius, who threatens to take her to a brothel, to

shame her into converting and dishonor her faith. Irena remains steadfast in her faith and

declares “[t]he wage of sin is death; the wage of suffering a crown. If the soul does not consent,

there is no guilt.

244

The young woman is rescued by angels disguised as soldiers before she is

brought to the brothel, yet she is shot by an arrow and dies, knowing that she will be “adorned

with the crown of virginity.”

245

In this play, the triumph of virginity and Christian faith over paganism is overt. Dulcitius

is typically read as a victory of Christianity, but it is also a victory for Agape, Chione, and Irene,

who actively choose nonsexuality in the form of chastity. This play’s triumphant medieval

nonsexuality, I argue, makes it asexually resonant for present-day readers. For instance, Marla

Carlson states that the “girls' bodies function as foci of desire but are themselves free from

desire. By contrast, the non-Christian men are represented as desiring subjects, which also means

they are subject to their bodies.”

246

Their freedom from desire is reminiscent of how many

asexual individuals define themselves, as lacking sexual desire.

247

While this is a modern

definition of asexuality, there is still some overlap between their staunch virginity and the

244

“Dulcitius,” The Plays of Roswitha, scene xii.

245

“Dulcitius,” The Plays of Roswitha, scene xiv.

246

Marla Carlson, “Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom,” Theatre Journal 50,

no. 4, (1998): 479, http://www.jstor.com/stable/25068590.

247

Pacho, “Estabalishing Asexual Identity,” 13.

experience of lacking desire. For instance, Karras notes that “to be chaste was to identify oneself

as someone devoted enough to spiritual matters that one could transcend the flesh. This is an

even more profound aspect of personal identity than simply a question of whether someone was

ritually pure or not.”

248

To think somewhat anachronistically, this transcendence of the flesh

could easily be considered a lifelong and serious commitment, which Karras claims is not unlike

a modern sexual orientation.

249

Thus, that these virgins’ lack of desire is buoyed by faith should

not negate a potential asexual reading. In fact, their faith further shields them from sexual

assault, as evidence by the series of mishaps that befall their would-be defilers. Florence

Newman suggests that plays such as Dulcitius “consistently deflect or deflate the ‘sexing up’ of

their heroines.”

250

This can be seen in the substitution of cookware for the girls’ bodies, which

ridicules the lustful Dulcitius. Kathryn Gravdal argues that by making Dulcitius grope literal

objects, “Hrotsvitha rejects the cultural axiom that women, including saintly virgins, are the

cause of sexual transgression in men.”

251

Thus, I maintain that Hrotsvit subverts the assumption

that women are inherently hypersexual temptresses who use “burning female eroticism,” and

portrays them instead as virgins rejecting compulsory sexuality and seeking the perfect angelic

asexuality of the legendary virgin martyrs.

252

248

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 66.

249

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 66.

250

Florence Newman, “Violence and Virginity in Hrotsvit’s Dramas,” in Hrotsvit of

Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances, ed. by Phyllis R. Brown, Linda

A. McMillin, and Katharina M. Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 60.

251

Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 34.

252

Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 92.

Like Dulcitius and Sapientia, the plays Callimachus and Gallicanus feature Christian

women converting men through their commitment to celibacy. Gallicanus features martyrdom,

but it also introduces the notion of a chaste Christian marriage and centers on the conversion of

the title character due to his intended wife’s steadfast faith and vow of celibacy. Similarly, the

play Callimachus involves a chaste Christian marriage and the unwavering faith of the celibate

wife, Drusiana. Callimachus is an admirer who declares his love for Drusiana, even after his

friends tell him that it is fruitless to pursue such a devout woman who has even rejected her

husband’s sexual advances. He persists and propositions her, but she rejects him, stating, “I have

renounced even what is lawful – my husband’s bed!”

253

He swears to trap her into bed, but

Drusiana, ever devout, prays for death rather than succumb to Callimachus. Even her death is not

enough to stop her admirer, who convinces the guard to allow him access to her tomb to have sex

with her corpse. Upon entering the tomb, Callimachus and the guard are killed by a serpent

before her body can be defiled. The apostle John appears and resurrects Callimachus to convert

him. Drusiana is also resurrected, and she prays for the guard to be likewise returned to life, but

he chooses death rather than convert to Christianity. The play ends with Drusiana’s husband

rejoicing with the angel that Callimachus was converted and Drusiana was resurrected.

Callimachus portrays a subversion of the sexual economy. The plot of this play revolves

around how the sexual access to a woman is denied to man who goes to great lengths to acquire

her. By having Drusiana choose death over seduction, Gravdal observes that “Hrotsvitha shows

here the female power to petition and the eternal and perfect justice of the Christian God who

unfailingly rewards the faithful.”

254

In other words, Hrotsvit is commenting on the ability of

253

“Callimachus,” The Plays of Roswitha, scene III.

254

Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 31.

women to choose chastity as a means for women to, as Sue-Elle Case puts it, “remain outside of

the patriarchal order of desire” and be rewarded for their faith and their commitment to

chastity.

255

It is even more telling that Drusiana does not merely refuse Callimachus’ seduction,

but she makes a point to say that she has also refused her husband’s bed, demonstrating her

complete renunciation of sex. While Drusiana’s total renunciation of sex is absolute, so is

Callimachus’ desire for her body, so much so that Hrotsvit includes necrophilia as a perverse

extension of compulsory sexuality. Here Hrotsvit refuses to signal a woman’s culpability in the

act of male objectification, and by having Callimachus attempt to assault her lifeless body, a

literal object, she portrays this victimization as perverse.

256

Drusiana is resurrected and thus

rewarded for her celibacy.

The plays Abraham and Paphnutius also portray men’s interest in women’s sexuality, but

these plays feature men rescuing women who have turned away from chastity. Both plays also

feature nonsexual ascetic men converting female sex workers who are made to repent their sins

following a time of difficult penance. Paphnutius features a desert hermit so concerned for the

soul of a prostitute, Thais, that he disguises himself as a lover to gain access to her and convinces

her to repent her sinful life by destroying her possessions and living out the remainder of her life

in a cloistered cell for penance. Abraham similarly features a hermit so worried for the chastity

of his young niece that he inters her into a hermitage as a young woman. This play begins with

Abraham, along with his friend Ephrem, teaching his young niece Mary the virtues of leading a

chaste life. Mary agrees to be locked away in an enclosed hermitage to protect her virtue.

Ephrem tells her that “[b]y keeping your body unspotted, and your mind pure and holy,” she

255

Sue-Ellen Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” Theatre Journal 35, no. 4 (1983): 537,

https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711406462.

256

Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” 537 and Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, 32.

would be able to become like the angels.

257

Mary lives in the hermitage until she is about twenty,

when she is corrupted (either raped or lured away, depending on the interpretation) by a young

man who enters her hermitage disguised as a monk.

258

Ashamed of her transgression, she leaves

the hermitage and becomes a prostitute. After several years, Abraham goes after her by

disguising himself as a potential lover, and eventually convinces Mary to repent her ways and

return to the hermitage where she lives out her days in penance.

Abraham, like Paphnutius, focuses on bringing fallen women to celibacy. Albrecht

Classen writes, “Hrotsvit skillfully weaves the troublesome topics of sexuality and prostitution

into her plays and thereby illustrates for her audience how to cope with two entirely opposite and

yet intimately linked aspects in the life of women during the early Middle Ages.”

259

The

suggestion here is that Hrotsvit was familiar with the various nuances of human sexuality and

included representation of sex work as part of her oeuvre. These plays also, Classen writes,

“describe the war between the flesh and the spirit, and the long penance which must be done by

those who have allowed the flesh to triumph.”

260

In other words, they focus the necessary labor,

both physical and spiritual, that is required to maintain chastity. That this labor is undertaken by

a repentant sex worker demonstrates that anyone can reap the benefits of a celibate life.

While both Abraham and Paphnutius focus on bringing fallen women to celibacy, they

also center the ascetic practices of men. For while there is indeed an overwhelming prominence

257

“Abraham,” The Plays of Roswitha, scene ii.

258

Newlands, “Hrotswitha’s Debt to Terence,” 374-375 and Albrecht Classen, “Sex on

the Stage (and in the Library) of an Early Medieval Convent: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Tenth‐

Century Convent Playwright’s Successful Competition against the Roman Poet Terence,” Orbis

Litterarum 65, no. 3 (2010): 187, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0730.2009.00973.

259

Classen, “Sex on the Stage,” 192.

260

St. John, The Plays of Roswitha, p. xx.

of celibate women in Hrotsvit’s plays, these two plays also center the practices of celibate men,

demonstrating the importance of celibacy to both sexes. Pat Cullum notes that “chastity was

central to the conception of the role of the hermit.”

261

In other words, hermits could arguably be

interpreted as nonsexual, or containing asexual resonances due to their transcending sexual

desire and nonconformity to compulsory sexuality.

In a sense, both Paphnutius and Abraham not only refrain from sex; they actively recruit

otherwise allosexual people into a nonsexual lifestyle. In a sense, they adopt an allosexual drag

to disguise themselves as sexual men in order to enter the sexual economy of the brothels and

“rescue” sex workers. These men are demonstrating that it is possible to be both nonsexual and

patriarchal at once, since their dedication to nonsexuality is forced upon Mary and Thais. These

plays then feature male characters who are so concerned with the sexuality of young women that

they convince them to lock themselves away for years at a time, in essence, desexualizing them

to fit within the sexually appropriate ideal: a virgin. In this way, compulsory sexuality functions

as a means to carve out one of only two options for a woman: the virgin or the whore. These

nonsexual men thus use desexualization as a means of control in order to force women into a

nonsexual life meant to help them transcend earthly desires.

Hrotsvit’s plays thus portray nonsexuality in a myriad of ways. Neither a positive nor

negative, the chosen celibacy and stalwart virginity was the means to an end of resurrection and

cosmic reward, but likely meant bodily suffering. Neither fully normative nor automatically

transgressive, celibacy could signal a subversion of repressive ideals, but it could also be used as

a means of controlling unruly desires. It is clear, however, that Hrotsvit promoted celibacy as the

261

Pat Cullum, “‘Give me Chastity’: Masculinity and Attitudes to Chastity and Celibacy

in the Middle Ages,” in Sex, Gender and the Sacred: Reconfiguring Religion in Gender History,

ed. Joanna de Groot and Sue Morgan (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2014), 234.

most desirable path for a Christian. This argument is promoted through her characters that are

uplifted when they give themselves over to celibacy, such as the three young virgin martyrs in

Dulcitius, or the chaste wife who dies and is resurrected in Callimachus, or the young Mary who

is convinced to return to a life of celibacy in Abraham.

Reading Hrotsvit

The scholarship surrounding Hrotsvit’s plays provides just as much insight into

nonsexuality as do her plays. For instance, much of the scholarship on Hrotsvit’s plays has

focused on how sexuality and virginity are portrayed, as well as on her status as a medieval

woman in a religious order. The issues of her agency as a woman of the church and the portrayal

of women in her plays have been driving questions of this scholarship, especially in the latter

part of the twentieth century which introduced a feminist lens from which to read her work. I

find the debates regarding whether or not Hrotsvit can be read with a feminist lens to be

important to the utilization of an asexual lens for her plays. What follows then is a brief survey

of some of the feminist and queer interpretations of Hrotsvit.

For starters, scholars prior to the twentieth century seemed to express incredulity that

Hrotsvit even existed, with A. Daniel Frankforter noting that in “1867 Joseph von Aschbach

advanced the thesis that Hroswitha was a historical absurdity and, therefore, an impossibility…

that a woman of [her] literary education and sophisticated taste could not have existed.”

262

Frankforter further explores other criticism from the early twentieth century, observing the male

bias and sexism that permeate the scholarship.

263

262

A. Daniel Frankforter, “Sexism and the Search for the Thematic Structure of the Plays

of Hroswitha of Gandersheim,” International Journal of Women's Studies 2, no. 3 (1979): 223.

263

Frankforter, “Sexism and the Search for the Thematic Structure,” 224-226.

Rosamond Gilder, reviewing Hrotsvit’s work from a historical perspective in 1931,

similarly remarks that her work as a dramatist is extraordinary given the “handicaps with which

she was burdened” as a woman during the time of “the dark ages,” especially for a woman in the

church.

264

Gilder here is operating under the assumption that a woman such as Hrotsvit would

have been repressed rather than having some sense of agency. As has been noted by several

scholars, at this time in the Ottonian empire, women of religious orders like those at

Gandersheim would have potentially wielded a great deal of agency and power compared to their

non-clergy counterparts.

265

Additionally, the status of virgin brought about some protections for

women and elevated them to a high status within their communities and within the church.

266

Theodora Jankowski suggests that women such as Hrotsvit had amazing powers that were bound

up with their positions within the church and sometimes secular hierarchy, noting that “the

period from the sixth through twelfth centuries was one of intense and continual negotiation of

the virgin’s power both from within the Roman Catholic Church and within the monachal

system.”

267

Religious women were thus afforded some degree of agency, and as noted by Mary

Marguerite Butler, Hrotsvit’s life at Gandersheim provided her with a considerable classical

education.

268

Sue-Ellen Case, writing in the 1980s, argues for Hrotsvit’s inclusion in a feminist

theatrical canon. She “attempts to do nothing more than to exemplify the application of a few

264

Rosamond Gilder, Enter the Actress: The First Woman in the Theatre (New York:

Theatre Arts Books, 1931): 20.

265

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 66-67.

266

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 64.

267

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 66.

268

Mary Marguerite Butler, Hrotsvitha: The Theatricality of Her Plays, (New York:

Philosophical Library, 1960), 65-66.

basic feminist approaches to Hrotsvit and to lay a groundwork for evaluating the performance

and reception of her work.”

269

In other words, Case reads Hrotsvit’s dramas through a feminist

lens and counters the argument that the religious life for a woman was the ultimate repression,

instead of a potential location for agency for women of the time.

Barbara Gold similarly suggests that Hrotsvit’s depictions of women was complex,

stating that “she can be credited with expanding the range of possible representations available to

religious women in the tenth century.”

270

Gold, like Case, is responding to earlier criticism that

Hrotsvit is a mere female version of a monk, writing simple stories of chastity or is a “failed

precursor of feminist thought.”

271

Both of these options, she reasons, ignore her place as a

woman writing at this time. For Gold, Hrotsvit vindicated and uplifted her female characters and

provided keen insight into the lives of women, again demonstrating evidence of agency within

her writings.

Writing in 1993, M.R. Sperberg-McQueen however disputes a feminist reading of

Hrotsvit, stating that her plays reinforce patriarchal values and assert men’s control over

women’s bodies. Her criticism is that “the behavior and actions of men determine what happens

to a woman’s body” in several of her plays.

272

While Sperberg-McQueen applauds her for

portraying women positively, she also laments her limitations, stating that because she was

269

Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” 534.

270

Barbara K. Gold, “Hrotswitha Writes Herself: Clamor Validus Gandeshemensis,” in

Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, ed. by Barbara K.

Gold, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1997), 57.

271

Gold, “Hrotswitha Writes Herself,” 44.

272

Marian R. Sperberg-McQueen, “Whose Body is it?: Chaste Strategies and the

Reinforcement of Patriarchy in Three Plays by Hrotswitha von Gandersheim,” Women in

German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 8, no. 1 (1993): 63,

https://doi.org/10.1353/wgy.1993.0018.

steeped in the tradition of her faith, “she, perhaps inevitably, reproduced patterns from the

dominant male discourse that present-day feminists can recognize as detrimental to women's

search for personhood and autonomy.”

273

For Sperberg-McQueen, her very identity as a member

of a religious order negates her agency as a writer. Although I consider Sperberg-McQueen's

reading limited, I value her critique of the assumption that Hrotsvit's writing is automatically

feminist simply because Hrotsvit was a woman writing about women. As can be seen in these

plays, Hrotsvit is not necessarily writing for the glory of women, but for the glory of virginity.

Yet even this observation proves less straightforward than it might seem. Helene Schleck

complicates the image of Hrotsvit as champion of virginity over women's agency. She asks,

“[w]hen a woman tells the story, however, even a medieval ecclesiastical woman, we need to ask

whether she is internalizing the antifeminist thrust of the story and, therefore, taking the

masculinist position, or if she is offering a response to that position.”

274

For Schleck, stating that

Hrotsvit presents merely a masculinist perspective is oversimplified, and that instead, her

dramatic treatment of these hagiographic legends challenge the convention female subservience

to male patriarchal rule.

275

As a scholar looking to Hrotsvit for asexual resonances to use in present readings and

productions, I value Schleck’s arguments for Hrotsvit’s transgressive achievement. But Marla

Carlson’s arguments remind me to moderate my enthusiasm. Carlson problematizes Hrotsvit’s

political imperatives regarding her plays, arguing that “Hrotsvit's dramas work to contain and

273

Sperberg-McQueen, “Whose Body is it?,” 63-64.

274

Helene Schleck, “The Whore as Imago Dei: Being and Abjection in Hrotsvit’s

Rewriting of Thais,” in Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts, ed.

Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) 8.

275

Schleck, “The Whore as Imago Dei,” 11.

neutralize a potentially subversive energy.”

276

She first presents a history of the higher social

class within tenth century Saxony that Hrotsvit belonged to, noting the importance of the class

and position of power from which Hrostvit was writing. Secondly, she situates Hrotsvit’s plays,

particularly Dulcitius and Sapientia that heavily feature martyrdom of virgin women, within the

history of the ritual of ordeal. In particular, she relates the history of the ordeal to the relative

lack of pain on the part of the tormented virgins in both plays. That the Christian women triumph

over pain in these dramas echoes the powerful position of the aristocratic Christian women of the

Ottonian empire.

277

She states, “My readings of Hrotsvit's tormented bodies demonstrate,

however, that what looks like subversion to a twentieth-century feminist can just as easily be

read as a model for covert coercion designed to benefit those in power.”

278

In other words,

Carlson argues that Hrotsvit’s use of the virgin martyrs is normative rather than transgressive in

that they exist to contain potential subversions of the social order of the Ottonian empire. Most

importantly, by “erasing pain from her representation of martyrdom, Hrotsvit appropriates the

voice of the victim to serve as a sign of the Imperial Church's power and her dramatization of

passive female triumph serves to reinforce male strength in action,” thus, Hrotsvit’s virgin

martyrs reinforce the patriarchal order of the church’s power.

279

More recently, other theorists have explored the treatment of sexuality, with Albrecht

Classen considering the erotic possibilities within her text. His analysis focuses on the very

sexual themes of her plays, noting that it is very likely that as opposed to the stereotype of a

repressed and prudish religious figure, Hrotsvit was well aware of all sorts of sexual behaviors

276

Carlson, “Impassive Bodies,” 475.

277

Carlson, “Impassive Bodies,” 483-484.

278

Carlson, “Impassive Bodies,” 487.

279

Carlson, “Impassive Bodies,” 487.

(e.g. sexual assault, sex work, necrophilia, etc.). He asserts, “despite her clerical status, both she

as the author and her audience, nuns or canonesses, were fully in a position to reflect literarily

upon the wide range of ordinary life conditions, were well informed about the various

manifestations of sexuality.”

280

This reading suggests that both she and her intended audience

were in a position to understand the relations between sexuality and nonsexuality, and the

importance of choosing virginity.

Stephen Walies considers a different reading on the sexuality of her plays, suggesting that

they are not about virginity, but about the “conflict of flesh and spirit.” Such a conflict bespeaks

not a simple dichotomy between abstinence and promiscuity, but a deeper, spiritual sense of the

two terms.

281

He refers to the “biographical reductionism” that many scholars make of her work,

conflating her life in a virginial community with advancing virginity as a theme of her plays.

282

Wailes argues that this stance ignores the sexuality apparent in the plays, for not all of her

protagonists are female virgins. He does suggest that the plays do celebrate chastity, but that they

do not necessarily hold chastity to be the utmost human virtue. I point out, however, that this

view only considers virginity, not the full range of nonsexuality, which includes nonvirginal

characters who either choose not to have sex or lack sexual attraction. Both Wailes and Classen

are correct in that Hrotsvit’s dramas contain a large spectrum of sexuality, but ultimately, most

of her characters participate in a refusal of sexual advances and sexual coercion in order to

actively choose a nonsexual Christian life.

280

Classen, “Sex on the Stage,” 193.

281

Stephen L Wailes, “Beyond Virginity: Flesh and Spirit in the Plays of Hrotsvit of

Gandersheim,” Speculum 76, no. 1 (2001): 3, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2903704.

282

Wailes, “Beyond Virginity,” 26.

Colleen Butler takes a new direction and explores Hrotsvit’s work by situating it in the

sex/gender system of the Middle Ages. In particular, she engages in a linguistic analysis of

Hrotvit’s work, analyzing her plays in contrast with the plays of Terrence and the hagiographic

myths she used as source material. Specifically, she maintains that “Hrotsvit is arguing that her

imitation of Terence’s sexual content will help her destabilize gender expectations, and that the

destabilization of gender expectations demonstrates the glory of God.”

283

In other words, Butler

provides a means for using a queer lens to read Hrotsvit’s work. Karras similarly explains the

importance of queering such work from the Middle Ages, arguing that “‘queer’ can also signify a

new way of looking at medieval texts, rejecting contemporary heteronormativity; approaching a

medieval text without assuming that the people and actions depicted in it are heterosexual (unless

otherwise noted) can open up a new set of interpretive possibilities.”

284

Through using a queer

(and by extension, asexual) lens, there are more ways from which to interrogate the system of

compulsory sexuality that was at work during the tenth century.

These various lenses are useful in exploring how contemporary scholars can read and

interpret Hrotsvit’s work. Katharina Wilson, for example, argues that while some may consider

Hrotsvit’s writing subversive, it should not be considered radical, considering that Hrotsvit never

questions the patriarchal paradigm of virginity. Rather, she asserts that Hrotsvit does

“appropriate and invert the paradigm,” presenting young women often at the top of the

ecclesiastical hierarchy of virtue.

285

283

Colleen Dorelle Butler, “Queering the Classics: Gender, Genre, and Reception in the

Works of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2016), 71.

284

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 11.

285

Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of her Works, 121.

Questions about Hrotsvit’s political agency have formed a central axis of scholarship

about her for some time, and the answers may be rather elusive. Assuming that her devotion to

virginity is solely repressive negates potential liberation that could be found through a refusal of

sex and the potential safe havens that religious communities could have provided for individuals

seeking to live a nonsexual life. However, a solely liberatory lens could blind readers to the

repressive desexualization that could occur in chaste environments, such as religious cloisters. Of

course, both could be true. One can recognize the patriarchal institution of the church while also

being attuned to the avenues of agency that could be found within. It is also important to note the

privilege Hrotsvit wielded as an upper-class woman in a position of power. While the church was

known to be a patriarchal institution, in Hrotsvit’s time, she likely had immense influence. Also

noting that she was a member of the upper class is an important point that should not be ignored.

While there may be some subversive strands in her writing, she also upholds the normative

power of the church.

Hrotsvit’s Nonsexuality

The importance of the previous scholarship on Hrotsvit, especially the feminist and queer

interpretations, is that they lay the groundwork for reading her plays against the grain, which also

allows for reading with an asexual critical lens. So, what use might Hrotsvit be for feminist and

queer critics in the present? Is the nonsexuality in her plays a useful touchstone for asexual

artists, critics, and activists now? As noted earlier, asexuality studies owes much to feminist and

queer theory, and the feminist and queer readings of Hrotsvit’s work should be recognized.

However, since a good portion of the scholarship on Hrotsvit was conducted before asexuality

was articulated as a legitimate sexual orientation, many of these scholars may have taken for

granted the assumption of sexual normativity. That does not mean that their analyses are

100

somehow lacking; rather, their analyses have brought up questions that have been worthwhile to

this study, especially in regard to how the system of compulsory sexuality functioned.

A feminist lens tends to view her plays as subverting the patriarchal structures. Likewise,

a queer lens of Hrotsvit’s plays considers the ways that she subverts the heteronormative

structures of premodern Europe. An asexual lens, however, views these plays as subverting

patriarchal and heteronormative expectations while also upholding the system of compulsory

sexuality that allowed space for nonsexuality. The themes of celibacy and chastity in Hrotsvit’s

plays were presented as choices where the characters actively choose nonsexuality as an option.

While this celibacy is complex, it can still offer some insight into asexuality in the modern sense.

By complex, I mean that these works do not separate nonsexuality from faith. In fact, these plays

demonstrate that nonsexuality and faith, in the Middle Ages, could not be separated.

While this holds true for the Middle Ages, that link is complicated in today’s society.

Most asexual activists and scholars draw a firm line between asexuality and celibacy. However,

it is important to recognize that even today, nonsexuality (or asexuality) can exist alongside faith.

Religious devotion to celibacy does not negate asexuality. Hrotsvit’s plays show a society in

which religious nonsexuality was a clear option that functioned within the system of compulsory

sexuality.

Even though these plays feature a form of nonsexuality that can be read as asexual, it

does not mean that they are unproblematic. In staging these works, one must remain attuned to

the ways in which nonsexuality is wielded. At times, the proclamation of virginity can be seen as

a triumph over oppression, at others, virginity is used as a form of desexualization, wielded

against certain characters in order to save their souls while sacrificing their corporeal bodies. For

101

contemporary readers this resembles repression and abuse, which was also observed by Sue-

Ellen Case in her attempts to restage Hrotsvit’s plays.

For instance, Case discusses the difficulty she faced restaging these plays (presented as a

trilogy she referred to as: “‘The Virgin’ (Dulcitius), ‘The Whore’ (Paphnutius) and ‘The

Desperate One’ (Callimachus)” in 1982.

286

For Case’s audience, Hrotsvit came to be viewed as

an “Uncle Tom” trapped by male values.

287

This comment brings to light the issue of audience

and reception, and Case describes her feminist audience as resistant to viewing a Christian play

lauding virginity as anything other than repressive. She further mentions that her audience

reacted with laughter at certain parts, such as the miracles and resurrections, noting that her

audience viewed “them not as stage conventions, but as bygone beliefs.”

288

In short, her audience

likely understood Hrotsvit’s plays in terms of their own attitudes and beliefs towards

contemporary Christianity.

289

Considering that her audience was primarily feminists amidst the

background of the feminist sex wars and the rise of the conservative moral majority in the early

1980s, this response is unsurprising.

290

As conservative Christian groups were engaged in a

backlash against feminism, sex-positive feminism was blossoming, so the idea of a laudable

chastity ran counter to the sex as liberatory ideology.

The system of compulsory sexuality in the twentieth century, especially the late twentieth

century of Case’s production, rendered the possibility of living a nonsexual life invisible. Case’s

286

Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” 540.

287

Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” 541.

288

Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” 541.

289

Case, “Re-Viewing Hrotsvit,” 541.

290

Lorna Norman Bracewell, “Beyond Barnard: Liberalism, Antipornography Feminism,

and the Sex Wars,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1 (2016): 27.

https://doi.org/10.1086/686752.

102

audience could not imagine a world where a nonsexual life, especially a nonsexual life that was

closely tied to faith, was anything but repressive, or worse, laughable. Cases’s audience response

is not necessarily wrong; instead, their response should be viewed as a natural response to

unfamiliarity.

Contemporary audiences, as well as the critics of Hrotsvit, have had a hard time

understanding the nonsexuality presented in Hrotsvit’s plays. Some consider her work to be

liberatory, others consider her work to be reminiscent of an oppressive and patriarchal structure.

While her representation of nonsexuality could be experienced as liberatory for some, such as the

virgin martyrs who transcend their pain and earthly lives, it could also be wielded against others,

such as the hermits who force their nonsexuality upon sex workers.

Like Hrotsvit’s nonsexuality, asexuality is not essentially or inherently liberatory, nor is

it a pathology or symptom of oppression. While asexuality was not enunciated as an identity

until very recently in history, the practice of chastity as a choice and a chosen way of life is

prevalent. This has significant ties to how asexuality is understood today. Even today, asexuality

is still being argued regarding its status as queer, even though most asexualtiy scholars agree that

it can be understood as being queer. While it can queer sexuality, i.e., confound our assumptions

about human nature, this current articulation of sexuality was not always how sexuality was

conceived. Centering asexuality allows for these sorts of conversations regarding sexuality and

assumptions about who had access to sexuality to come be brought to the fore. However,

asexuality’s queerness does not negate the potential slipperiness between the definitional

boundaries between asexuality and celibacy. As Hrotsvit’s plays demonstrate, these boundaries

overlap.

103

Nonsexuality can be both resistant to and supportive of compulsory sexuality.

Nonsexuality can both uphold and resist regimes of control. Regardless of how the technology of

self in the Middle Ages understood sexuality, living a nonsexual life was possible. Lifelong

celibacy was even part of the system of compulsory sexuality. In other words, there was an

acceptable place for nonsexual individuals to live. This nonsexual lifestyle was strictly tied to the

church and to religious practices of the day.

Karras contends that “the identities of medieval people were fundamentally shaped by

their sexual status – not whether they were homosexual or heterosexual, as today, but whether

they were chaste or sexually active.”

291

In other words, instead of a heterosexual/homosexual

binary opposition, there could arguably have been a married/chaste binary at work in medieval

Europe. Though like the heterosexual/homosexual binary that has pervaded modern discourse,

there are those individuals and sexualities that exceed the married/chaste binary.

The argument, then, and what can be gleaned from Hrostvit and her plays, is that

nonsexuality existed within the normative system of how sex was conceived. Call this

compulsory heterosexuality; call this the sex-gender system. The point though is that

nonsexuality was not a category that exceeded articulation, like asexuality is today. As noted

previously, asexuality confounds current the system of compulsory sexuality, and like

bisexuality and pansexuality, it exceeds the heterosexual/homosexual binary. In the Middle

Ages, while asexuality as a sexual orientation did not exist, nonsexuality did exist, so much to

the point that living a nonsexual life was not only possible, but sanctioned and lauded.

Using an asexual lens to examine these plays allows for the anachronistic question of

possibility. These characters could have been both deeply committed to their faith and lacked a

291

Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 11.

104

desire for sex. While the vocabulary and discursive construction of asexuality did not exist in

that time, it is not a stretch to consider the possibility that some people did not feel desire or did

not desire sex. Both could exist then, and both can exist now.

There have been many discussions regarding whether or not Hrotsvit’s plays were closet

dramas meant for private reading or performed for a live audience.

292

Regardless of whether or

not her plays were meant to be fully staged or meant for private reflection, their message is no

less impactful. For instance, Lisa M. C. Weston contends that “Hrotsvit’s virginal bodies are

ultimately even more powerful when they become powerful reproducers of new Christian bodies

without sexual reproduction.”

293

Thus, these nonsexual bodies have the power to produce other

virgins through conversion, either on the stage or on the page. As Hrotsvit makes clear in the

preface to her plays, her goal was to reimagine the works of Terrance in a way that showcased

the triumph of virginity while still building off of the literature of the classics. In so doing, she

demonstrates not only her vast classical education, but also reveals how virginity operated along

the lines of sex and gender. While critics may differ on the thematic elements of her plays, most

seem to agree that she was a talented playwright who was promoting Christian ideals, whether

they be a spirituality triumphing over materiality or celibacy prevailing over sexual indiscretions.

Colleen Richmond agrees that Hrotsvit was a skilled rhetorician presenting “inspired female

characters and an unstoppable Christian message.”

294

In this way, Hrostvit’s plays could be

viewed as pedagogical tools. Katharina Wilson puts forth the theory that while Hrotsvit’s plays

292

Butler, Hrotsvitha: The Theatricality of Her Plays, 1-19.

293

Lisa M. C. Weston, “Virginity and Other Sexualities,” in, A companion to Hrotsvit of

Gandersheim (fl. 960): Contextual and Interpretive Approaches, eds. Phyllis R. Brown and

Stephen L. Wailes (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 272.

294

Richmond, “Hrotsvit's Sapientia,” 142.

105

may not have been intended for performance, they may have been intended to be read as

dialogues and used for instruction.

295

What is clear, is that Hrostvit’s rhetorical virgins provide

some insight into sexuality and gender of her time.

295

Wilson, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: The Ethics of Authorial Stance, 104.

106

Chapter 3.

Maiden Pride: The Ambiguous Moll Cutpurse of The Roaring Girl

The Jacobean city comedy The Roaring Girl (1611) by Thomas Middleton and Thomas

Dekker features a title character who is based on a real person, Mary Frith (alias Moll Cutpurse),

the infamous cross-dressing woman of London. This character becomes involved in a fake

marriage plot, wherein a young man, forbidden by his father to marry his true love, pretends to

love Cutpurse instead. Cutpurse’s inappropriateness forces his father to see that his true love is

the correct option for his bride. From here, hilarity and adventures ensue, many of which involve

Moll in men’s attire dueling other men and cavorting with thieves. The play ends with the

rightful couple together and Moll swearing (repeatedly) that she will never marry. Scholarship

regarding the play, and particularly the character of Moll Cutpurse often involves critical

explorations of her character in terms of gender and sexuality, yet her character has not been

explicitly articulated as being asexual in the contemporary, identarian sense of the term, except

in passing.

296

In this chapter, I apply an asexual critical lens to this character, asking how that

view aligns or departs from traditional feminist and queer criticism about the play.

As one of the more recognizable queer characters in early modern drama, Moll Cutpurse

exhibits one version of an asexual resonance: that of the potentially agender asexual. As noted in

the introduction, the concepts of asexuality and agender often overlap in recent scholarship.

Furthermore, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, Moll has been defined as a metaphorical

asexual by various scholars and critics. This reading is further complicated by the individual

296

For instance, see: Victoria Choate, “Queering the Roaring Girl: Gender Ideals and

Expectations of Moll,” Merge 4, no. 2 (2020): 23,

https://athenacommons.muw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article =1018&context=merge and

Michael Shapiro, Gender and Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heronies and Female

Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 1996), 27.

107

known as Mary Frith, who in Gustave Ungerer’s description “is represented as a transvestite

usurping male power, as a hermaphrodite transcending the borders of human sexuality, as a

virago, as a tomboy, as a prostitute, as a bawd, and even as a chaste woman who remained a

spinster.”

297

Simply put, the character of Mary Frith is just as enigmatic as the fictional

counterpart, Moll Cutpurse. Thus, I intend to unpack these various interpretations and ultimately

offer up an asexual reading of Moll.

In searching for asexual resonances in literary and dramatic works, asexuality scholars

have increasingly turned to the early modern era, using a similar methodology to Przybylo and

Cooper’s.

298

In utilizing asexuality as a critical lens, these scholars explore interconnections

between asexuality and anorexia, traumatic pregnancy, Protestant marriage, and queer male

chastity in early modern drama.

299

Additionally, the 2020 Early Modern Asexuality Roundtable

discussion on YouTube focused primarily on reading for asexuality in the works of

Shakespeare, and a 2021 call for papers announced an anthology focusing on Early Modern

Asexualities.

300

These forays into asexuality and early modern era point first to Carolyn

Dinshaw’s “queer historical impulse” to make connections between those left out of sexual

categories in the past as well as those left out of sexual categories in the present.

301

Secondly, the

297

Gustave Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,”

Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 42, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A67530774/AONE?u

=anon~d005525c&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=31d8f4b3.

298

Przybylo and Cooper, “Asexual Resonances,” 298.

299

See: Chess “Opting Out;” Cole, “Traumatic Pregnancy, Queer Virginity, and Asexual

Reproduction;” Sanchez, “Protestantism, Marriage and Asexuality in Shakespeare;” and

“Windholz, “The Queer Testimonies of Male Chastity.”

300

See: Jeff Wade, et. al, “Early Modern Asexuality and Performance: An ACMRS

Roundtable” and Call for Papers, “Call for Abstracts: Early Modern Asexualities,” https://call-

for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/09/08/call-for-abstracts-early-modern-asexualities.

301

Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 1.

108

impulse to seek asexuality in the early modern era in particular speaks to the era’s part in the

development of sexuality as it is understood today in the Western world. While there are drastic

differences between how sex and sexuality are understood between the seventeenth century and

the present, the seeds of contemporary sexuality are arguably planted in the early modern era, as

seen in the development of companionate marriage, the nuclear family as an economic unit, and

the protestant conception of chastity.

302

Even today, contemporary Western society is still

organized around the ideals of companionate marital partnership between two dichotomized

genders based on free-choice rather than familial arranged alliances. Thus, the early modern era

proves irresistible to queer scholars tracing threads of development in Western sex and gender

technologies.

The (Companionate) Marriage Plot

Like other comedies during the Jacobean and Elizabethan eras, The Roaring Girl features

a marriage plot which centers around trickery and ends with the coupling of two young people.

Common examples of the marriage plot can be seen in well-known Shakespearean comedies

such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. These comedies tend to

showcase the period’s anxieties regarding the shifting ideals of marriage from arranged to free

choice. For instance, Lisa Jardine argues that the new model of companionate marriage “raised

problems in relation to the contemporary understanding of the structural coherence of ‘family,’

and in particular, produces anxieties concerning the agency of women within it.”

303

Companionate marriage thus had destabilizing effects on the understanding of family, on alliance

302

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 75.

303

Lisa Jardine, “Companionate Marriage Versus Male Friendship: Anxiety for the

Lineal Family in Jacobean Drama,” in Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge,

1996), 114.

109

building, and on the relationship between men and women. Once women were considered an

active part in the choice for marriage partners, their agency in choosing husbands became a

source of anxiety.

In addition to companionate marriage becoming the general model for the family unit,

Protestant ideals began to set up marriage as the most desirable way to lead a holy life.

304

This

meant that institutional virginity was no longer a viable option for those who may be unwilling to

marry or uninterested in partnered sexuality. Protestant ideals contrasted with Catholicism’s

championing virginal status as a path to holiness. Instead, Protestants began to hold marriage as

the Christian ideal, citing the impossibility of living a completely virginal life. Theodora

Jankowski marks Martin Luther’s objection towards total virginity, where he insists that “there

has never been a virgin or an unmarried person in the world who has been utterly free from

lust.”

305

In other words, the total rejection and unthinkability of a potential asexual life were thus

integrated into the beginnings of modernity.

Jankowski also claims that this push towards marriage as the utmost success for a

Christian life was not merely a result of Protestantism but was also influenced by economics.

Due to the increase of the merchant class, marriage and family ties were necessary to ensure

economic success. Total virginity as a lifestyle choice became untenable as an economic

strategy. This sentiment can easily be seen in another of Shakespeare’s works, All’s Well that

Ends Well, where Shakespeare provides the character of Parrolles with a monologue railing

against virginity, stating, “It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity.

304

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 80.

305

Martin Luther, “The Estate of Marriage, 1522,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T.

Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press,

1958), (4:263), quoted in Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 92.

110

Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never a virgin got til virginity was first

lost.”

306

Nature here is being set up as an economic system, and it is not profitable to preserve

virginity in this system of compulsory sexuality. In the early modern era, then, a dual religious

and economic push occurred to bring institutional, lifelong virginity to an end and position

heterosexual romantic coupling in the form of companionate marriage as the ideal way of life.

This system of compulsory sexuality is easily seen in many of Shakespeare’s plays,

particularly his comedies, which feature a young couple and the complications that arise from

falling in love and marrying. A common example of this is the marriage plot in Much Ado About

Nothing, specifically that of Beatrice and Benedick, who begin the play opposed to marriage but

are finally tricked by their friends and family into falling in love with each other. Their courtship

is particularly interesting to note, since both parties set themselves apart from romance, declaring

their refusal to marry or have anything to do with the opposite sex. As each of them are

convinced that the other loves them, they give monologues reflecting on their previous disdain

for marriage and their commitment to renouncing their single lives. Benedick admits that his

opinions have changed, and he convinces himself by saying “the world must be peopled.”

307

Beatrice has a similar monologue, concluding, “Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?

/ Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu! / No glory lives behind the back of such.”

308

Both

of these comments from the two lovers point to the protestant ideals in companionate marriage.

Benedick’s mention of the world needing to be peopled signals the economic necessity for

306

William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd

ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I, i, 128-132.

307

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd

ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), II, iii, 1047.

308

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, III, i, 1188-1190.

111

producing children as a part of the duty towards marriage. Beatrice’s words, on the other hand,

show the changing attitude towards life-long virginity. By referring to it as “maiden pride” and

“contempt,” Shakespeare demonstrates the shifting attitude of virginity from holy to almost

sinful. Other scholars have remarked on the traces of Beatrice’s potential asexuality. Jankowski,

for instance, notes her recuperated queer virginial status.

309

Liza Blake explores this theme

further in her presentation on Much Ado About Nothing as part of the 2020 Early Modern

Asexuality Roundtable.

310

As an example of the marriage plot, Much Ado About Nothing shares several features in

common with The Roaring Girl, mainly the trickery used to secure a heterosexual coupling at the

end of the play. However, while Beatrice and Benedick, arguably two characters who seem to

demonstrate some traces of nonsexuality, are recuperated into the heteronormative union of

marriage, Moll Cutpurse, the character vocally opposed to marriage, is never recuperated into

marriage and remains a maiden.

For instance, the inciting incident for the main plot of The Roaring Girl involves

Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander, refusing to let his son marry Mary Fitz-Allard, whose dowry is

too small for his liking. Rather than forsake the woman he loves, Sebastian opts to convince his

father that he has fallen in love with the infamous virago Moll Cutpurse, hoping that he will be

allowed to choose Mary as the preferred daughter-in-law. When Sir Alexander hears of his son’s

intention to now marry Moll, he hires a man named Trapdoor to spy on her and cause her

309

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 159.

310

Liza Blake, “Asexual Reading, Postcritical Reading, Queer Reading: The Tragedy of

Much Ado About Nothing,” in “Early Modern Asexuality and Performance: An ACMRS

Roundtable,” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, October 20, 2020, video,

1:00:31, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vSgG02fH6M.

112

downfall. Both of these men devote a large portion of the play to tricking Moll into damaging her

own reputation, which she consistently thwarts. A secondary plot involves the shopkeepers of

London, their wives, and various gallants and thieves, many of whom interact with Moll

throughout. The play ends with Sebastian announcing his elopement. He lets his father assume

he married Moll, but in the end, he reveals that he indeed married Mary Fitz-Allard.

The marriage plot and the use of the lower-class characters demonstrates a major

difference between the romantic comedies of Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing included,

and the Jacobean city comedies, such as The Roaring Girl. Jacobean city comedies generally

deal with the anxieties surrounding the changing landscape of both city life and of marriage. The

rise in companionate marriage brought forth anxiety concerning unruly wives and the

appropriateness of chosen partners.

311

While the two plots of The Roaring Girl feature general

marriage and economic anxieties of the time, these plots also heavily center around Moll

Cutpurse and her commitment to virginity. She is the center of the trickery plot between

Sebastian and Mary, but she also orbits within the shopkeepers’ plot, since Laxton, a young man

involved with Mistress Gallipot, becomes enamored with her. Most importantly, she expresses a

steadfast commitment to virginity throughout the play, despite the many assumptions of her

sexual availability. She even goes so far as to dismiss her critics, stating “Perhaps for my mad

going some reprove me, / I please myself, and care not else who loves me.”

312

In this manner,

she can be seen as exhibiting a clear sense of “maiden pride,” and perhaps even a trace or

resonance of asexuality. Thus, her potential asexuality is a proper starting place for this analysis.

311

Mario Digangi, “Sexual Slander and Working Women in “The Roaring Girl”,”

Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 163, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41917379 and Jardine,

“Companionate Marriage Versus Male Friendship,” 125.

312

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, V, i, 310-311.

113

An Asexual Moll

Moll’s asexuality has been mentioned only in passing by several scholars and has not

been given centrality as a potential theoretical lens.

313

When considering Moll Cutpurse as a

potentially asexual character, it is important to consider how the term “asexual” has been used in

earlier scholarship of the play. For example, Patrick Cheney, writing in the 1980s, explicitly uses

the term “asexual” to describe Cutpurse, but it is less as an identity and more as a descriptor of

her neutral status in terms of sexual expression, stating that “because Moll is a figure embodying

both subject and object, balancing reason and passion, she has no real sexual desires herself: she

is asexual.”

314

Yet this descriptor explains her identity away almost as a metaphor for how love

works itself out in the play. His naming of her as both a hermaphrodite and asexual is

metaphorical: for him, Moll is a tool in service of the marriage plot of the play.

315

He states that

“Moll’s asexual nature and reconciling function link her with the Eros figure,” arguing further

that her presence in the play is merely to facilitate the companionate marriage between Sebastian

and Mary.

316

While this analysis may ring true in terms of the plot of the play, it is an interesting

use of the term “asexual” that requires unpacking.

In Cheney’s use of the term “asexual,” he is referring to her lack of desire, which is part

of the definition of asexuality as a sexual orientation, but he is also invoking assumption of

asexuality as meaning neutrality. In the 1980s, asexuality was not fully articulated as a sexual

313

For instance: Laila Abdalla, “Roaring Fissures: Marginal Success in Middleton and

Dekker’s Roaring Girl,” Jostes: The Journal of South Texas English Studies, 3, no. 1 (2011): 15,

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/jostes.

314

Patrick Cheney, “Moll Cutpurse as Hermaphrodite in Dekker and Middleton's “The

Roaring Girl”,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 7, no. 2 (1983): 130,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43444411, (original emphasis).

315

Cheney, “Moll Cutpurse as Hermaphrodite,” 132.

316

Cheney, “Moll Cutpurse as Hermaphrodite,” 131.

114

orientation, at least not in its current definition. By referring to someone as “asexual,” that most

often meant someone who was sexually neutral or desexualized. Framing asexuality as a means

of ignoring sexuality reinforces rigid constructions of normative sexuality by placing those who

do not conform to heteronormativity outside of sexuality. In describing Moll as an asexual tool

and symbol “of a new hermaphroditic form of comedy” and not as an individual character, he is

placing her outside of the realm of sexuality.

It is perhaps her location outside of sexuality that allows for a queer interpretation of

Moll Cutpurse. Theodora Jankowski, writing in 2000, explores what she terms “queer virginity”

in early modern English drama, and while she does not specifically use the term “asexual” to

describe Moll, she does describe her as exhibiting a queer virginity, which is somewhat close to a

current understanding of asexuality in contemporary scholarship.

317

Jankowski makes the

argument that Moll be considered a queer virgin, based on her refusal to marry and her consistent

denial of being a prostitute. Even though Moll is never shown to have any sexual desires, the

male characters in the play often project their desires onto her.

When Moll first enters, wearing a woman’s skirt and a man’s jacket, the character Laxton

immediately assumes that she is sexually available and in an aside, alludes to piercing her

“maidenhead” with a “golden auger.”

318

Eventually, after much coaxing, Moll offers to meet

with him. Later, in Act III when they do meet, she challenges him to a fight:

What durst move you, sir,

To think me whorish, a name which I'd tear out

From the high German's throat if it lay ledger there

To dispatch privy slanders against me?

317

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 185. While current scholars will agree that asexuality is

considered queer, virginity is not a necessary marker of asexuality. However, Jankowski’s work

stands out among asexuality scholars as a major contributor to the field of asexuality in the early

modern era.

318

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, II, i, 171-2.

115

In thee I defy all men, their worst hates

And their best flatteries.

319

Moll clearly objects to being automatically tied to sex work, instead showing a clear distaste for

men and their flattery. By insisting that she defies all men, she is affirming her virginity and

nonsexual status. Also in this monologue, Moll chastises Laxton for viewing all women as

objects for his pleasure, saying, “th' art one of those/ That thinks each woman thy fond, flexible

whore.”

320

She then fights him and wins, chasing him offstage. Once she is alone onstage, she

gives a brief soliloquy wishing she could meet her slanders in the same manner again affirming

that she will remain unmarried. She vows, “My spirit shall be mistress of this house / As long as

I have time in't,” confirming that she will be in charge of her own autonomy and her own fate as

long as she lives.

321

The scene most often cited as confirming her queer virginal status is Act II, scene ii,

where Moll confirms that she does not engage in sexual activity to brush off Sebastian in his

initial attempt to woo her. She tells him,

I have no humour to marry: I love to lie o' both sides o' th' bed myself; and again o' th'

other side, a wife, you know, ought to be obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to

obey, therefore I'll ne'er go about it… I have the head now of myself and am man enough

for a woman; marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head

and has a worse i' th' place.

322

Jankowski suggests that these lines indicate that for Moll, marriage for women means

giving up their autonomy, in exchanging one (maiden)head for another.

323

In other words, by

marrying, women give up not only their virginity, but their autonomy to the male head of the

319

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, II, i, 84-9.

320

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, III, i, 68-9.

321

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, III, i, 135-6.

322

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, II, ii, 33-42.

323

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 188.

116

household. Most interestingly, it is the line, “I love to lie o’both o’ th’bed myself” which for

Jankowski indicates that Moll is able to find pleasure by herself, suggesting that this pleasure

“could be masturbation, as by lying on both sides of the bed herself she plays both lover and

beloved.”

324

While this quotation by Moll could suggest a queer bisexuality, it can also be read

as a form of asexuality or nonsexuality.

325

Christine Varnado suggests that this quotation

demonstrates not just an image of bisexuality, but a third position which “posits an outside to the

sexual binary.”

326

For Varnado, this third position renders Moll as exhibiting an erotic

instrumentality that is a queer mode of relation between Sebastian and Mary.

327

However, this

third position outside of the sexual binary could just as easily represent an opting out of the

sexual binary, i.e., as a form of asexuality or even autoeroticism. An asexual reading of this line

questions any allocentric assumptions that accompany the asexual orientation.

One of the main misconceptions regarding asexual individuals is that they are entirely

celibate, to the point of not even masturbating. This misapprehension is profoundly misleading

and false, since asexuality is about desire, not about acts. For example, a lesbian would still be

considered a lesbian if she has sex with a man; her understanding of her orientation defines her,

not her actions. By suggesting that she can find pleasure for herself and by herself, Moll is

exhibiting a potential asexuality and autoeroticism. What’s more, for some asexual individuals,

self-pleasure may what most interests them in terms of sexuality. For example, Myra T. Johnson

claims that asexual women with no sexual desires or autoerotic women who prefer to satisfy

324

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 188.

325

For a reading where this line may mean bisexuality, see Jean E. Howard, “Sex and the

Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl, in Erotic Politics: The Dynamics of Desire in

the Renaissance Theatre, ed. Susan Zimmerman, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 185.

326

Varnado, Shapes of Fancy, 83.

327

Varnado, Shapes of Fancy, 52.

117

them alone are oftentimes dismissed and unrecognized.

328

This admission of loving to lie on both

sides of the bed and refusing to marry could arguably be viewed as an asexual or autoerotic

potential within the character of Moll Cutpurse. Asexual individuals are not entirely sexless; they

can enjoy sexual activity, including masturbation, and still not profess a desire to engage in

partnered sexual intercourse.

Asexual individuals are also not entirely prudish either and can engage in sexual play and

even sex work. Another instance in which Moll has been read as queerly erotic is the scene

where she plays the viol in the presence of Sebastian and Mary, who is dressed in men’s attire.

This scene is notable for several reasons. First, the act of playing an instrument in public in

seventeenth century England would have been seen as an act of sexual display. Linda Phyllis

Austern notes that in the Renaissance, “music and womanhood, similarly capable of infinite

spiritual benefit or fleshly corruption, required careful control lest they prove whorish and seduce

the vulnerable.”

329

In other words, musical performance could have easily been considered an act

of seduction, and Moll’s presentation of a song is just as likely to be read as such. Christine

Varnado suggests that the “long song Moll then plays and sings—a bawdy ballad of female

economic and sexual agency, about a mistress, her money, her lovers, and her sisters—serves in

the scene as a dramatic substitution, or an accompaniment, for a three-person sex act centered on

Moll.”

330

Varnado imagines this scene to denote a queer triad, an interpretation that depends on a

328

Myra T. Johnson, “Asexual and Autoerotic Women,” 99.

329

Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren’: The Female Musician and Sexual

Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature.” Renaissance Quarterly. 42, no. 3 (1989): 424,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2862078.

330

Christine Varnado, “‘Invisible Sex!’: What Looks Like the Act in Early Modern

Drama?” in Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, ed James M. Bromley

and Will Stockton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 39.

118

queered view of how sex could be tacitly represented onstage. Varnado further posits that Moll’s

instrumentality in the plot to help Sebastian and Mary is a queer mode of relation that confounds

the sexual binary and gendered power dynamics.

331

By aiding in the construction of “a three-way

circuit” between Sebastian and Mary, Moll brings about a sexual dynamic that throws a wrench

into the idea of sex existing only between a heterosexual couple.

332

Imagining this relationship as a queer triad does not, however, negate an asexual reading

which should be considered one potential queer reading among many. Asexual people often

engage in sex and sexual play and claiming an asexual identity does not automatically render one

somehow sexless. While this scene can be read as a metaphor for a queer threesome, it can also

be read as an example of a verbal performance of sexual wit, using sexual language to entertain

her audience: both in the theatre and in the intimate setting of the scene.

Jean Howard similarly remarks that Moll uses the musical performance of the viol “to

appropriate this instrument not so much to make herself an erotic object, as to express her own

erotic subjectivity.”

333

For Howard, Moll’s act of playing the viol is transgressive in that it is an

exclamation of her own desires, whether they be for a queer threesome, a bisexuality that enjoys

playing both a traditionally-defined male and female role in bed, or an asexual and autoerotic

desire for oneself. Either way, it is best to not forget that asexual people have sex, masturbate,

and engage in sexual wordplay and performance. What’s important in taking an asexual reading

of this scene is that while Moll’s sexuality is verbally on display, she never acts on it nor

expresses a desire to have sexual relations with another character or expresses sexual attraction

331

Varnado, Shapes of Fancy, 52.

332

Varnado, Shapes of Fancy, 86.

333

Howard, “Sex and the Social Conflict,” 184.

119

towards anyone. Even though the very act of her performing the song is sexually suggestive, she

refers to it as merely a fantasy. At the end of the song, Moll tells Sebastian, “Hang up the viol

now, sir: all this while I was in a dream, one shall lie rudely then; but being awake, I keep my

legs together.”

334

Her demonstration of her sexuality is imaginative and hypothetical,

transgressive in both the expression of sexual words and the refusal of sexual access to her body,

here demonstrated by her pronouncement that she keeps her legs closed when she is awake.

It is these moments of sexually explicit performance and cross-dressed costume that

causes the other characters to find her sexually transgressive. Sir Alexander, Sebastian’s father,

finds Moll threatening from the outset, though of course this was the point of Sebastian’s plot.

Sir Alexander, however, attempts any number of plans to discredit Moll, such as sending a spy,

Trapdoor, after her to destroy her reputation through slander or even through sexual assault.

When these plans turn out to be fruitless, Alexander turns to trying to set Moll up as a thief,

allowing his possessions to be laid out in plain view. Matt Carter notes this shift in Sir

Alexander’s plans, suggesting that as the play progresses, “Alexander starts recognizing Moll’s

sexual agency as that of ‘impenetrability’, rather than hyper-penetrability, and begins to amend

his accusations to criminality over sexual voracity.”

335

Sir Alexander assumption of her “hyper-

penetrability” (a.k.a. hypersexuality) shifts as he begins to realize that she is sexually

impenetrable, or asexual, which confounds the assumption of single, unmarried women as being

sexually available. Moll’s refusal of sex becomes transgressive not only in terms of her opting

out of the system of compulsory sexuality, but it is also transgressive in terms of her refusing to

334

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, IV, i, 124-125.

335

Matt Carter, “‘Untruss a Point’—Interiority, Sword Combat, and Gender in The

Roaring Girl,” Early Theatre 21, no. 1 (2018): 95, https://doi.org/10.12745/et.21.1.3145, (added

emphasis).

120

cooperate in her own demise. In this way, she is also resistant to a patriarchal configuration of

women as sex objects that are always available to be penetrated by men.

Further evidence of her nonsexuality comes in at the end of the play, after the lovers,

Sebastian and Mary, have convinced Sebastian’s father that Mary is the better match for his son

than Moll. After Sebastian reveals to his father that his bride is Mary, not Moll, the roaring girl is

then asked when she will marry. She answers with a long list of improbabilities:

When you shall hear

Gallants void from sergeants' fear,

Honesty and truth unsland'red,

Woman mann'd but never pand'red,

[Cheaters] booted but not coach'd,

Vessels older ere they're broach'd:

If my mind be then not varied,

Next day following I'll be married.

336

The response to her words is “This sounds like Doomsday,” to which Moll agrees, indicating the

doubtfulness of her ever marrying.

337

Moll yet again reinforces her desire to remain single and

unmarried. Heather Hirschfeld points out this tendency of Moll to frame her sexuality in terms of

the negative or lack. She states, “when Moll does, at the play’s end, come close to revealing what

will spur her to a partner, what might capture her desire, she articulates her interests only in the

negative, telling the characters not what she wants but only what she does not want.”

338

As noted

in the introduction, the word “lack” is oftentimes part of the very definition of asexuality as a

concept. So too is the concept of lack part of Moll’s characterization of her desires. She frames

them in terms of what she does not want. For Hirschfeld, Moll represents a subversive threat in

336

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, V, ii, 216-223.

337

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, V, ii, 224.

338

Heather Hirschfeld, “‘What Do Women Know?’: The Roaring Girl and the Wisdom

of Tiresias,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 140, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41917378.

121

“a conviction in her own desire and pleasure, that, by remaining unspoken and unsymbolized

even as it is continually spoken about, represents a knowledge unavailable to the others.”

339

What Hirschfield is arguing is that by hiding her desire and pleasure from others, she creates a

subversive threat to the social order. This secret desire could easily be read as a repressed

sexuality, rather than a commitment to nonsexuality.

340

I would argue instead that her secret

desire is an autoerotic yearning to pleasure herself and remain an autonomous single woman,

which is therefore threatening because she is not providing bodily access to the men around her.

While she is constantly surrounded by sexual discourse from those that assume she is a sex

worker or otherwise a woman of loose morals, she consistently disputes these claims and

reinforces her status as a proudly virginal, unmarried woman.

Reading Moll as potentially asexual can help illuminate the various nuances regarding

asexuality as it is understood today. Megan Arkenberg states that “understanding the past in

terms of the present can confer intelligibility on what previous analyses have found

unintelligible.”

341

These asexual readings are thus additional possibilities among the chorus of

potential queer readings. Middleton and Dekker keep Moll happily unmarried at the end of The

Roaring Girl, thus subverting the major trope of comedy that is seen in works such as Much Ado

About Nothing, which ends with two marriages. Jean Howard argues that by allowing her to

remain unmarried, what is left for Moll at the end of the play “are the eroticisms of solitary

fantasy and self-pleasure.”

342

Jankowski, building off her argument regarding nonmarrying queer

339

Hirschfeld, “What Do Women Know?,” 142.

340

Lloyd Edward Kermode, “Destination Doomsday: Desires for Change and

Changeable Desires in The Roaring Girl,” English Literary Renaissance 27, no. 3 (1997): 426,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447762.

341

Arkenberg, “A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood,” 5.

342

Howard, “Sex and the Social Conflict,” 186.

122

virgins as “neither desired nor desiring,” refers to Moll as “inhabiting the third gender of queer

virgin.”

343

In other words, even though she may play up her sexuality for her audience, she

remains a queer virgin, with her true desires possibly being to lie on both sides of the bed, and

pleasure only herself.

An Agender Moll

While this chapter has thus far focused on Moll’s potential asexuality, it would be remiss

to ignore the trans aspect of this character. A good deal of the scholarship on The Roaring Girl

from the 1980s onward has focused on Moll’s gender and cross-dressing, with Simone Chess

noting the “increasing queer approaches toward the character.”

344

Queer readings of Moll that

offer a transgender interpretation might seem contradictory to an asexual identity, but there is

overlap between the two identities. While much of the scholarship on asexuality focus on it as a

new orientation, some recent scholarship links asexuality studies to transgender studies. Taken

together, these two theories are poised to destabilize notions about biology and humanity that

until recently were not only taken for granted but were considered cemented aspects of nature.

Ela Przybylo suggests that the burgeoning field of asexuality studies might have particular

interest to trans studies, noting that “asexuality studies also trouble, as have trans* studies, the

very ﬁeld of queer and sexuality scholarship by focusing attention on a previously unattended to

identity and modes of inquiry.”

345

Both asexuality and trans studies call for a renewed focus on

343

Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 171 and 185.

344

Simone Chess, “Introduction: Passing Relations,” in Male-to-Female Crossdressing in

Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (New York:

Routledge, 2016). 15-16.

345

Ela Przybylo, “Asexuals Against the Cis-tem!” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no.

3-4 (2016): 655, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3545347. While Przybylo uses an asterisk

after the term “trans,” its use is not consistent among transgender scholars. For more information

on the use (and disuse) of the asterisk, see: “Asterisk,” TSER: Trans Student Education

Resources, accessed September 27, 2022, https://transstudent.org/issues/asterisk/.

123

difference and a relinquishing of attachment to essentialist definitions of sex, gender, and

sexuality. These ways of conceiving of sexuality and gender hold the potential to reconfigure

much of what is taken for granted in assumed constructions of personhood.

Karen Cuthbert pushes this link between asexuality studies and transgender studies

further by specifically exploring the overlap between people identifying as asexual and agender.

Cuthbert found this to be particularly true for certain bodies more so than others, specifically “for

those participants who had been assigned female at birth, or were read socially as female,

asexuality also necessitated a level of agendered or gender-neutral embodiment, because of the

relentless sexual objectification and aggressive propositioning experienced under

heteropatriarchy.”

346

The surveyed participants noted for Cuthbert how presenting as feminine

was automatically associated with heterosexuality, sexual availability, and male sexual desire.

In looking at the character of Moll Cutpurse, the assumption of sexual objectification and

aggressive propositioning holds true throughout The Roaring Girl. Most of the male characters

that interact with Moll speak in overly sexual dialogue, for example:

GOSHAWK: ’Tis the maddest fantastiscall’st girl: - I never knew so much flesh

and so much nimbleness put together.

LAXTON: She slips from one company to another like a fat eel between a

Dutchman’s fingers. [Aside] I’ll watch my time for her.

MISTRESS GALLIPOT: Some will not stick to say she’s a man

And some both man and woman.

LAXTON: That were excellent, she might first cuckold the husband and then

make him do as much for the wife.

347

These sexual innuendos demonstrate the general attitude towards her body. The nimbleness and

slipperiness that are evoked here suggest that she has had multiple sexual partners. Her gender

346

Cuthbert, “When We Talk About Gender We Talk About Sex,” 859.

347

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, II, i, 181-186.

124

presentation is also the cause of gossip, with the characters further speculating that her gender

ambiguousness is evidence of her hypersexuality, with the assumption that she can play the part

of both a husband and a wife.

In a later scene with Moll and the tailor, the sexual language and objectification still

occur. Sir Alexander, upon hearing Moll getting fitted for a pair of breeches, sexualizes her and

is shown to be threatened by the possibility of having a “cod-piece daughter” for a daughter-in-

law.

348

Again, Moll is shown to be overly sexualized, even though she has several times

professed a virginal status. There is a distinct tension between her lack of sexuality and her lack

of clear gender norms, since she appears wearing the clothing of both men and women and being

fitted for a pair of breeches that could likely accommodate a codpiece, as noted by Marjorie

Rubright, thwarting the gender norms even further.

349

When she is not being oversexualized, she is made monstrous. Before she appears

onstage, Sir Alexander, upon learning of his son’s plan to marry Moll instead of Mary, refers to

her as “A creature…nature hath brought forth /To mock the sex of woman...The sun gives her

two shadows to one shape,” to which Sir Davy answers, “A monster, ‘tis some monster.”

350

Here

Moll is referred to as an unhuman creature, mocking the sex of woman due to her differently

gendered presentation. When Sebastian feigns that he has fallen for her since he cannot marry his

chosen bride, Sir Alexander refers to, “This wench we speak of strays so from her kind / Nature

repents she made her. ’Tis a mermaid/ Has tolled my son to shipwreck.”

351

Sir Alexander’s use

348

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, II, ii, 87.

349

Marjorie Rubright, “Transgender Capacity in Thomas Dekker and Thomas

Middleton's The Roaring Girl (1611).” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4

(2019): 63, https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0037.

350

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, I, ii, 127-8, 132, & 134.

351

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, I, ii 211-12.

125

of the term mermaid demonstrates how Moll, according to Tara E. Pedersen, is “a double

creature – a mermaid – whose effect on those around her is a source of puzzling scrutiny and

whose naturalness (in terms of her gender and sexual identity) are constantly under

evaluation.”

352

Here Pedersen suggests that in comparing Moll to a mermaid, her ambiguity is

made more overt. Mermaids exist outside of the boundaries of classification, at once both

monstrous and sexualized. Penderson, in using this metaphor of a mermaid to analyze the

character of Moll Cutpurse, points out that Moll herself does not identify as either a woman or a

man in the play. Instead, Penderson claims that “Moll exists in a historical location and moment

in which many of the scientific understandings of biology which define sex and gender as the

century wears on (as well as modern distinction between sex and gender) were still without firm

delineation.”

353

Given Moll’s status as being somehow both man and woman and yet also

neither, her existence points to a time where gender dichotomization began to coalesce into two

opposite sexes, a process which many point to as beginning in the early modern era and finally

fully consolidating in the Enlightenment.

354

Of course, distinct gender categories were still being formed, and these categories are not

so easily defined in this time. Jennifer Higginbotham complicates the assumed gender categories

of early modern England by centering girls and girlhood, noting their absence in much of the

conversations revolving gender in early modern England. Higginbotham complicates the theories

352

Tara E. Pederson, “Identifying Mermaids: Economies of Representation in Dekker

and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl,” in Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early

Modern England (Parkside: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 39-40.

353

Pedersen, “Identifying Mermaids,” 52-53.

354

Valerie Traub, “Mapping the Global Body: The Making of the Cartographic Body in

the Making of Nations,” in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race and Empire in

Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse,(Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 44.

126

that have centered around boys, specifically the use of boys playing female characters on the

English stage. Higginbotham suggests that “the early modern sex-gender system was organised

around a tripartite distinction that defined mature men against women and boys.”

355

In setting up

the early modern sex-gender system as one between men, women, and boys, girls are thus

rendered as absent, while at the same time, the category of woman becomes stable and fixed.

356

Higginbotham’s work centers girls, and in so doing, suggests that the category of girl does not

merely change the tripartite model into a fourfold model, but instead pulls it apart. Higginbotham

states, “[g]irls did not fit into the sex-gender system so much as they disrupted it. By offering an

alternative construction of femininity, girlishness exposed womanhood as a social

backformation.”

357

In other words, by shifting the focus to girls, Higginbotham exposes how

girlhood further complicates already unstable gender categories. She brings her analysis of how

girlhood functions to the character of Moll, noting that in some contexts, “the term ‘girl’ seems

to have been mobilized to describe adult women who were sexually, but perhaps more

importantly socially and politically transgressive.”

358

Moll, then, is presented as transgressing

numerous social and sexual boundaries, from wearing men’s attire to even playing a musical

instrument in mixed company. Even the title of the play itself, The Roaring Girl, denotes this

tendency to ascribe girlishness to transgressive behavior. Roaring boys, or ill-behaved rich young

men, were considered a typical staple in London society, but roaring girls were rarer. Moll’s

355

Jennifer Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender,

Transgression, Adolescence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 3.

356

Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters, 3.

357

Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters, 9.

358

Higginbotham, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters, 63.

127

behavior, seen not only in her dress, but in her use of smoking tobacco and use of thieves cant

(slang), shows that she was a rarity.

359

This reading is further complicated by the fact Moll, a woman in men’s clothing, would

have been played by a young boy actor, as noted above. There has been plenty of scholarship

regarding the erotic positionality of the boy actors on the Elizabethan stage, such as Lisa Jardine,

who argues that the actors were sexually enticing as transvestites.

360

What is interesting about the

case of The Roaring Girl is that the boy actor playing Moll would have been doubly cross-

dressed. Instead of a female character (played by a boy) dressing up as a boy for a short time for

safety, seen in such plays as Twelfth Night or As You Like It, Moll cross-dresses as part of her

identity in her everyday life.

361

Moll’s case as an exception to the rule goes even further, as

Anthony B. Dawson contends that The Roaring Girl “rewrites the Shakespearean transvestite

comedy by refusing to reunite the cross-dressed woman with her role.”

362

Unlike typical

Shakespearean comedies involving female characters pretending to be women, Moll does not

revert back to feminine clothing, for there is nothing different about her dress. Moll’s cross-

dressing is not an act, nor is it pretend; it is her daily life.

359

Callan Davies, “Speech: Strange Doctrines in The Dutch Courtesan, Macbeth, The

Roaring Girl, and The White Devil,” in Strangeness in Jacobean Drama (London: Routledge,

2021) 68-69.

360

Lisa Jardine, “Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism,” in Staging the

Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and

Peter Stallybras (New York: Routledge, 1991) 61.

361

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1997), I, ii, 96-110 and Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd

ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I, iii, 522-534.

362

Anthony B. Dawson, ” Mistris Hic & Haec: Representations of Moll Frith,” Studies in

English Literature, 1500-1900 33, no. 2 (1993): 391, https://www.jstor.org/stable/451005.

128

Even more transgressive was the fact that during Moll’s time, women dressing in men’s

clothing tended to look the same as one another out among the streets of London, thus erasing

the class differences typically seen in women’s dress in daily life. Mary Beth Rose points out

that “the female in male clothing served as a leveler… so the phenomenon of women of different

social positions dressing in similar male clothing appeared intolerably chaotic.”

363

Moll thus is

doubly transgressive, thwarting both gender and class expectations, making her especially

dangerous. Similarly, Adrienne Eastwood points out that there was a noticeable increase in

“female transvestites” appearing in London, perhaps as a means of gaining freedom to interact

with men or attain work.

364

Several texts regarding this trend, such as the pamphlets Hic Mulier

which opposed the practice of women wearing men’s clothing and Haec Vir which defended the

same women, appeared in 1620, almost a decade after The Roaring Girl was first performed.

365

This debate demonstrates the increasing anxiety regarding single women who cross-dress and

their visibility in the city.

Eastwood further argues is that while the character of Moll reflects the reality of female

transvestism, the playwrights also made sure that their play held as its subject “a unique, morally

superior character.”

366

For while it is possible that Middleton and Dekker sought to create a truly

transgressive character, they also ensure, in the prologue, that the character is morally without

363

Mary Beth Rose, “Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy,” in

The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1988) 74.

364

Adrienne Eastwood, “Controversy and the Single Woman in ‘The Maid’s Tragedy’

and ‘The Roaring Girl’,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 58, no. 2 (2004):

17, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566550.

365

Rose, “Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility,” 70 and Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-

Woman (And) Haec-Vir: Or, The Womanish Man (Exeter: The Rota at the University of Exeter,

1973).

366

Eastwood, Controversy and the Single Woman,” 18.

129

reproach. While the prologue describes the phenomenon of “roaring girls,” they are sure to

mention that “None of these roaring girls is ours: she flies / With wings more lofty.”

367

Eastwood

points out that this emphasizes the exceptional status of their character, thus making her at once

more sympathetic and more unbelievable. In this way, her social commentary can be taken with

a grain of salt and her transgressions can be dismissed.

Jane Baston similarly questions her transgressive nature, arguing that while “in the early

part of the play, Moll does appear to challenge and subvert gender and class norms, a close

examination of the final acts reveals that she is gradually contained and incorporated into the

prevailing social apparatus of the play.”

368

For Batson, her involvement in the matchmaking

scheme shows that her attitudes towards the patriarchal structure of marriage are not that radical,

and that by the end, she has been recuperated into the sex-gender system. Her existence as a

singular exception to the rule ends up reinforcing the predominant systemic norms. Ultimately,

while Moll may be transgressive, she is only as transgressive as she is allowed in her time.

A 2014 production of The Roaring Girl at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)

highlighted her transgressive nature through their various dramaturgical choices.

369

This

production was part of the RSC season titled “Roaring Girls” along with the Jacobean plays

Arden of Faversham, The White Devil, and The Witch of Edmonton and were produced with

367

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, Prologue, 25-26.

368

Jane Baston, “Rehabilitating Moll's Subversion in The Roaring Girl,” Studies in

English Literature, 1500-1900 37, no. 2, (1997): 320, https://www.jstor.org/stable/450836.

369

Emma Whipday, “‘The Picture of a Woman’: Roaring Girls and Alternative Histories

in the RSC 2014 Season,” Shakespeare 11, no. 3 (2015): 273,

https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2015.1048279.

130

female directors.

370

This season was, according to Peter Kiernan, “held up as an exploration of

feminist principles at the heart of the RSC” playing with the term “roaring girls” as a way of

showcasing the use of women’s bad behavior as a feminist political act.

371

The scholarship

regarding this play’s success seems mixed. Set in the Victorian Era, Kiernan writes that Moll is

portrayed “as a woman quite literally out of time, her musical performances alone encompassing

‘40s jazz, ‘70s punk and ‘00s rap battles.”

372

Similarly, Emma Whipday states that while Dekker

and Middleton “emphasize Moll’s chastity… [the 2014 production] took the opposite approach”

with the actress playing Moll presenting her as sexually provocative.

373

This production even

went so far as to invent a character who served as Moll’s maid, existing quietly as a companion,

and even sharing a romantic moment with Moll at the conclusion of the play.

374

All of these

elements of this production seem to point to Moll as being visibly and outwardly queer,

attempting to mark the character as transgressive not only in Middleton and Dekker’s time, but

also in our time.

For some scholars, Moll is neither transgressive nor normative. Ryan Singh Paul, for

instance, argues that “critical debate over Moll’s function as either a figure of female

empowerment or a means to stabilize the patriarchal culture ignores the fact that Moll is both, if

370

Kate Wilkinson, “Girls and Boys: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 Summer

Season,” Shakespeare 11, no. 3 (2015): 242 and 246,

https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2015.1048276.

371

Peter Kirwan, “The Roared-at Boys?: Repertory Casting and Gender Politics in the

RSC’s 2014 Swan Season,” Shakespeare 11, no. 3 (2015): 250,

https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2015.1048277.

372

Kirwan, “The Roared-at Boys?,” 258.

373

Whipday, “‘The Picture of a Woman,’” 274.

374

Kiernan, “The Roared-at Boys?,” 259.

131

not more, and that Middleton and Dekker’s play celebrates her final ineffability.”

375

Regardless

of her transgressive or normalizing status, or her status as both/and, Moll can be viewed as

potentially agender as well as potentially asexual. While it is impossible to truly define Moll as

either, since these terms are part of a contemporary vocabulary of sexual orientation, seeing her

as having resonances of both is well within the imaginative leap of this project. Additionally, the

term agender denotes “the experience of feeling like you have no gender or are removed from

gender in some way.”

376

Moll never fully articulates herself as either a woman nor a man and

while she most often answers to and refers to herself as “Moll,” she briefly answers to the name

“Jack” towards the end of the play.

377

By allowing her gender to remain ambiguous, and by

removing herself from the sexual economy that the men seek to put her in, the term agender

might be an appropriate lens for reading Moll. Marking her as definitively agender, however,

would be to ascribe a contemporary sexual orientation onto a past character, which would be

inaccurate. Additionally, I have kept with the use of feminine pronouns of “she/her/hers” to

describe Moll throughout, since this is how the character is written in The Roaring Girl.

378

rather than say that Moll is agender, perhaps it is more appropriate to suggest Moll exhibits

agender resonances in addition to asexual resonances.

Sex, the City, and Mary Frith

While an analysis of Middleton and Dekker’s character of Moll Cutpurse provides ample

material to analyze, the fact that she was based on a real individual, Mary Frith, provides even

375

Ryan Singh Paul, “The Power of Ignorance and The Roaring Girl,” English Literary

Renaissance 43, no. 3 (2013): 539, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6757.12016.

376

Cuthbert, “When We Talk About Gender We Talk About Sex,” 847.

377

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, V, ii 212 & 215.

378

For a transgender reading, including the use of “they/them” pronouns for “Moll |

Jack,” see Marjorie Rubright, “Transgender Capacity,” 52.

132

more evidence to point to the slippage allowed in the system of compulsory sexuality in early

modern London. Several scholars have noted the mention of the real Mary Frith in The Roaring

Girl and have speculated regarding her influence on the creation of the character. Alicia Tomisin,

for instance, notes that “Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl is unique among dramatized

female commoners. She is the only character for whom the historical and dramatic figures exist

in such a symbiotic relationship.”

379

The possibility of this symbiotic relationship can be seen in

the references to the real Mary Frith that is peppered throughout The Roaring Girl. The first time

Moll Cutpurse is mentioned, before she ever appears onstage, Sebastian says, “There’s a wench/

Called Moll, mad Moll, or merry moll, a creature/So strange in quality, a whole city takes/ Note

of her name and person.”

380

While Sebastian is speaking of Moll the character, this could also be

a playful reference to the real Mary Frith, who was indeed well-known around London. The

epilogue of the play even promises an appearance by Frith, stating, “The Roaring Girl herself,

some few days hence, / Shall on this stage give larger recompense. / Which mirth that you may

share in, herself does woo you, / And craves this sign, your hands to beckon her to you.”

381

The

question of whether or not Mary Frith actually appeared onstage has been debated by several

scholars.

For instance, Mark Hutchins examines the evidence of Mary Frith actually playing

onstage at the Fortune theatre in 1611, giving several possibilities, whether her participation was

scripted or improvised.

382

Alicia Tomison also speculates that Moll may have merely performed

379

Alicia Tomasian, “Moll's Law,” Ben Jonson Journal 15, no. 2 (2008): 206,

https://doi.org/10.3366/E107934530800028X.

380

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, I, ii, 92-95.

381

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, Epilogue, 34-37.

382

Mark Hutchings, Mark “Mary Frith at the Fortune,” Early Theatre 10, no. 1 (2007):

99, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43499292.

133

a song onstage at the Fortune.

383

Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing also offer evidence that Moll

likely sang and played the lute onstage at the theatre in 1612, citing the record in The Consistory

of London Correction Book.

384

Tomison further speculates that Moll was likely a regular patron

of the Fortune, and that Middleton and Dekker “must have assumed that, as a member of the

audience, she might have loudly corrected anything she did not like, and her supporters might

have done the same.”

385

The overall speculation of her involvement in the actual production or in

the audience provides more insight into the potentially subversive nature of her character and

also her popularity at the time. In fact, The Roaring Girl is not the only mention of Moll by her

contemporaries; she makes a small appearance in Amends for Ladies (1618) by Nathan Field,

and is briefly mentioned in John Taylor’s poetry (1622), Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch

of Edmonton (1621), and The Court Beggar (1632) by Richard Brome.

386

William C. Carroll also

mentions a 1610 book by John Daly (of which no copy survives) entitled A Booke called the

Madde Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her walks in Man’s Apparel and to what

Purpose.

387

Her popularity speaks to the draw of those who are somehow othered, and to the draw of

female criminals. Melissa Rohrer notes the popularity of crime drama, mentioning that a decade

before The Roaring Girl, several murder plays were being performed on London stages, such as

Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, and the lost murder plays Page of Plymouth,

383

Tomasian, “Moll's Law,” 214-216.

384

Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing, “Introduction,” in Counterfeit Ladies: The Life

and Death of Mal Cutpurse and The Case of Mary Carelton, ed. Janet Todd and Elizabeth

Spearing (New York: New York University Press, 1994), xiv-xv.

385

Tomasian, “Moll's Law,” 217.

386

Todd and Spearing, “Introduction,” xv and Tomasian, “Moll's Law,” 223.

387

William C. Carroll, “Introduction,” Thomas Middleton: Four Plays, xi.

134

Cos of Collumpton, and The Tragedy of Thomas Merry. Roher claims that not only were these

plays seemingly popular, but their popularity was tied to their “perceived authenticity.”

388

Plays

such as Arden of Faversham depict female criminals, which seemed to draw audiences in more

than depictions of male criminals, especially if they were based on true events. Jessica Landis

argues that the “characterization of female criminality as ‘scintillating’ indicates the allure of the

female criminal, especially Frith who clearly captured the collective imagination given the

frequency with which she is mentioned in various sources of the time.”

389

Frith’s popularity

could be simply due to her criminality, and very likely her inclusion in The Roaring Girl was a

ploy to sell tickets.

Marion Wynne-Davies makes a similar argument when referencing characters like Moll

Cutpurse and other lower-class women such as orange sellers who were likely well known and

vocal fixtures of playhouses, and these lower-class women were also likely to be perceived as

sexually transgressive.

390

She states, “while these women might be perceived as challenging the

legitimate all-male theatrical activities, dramatists like Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and Fielding

clearly recognized the compelling power of their voices and, tellingly, linked them to applause,

‘box office,’ and other female members of the audience.”

391

In other words, rather than assume

women were absent from the theatre, women such as Mary Frith were likely very vocally present

388

Melissa Rohrer, “‘Lamentable and True’: Remediations of True Crime in Domestic

Tragedies,” Early Modern Literary Studies, 20, no. 3 (2019): 5,

https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/439.

389

Jessica Landis, “The Allure of Joy and Female Criminals in Early Modern English

City Comedy,” Jems 10 (2021): 215, http://dx.doi. org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-12548.

390

Marion Wynne-Davies, “Orange-Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls:

Women and Theater in Early Modern England,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 22

(2009): 23, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24322796.

391

Eastwood, Controversy and the Single Woman,” 23.

135

in and around the theatre. Wynne-Davies also points out that these women have been pushed to

the background, constructing “a gendered dialectic in which men are legitimate performers

within an authorized commercial space and in which women provide an informal “sideshow” in

an unlawful market.”

392

These sidelined women would have possibly provided a variety of

services such as selling oranges or other wares, including sexual services. While Mary Frith was

never herself arrested for prostitution, she was a known thief, fence, and bawd who procured

male prostitutes for female clientele, so she was very likely participating in an unlawful market

at the theatre. Her presence in The Roaring Girl could simply reflect the consumerist gaze,

considering her popularity at the time.

Matthew Kendrick takes a materialist approach to the character of Moll, suggesting that

Mary Frith herself may have used this character to make a spectacle out of herself and fleece the

audience with her pickpockets. He suggests that Mary presented herself as a spectacle so that

“their eyes transfixed by the monstrous image of Moll, the public fails to notice Mary, the

pickpocket, sneaking up behind.”

393

Through staging this play about Moll, he posits that the

playwrights, actors, and Moll joined together in a very shark-like business arrangement, that was

both transgressive and consumerist at once. Kendrick bases this hypothesis on Gustave Ungerer,

whose examination of the sparse documentary evidence of Frith’s life suggests that Frith’s

“transvestism was a commercially and professionally motivated ploy to increase her income.”

394

392

Wynne-Davies, “Orange-Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls,” 20.

393

Matthew Kendrick, “‘So Strange in Quality’: Perception, Realism, and

Commodification in The Roaring Girl,” Criticism 60, no. 1 (2018): 106,

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715831.

394

Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,” 55.

136

While this speculation regarding her gender identity seems a bit reductive, perhaps the possibility

of Moll’s transgressive nature is much more complicated than a simple yes or no can provide.

Mary Frith’s lived reality as a popular character and object of speculation both today and

in early modern London speak to society’s fascination with sexually ambiguous characters. Her

celebrity and notoriety come from the fact that her gender presentation was criminalized, and she

was often penalized for it. Randall Nakayama observes that in her autobiography, The Life and

Death of Mrs. Mary Frith (of questionable authorship), Frith provides several instances of being

accused of indecency for wearing men’s attire.

395

More importantly, Frith’s sexual identity may

resonate with asexuality in the same manner as that of Middleton and Dekker’s Moll Cutpurse.

For instance, she admits to having no desire, a point that is remarked upon in the introduction to

two different volumes of her autobiography. Randall Nakayama remarks that “Moll Cutpurse

simply claims that she had no sexual desires,” but explains away her commentary, noting that

perhaps due to her “unwinning appearance” she may have “desired heterosexual romance but

was unable to achieve it.”

396

This reading seems to dismiss the words of Frith as compensation

for her being rejected. The story referenced is one where she likely propositioned a friend, owing

to “the apathy and insensibleness of my carnal pleasures even to stupidity possessed me.”

397

Arguably this apathy Frith speaks of demonstrates a general indifference to romance and a

disinterest in the insensibleness of such carnal pleasures. Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing also

note a general lack of admitted sexuality, stating that she had many male friends, “the dominant

395

Randall S. Nakayama, “Introduction,” In The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith,

Commonly Called Moll Cutpurse, ed. Randall S. Nakayama (New York: Garland Publishing,

1993), xvi-xvii.

396

Nakayama, “Introduction,” xvii-xviii.

397

Nakayama, The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith, 58.

137

tone of these relationships appears to have been the camaraderie of male bonding, with little hint

of feminine seduction.”

398

The veracity of this story and her sexual identity are thus impossible

to determine.

A further complication comes Ungerer who makes mention of her marriage to Lewknor

Markham, noting that one of her aliases was that of Mary Markham.

399

Her marriage, however,

does not indicate any sort of sexual desire. Ungerer even provides doubt of the veracity of the

marriage, stating that it “should presumably be seen as a marriage of convenience contracted

with a view to avoiding the discrimination and disabilities resulting from coverture and to

exploiting the loopholes in the definition of gender boundaries,” even calling into question if

they lived together as husband and wife.

400

Steven Orgel, on the other hand, claims that she was

never married, thus the existence of this marriage, convenience or not, is still in question.

401

So what if, rather than dismissing the appearance of a lack of desire as a problem of

authorship or an inability of Moll to achieve a heterosexual romance (married or not), we instead

were to take Frith at her word? It is highly possible that the real Mary Frith may have been a

potential asexual person attempting to live a nonsexual life while being surrounded by the

abundant sexual economy of seventeenth century London.

Mary Frith and her fictional counterpart of Moll Cutpurse provide a unique and arguably

very queer perspective. Due to her arrests for indecency, Frith was not allowed a place within the

system of compulsory sexuality, and she was hypersexualized both onstage and off. The

398

Todd and Spearing, “Introduction,” xxiv.

399

Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,” 48.

400

Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,” 53.

401

Steven Orgel, “The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl,” Erotic Politics: Desire on the

Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15.

138

fascination and hypersexualization of Moll points to the overall fascination and

hypersexualization of those who present as differently gendered, whether transgender or

nonbinary. Like Moll, when they are put in the spotlight, their gender and thus their sexuality is

put on display, oftentimes hypersexualized for a profit. We are left with the question: is Moll an

example of an asexual individual existing, best she can, within the confines of renaissance

gender anxiety and compulsory sexuality that would make a spectacle of her? Or is this character

a rhetorical and capitalist tool, simultaneously hypersexualized and sanitized for the stage to

make a profit? The answer, I would offer, is both. The character of Moll Cutpurse is not neat in

any way. Moll is, according to Kendrick, “an ‘unfinalizable’ character” who demonstrates

fluidity through an ambiguous gender identity, an arguably asexual sexuality, and an unstable

socioeconomic position.

402

We do not have access to the lived reality of Mary Frith, but we do have a questionable

autobiography as well as a male-filtered dramatic representation of her character. The possibility

that both the character and the real person could contain traces of asexuality provides the

potential to develop a richer history of asexuality for this emerging identity and sexual

orientation.

402

Kendrick, “‘So Strange in Quality’,” 117.

139

Chapter 4.

Barely Tolerated Spinsters: Rachel Loving and Laura Wingfield

The term “spinster” evokes different connotations throughout history. Originally

designating a woman who spun wool, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term came to

refer to unmarried women.

403

While the idea of the spinster in popular culture has a long history,

she came to be considered as “an exemplar of feminine failure” in the middle of the twentieth

century.

404

The two plays I examine in this chapter, Rachel and The Glass Menagerie, feature

young women (Rachel Loving and Laura Wingfield) who end up unmarried, and their failure to

marry is viewed as tragic. In both plays, the young women in question are portrayed as childlike

in their innocence. Both, I argue, contain traces or resonances of asexuality.

While these two plays are vastly different in many ways, their resonances with asexuality

speak to the prevailing attitudes of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century,

including the system of compulsory sexuality. The first play, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel

from 1916, features the black experience of racism by focusing on how it impacts on the title

character, Rachel, a young woman on the verge of adulthood. The second play, 1945’s The Glass

Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, focuses on the life of Tom Wingfield as he narrates his

experiences with his mother and his disabled sister Laura. While the plays were written decades

apart, they both provide a snapshot of the confluence of racism, ableism, and sexism that inflects

the early- to mid-American system of compulsory sexuality. In particular, the two characters,

Rachel and Laura, model another instance of nonsexuality: unmarried women, otherwise known

as spinsters. While these two characters do not begin as spinsters, they end their respective plays

403

Naomi Braun Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2002),10.

404

Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities,13.

140

as tragic spinsters who are sufficiently desexualized. As noted in the introduction, asexuality can

and has been weaponized against certain bodies that did not fit the specific ideal of being white

and able-bodied. Thus, I will explore how compulsory sexuality intersects with heteropatriarchy,

white supremacy, and ableism, which can be seen in the early twentieth century’s fascination

with eugenics.

The desexualization and construction of Rachel and Laura as tragic spinsters demonstrate

the prevailing attitudes towards single, unmarried women in the first half of the twentieth century

and allows for an examination of how compulsory sexuality functioned. As attitudes towards

unmarried women shifted, the place of spinsters throughout the twentieth century likewise

shifted. Using an asexual lens, I analyze the external forces that construct these characters as

tragically desexualized while also leaving room for these characters to be read as asexual. Put

another way, I ask how the typical reading of these characters can be overturned when viewing

these characters as asexual. In taking this read, I explore the assumptions of compulsory

sexuality as well as the intersections of asexuality with race and disability. I argue that reading

these characters through an asexual lens rather than as tragic spinsters creates dramaturgical

possibilities for agency within and against the multiply oppressive cultural logics represented in

the scripts.

Constructing American Womanhood

Before delving into the nature of how compulsory sexuality and asexuality functions in

these two particular plays, it is useful to examine the changing shape of compulsory sexuality

that came to influence early twentieth century America. I pay particular attention to American

womanhood, since both plays deal with unmarried women, so the ways that women are

constructed under compulsory sexuality here is important. Additionally, the perception of

141

women as naturally feeling sexual urges less stringently than men, which has been the modern

prevailing assumption regarding human sexuality, requires analysis, especially in light of

asexuality.

Before delving into the nature of how compulsory sexuality and asexuality functions in

these two plays, it is useful to examine the changing shape of compulsory sexuality that came to

influence early-to-mid-twentieth century America. I pay particular attention to the cultural

construction of American womanhood under compulsory sexuality, especially as it affected the

representation of unmarried women like Laura and Rachel.

Cultural historian Nodhar Hammami exclaims that a form of asexuality was prescribed

for U.S. women at the start of the twentieth century, stating that, “woman had to conform to the

nineteenth-century ideal of the domestic paragon and be a mere non-responsive and inactive

sexual partner. Thus her moral perfection resulted in her asexuality.”

405

Far from a sexual

orientation or identity marker, Hammami’s use of asexuality here is more appropriately defined

as a form of desexualization, so named by asexuality scholar Karen Cuthbert as preferred

terminology to specifically distinguish this from asexuality as orientation.

406

This framing of

asexuality as an ideal of womanhood was part of a specific rhetorical strategy in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that was used to code women as being pure and lacking

sexual urges. Nancy F. Cott describes this transformation by arguing that “there was a

traditionally dominant Anglo-American definition of women as especially sexual which was

reversed and transformed between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries into the view that

405

Nodhar Hammami, “The Nineteenth-Century American and British Female Public

Performer: A Cultural Study,” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 1, no. 3

(2016): 3, https://www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/article/view/48.

406

Karen Cuthbert, “Disability and Asexuality,” 374.

142

women (although still primarily identified by their female gender) were less carnal and lustful

than men.”

407

Cott attributes this shift away from the medieval idea of women as naturally lustful

to a number of factors, most prominently to the changing sphere of morality and religion in the

new world and the rise in the middle class. Women were seen as agents of moral reform, and

Cott suggests that women’s supposed piety was seen as useful for bringing men to Christianity.

This shift also provided women with a slightly greater degree of moral and intellectual

agency than prior eras had allowed. Cott starts her examination of this shift in the eighteenth

century, pointing out that “by elevating sexual control highest among human virtues the middle-

class moralists made female chastity the archetype for human morality.”

408

Through being

framed as moral agents, women could exert some control over their own sexuality, potentially

arguing for more control over their reproductive labor by refusing sexual access to their

husbands. Furthermore, as Cott points out, “the positive contribution of passionlessness was to

replace that sexual/carnal characterization of women with a spiritual/moral one, allowing women

to develop their human faculties and their self-esteem.”

409

In this way, women could enter into

public discourse, lending their newfound respect as moral agents to causes such as the suffrage

and temperance movements.

410

This construction led to the idea of spinsters (unmarried, single

women) as being respectable, even if their presumption of celibacy was assumed. While the

construction of women as desexualized, passionless moral characters became the ideal of

womanhood, sexuality did not simply disappear. Cott points out that while some women used

407

Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology,

1790-1850,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 2 (1978): 221,

ttps://www.jstor.org/stable/3173022, (original emphasis).

408

Cott, “Passionlessness,” 223.

409

Cott, “Passionlessness,” 223.

410

Kahan, Celibacies, 19

143

this ideology of passionlessness to stay single, most women of the time still got married and

became mothers. Heterosexuality, specifically procreative heterosexuality, while not yet named

as such, was still considered the norm and expectation for women.

411

This construction of women as pure and lacking sexual urges was not only tied to

femininity, but also to whiteness. Ianna Hawkins Owen points out that “whiteness marshals the

concept of asexuality-as-ideal to substantiate its claims to racial superiority as ‘fitness’ to

rule.”

412

In other words, sexual purity displayed a form of self-mastery that was assumed

inherent for white people, white women especially. Specifically, this “whiteness” described an

American-born Western European/Anglo-Saxon, since the Irish, Italians, and other

southern/eastern European immigrants were often coded as not-quite-white.

413

Further, in

constructing white women as desexualized and passionless, black women were not allowed such

a construction, since “a slave woman was imagined as unrapeable,” which meant that enslaved

black women were often forcibly used to take the place of the prudish wife’s lack of sexual

interest.

414

Black women were simultaneously hypersexualized and desexualized, often through

the use of controlling images used to police black women’s sexuality, which Patricia Hill Collins

411

Peter Coviello, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century

America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 3 and 8. Coviello uses the Oscar Wilde

trials as the event that invented the identities heterosexual and homosexual.

412

Owen, “On the Racialization of Asexuality,” 122.

413

For discussions on how various immigrant groups became to be interpellated as white,

see: James R. Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New

Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 3 (1997), 6,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27502194.

414

Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, (Durham, Duke University Press,

2018), 58.

144

explains comes in four forms: the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, and the jezebel.

415

Collins traces the history of these images from the time of enslavement, while also

demonstrating how they have carried over into the twenty-first century. This history of these

controlling images points to the ways that black women’s sexuality was not constructed along

the lines of purity and passionlessness but was rather constructed around how they were able to

serve whiteness. Owen argues that while the jezebel was the epitome of excessive hypersexuality

on the part of black women, the mammy was constructed as an asexual object, which can rather

be read as desexualized in service to her ability to mother white families.

416

The construction of women as passionless seemed narrowly focused to not simply white

women, but upper and middle-class domestic white women. This is especially important

considering the racial tensions of the post-Civil War era, occurring at a time when America was

still a relatively new nation. This national identity attempted to fuse Christian principles of

goodness and purity with whiteness, thus tapping into the idea of white fitness to rule. Racial

anxiety was high due to the fear of white racial decline.

417

By tying the ideal of chaste (here

meaning virginal) femininity to the institution of marriage, white supremacy could be upheld.

Compulsory sexuality was tied to a very American imperative to support whiteness and thus

gave way to eugenics.

415

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the

Politics of Empowerment, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 72-84.

416

Ianna Hawkins Owen, “Still, Nothing: Mammy and Black Asexual Possibility,”

Feminist Review 128 (2018): 74-75, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0140-9.

417

Barrett and Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples.” 9-10 and Andrew S. Wilson, “‘Jews Will

Not Replace Us!’: Antisemitism, Interbreeding, and Immigration in Historical Context,”

American Jewish History 105, no. 1/2 (2021) 2-4, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/804146.

145

While an in-depth history of eugenic thought is beyond the scope of this current project,

no history of American sexuality can ignore the influence of eugenics on compulsory sexuality

and race/gender construction. Daylanne K. English provides an excellent overview of eugenic

thinking, including the Malthusian idea of “moral restraint,” noting how these theories come to

the fore in early twentieth century America.

418

The idea of moral restraint has ties to the

construction of passionlessness and its inherent tie to whiteness. As the twentieth century began,

English notes how American eugenics arose as anxieties regarding immigration and white racial

decline. Eugenics writers sounded alarms that white people were being out-procreated by non-

white populations. Such a trend, they warned, would lead to the minoritization or dilution of

white populations and thus the decline of moral (i.e., white) national standards.

419

English is also

careful to note that eugenics existed in its historical context, and here was not only a racial aspect

of eugenics, but it also had a classist and ableist side.

420

At the turn of the century, as anxieties of

white racial decline began to rise, the idea of unmarried, upper-class women became less of an

ideal for women and more of a contested site, since in remaining unmarried, these women were

not fulfilling their expected role as child bearers and mothers. The rise in birth control methods

and family planning in the early twentieth century also plays a role in the anxieties surrounding

sexuality and motherhood.

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger campaigned for women to have access to the

knowledge and the means for family planning. In her 1917 Introduction to The Case for Birth

418

Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and

the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3.

419

Barrett and Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples.” 9-10 and Shannon L. Walsh, Eugenics and

Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Cham:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 8-9.

420

English, Unnatural Selections, 24.

146

Control, she declares, “no adult woman who is ignorant of the means to prevent conception can

call herself free. No woman can call herself free who cannot choose the time to be a mother or

not as she sees fit.”

421

While Sanger’s critics rightly point out her ties to negative eugenics, her

concern focused on lifting women out of poverty. Sanger’s campaign for birth control was born

out of seeing women in poverty having more children than they could afford. Although she

pioneered birth control for women’s bodily autonomy, she couched this in terms of the benefits

for the family overall. Wesley Buerkle notes that Sanger simultaneously argues “that birth

control will provide women with personal freedom and sexual liberation even as she articulates

contraception as women’s maternal obligation to themselves, their children, their husbands, and

their nation.”

422

Even Sanger, pioneer of birth control in the early twentieth century, still

articulates an obligation towards motherhood, specifically in the context of heterosexual

marriage. Thus, compulsory motherhood gets intertwined with compulsory sexuality.

The early twentieth century also saw the emergence of theories of sexuality and sexual

heath. Theorists such as Sigmund Freud put forth the notion that sex was a normal part of adult

life, and this proliferated in the period between the world wars.

423

Naomi Braun Rosenthal

remarks that “in this context, spinsterhood was increasingly seen as one of a number of abnormal

conditions that suggested a lack of mental balance or a flight from femininity.”

424

In other words,

by articulating sex (and the assumption of motherhood) as part of the “normal” impulses for

421

Margaret Sanger, The Case for Birth Control (Modern Art Printing Company, 1917),

422

Wesley C. Buerkle, “From Women’s Liberation to Their Obligation: The Tensions

Between Sexuality and Maternity in Early Birth Control Rhetoric,” Women and Language 31,

no. 1 (2009), 27, https://faculty.etsu.edu/buerkle/pubs/MS%20Lib%20Ob.pdf.

423

Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities, 116.

424

Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities, 117.

147

humans, a lack of interest in sex was increasingly seen as a sign of pathology. Margaret Sanger

also argued that celibacy as a form of birth control was too limiting for women, noting that it was

“the cause of many nervous complaints.”

425

This pathologization of celibacy and low sexual

desire further contributes to the way that compulsory sexuality was constructed.

Since eugenics was such a widespread belief system that English calls the “paradigmatic

modern American discourse,” it is necessary to begin with eugenics to demonstrate how

compulsory sexuality functioned in terms of nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

426

Furthermore, this view is complicated in light of the way that compulsory sexuality was

constructed to favor white, affluent, able-bodied heterosexuals. Eugenics did not merely

champion white procreativity but also urged (and oftentimes imposed) non-procreativity for

people who were nonwhite, disabled, or otherwise “undesirable.” The “Asexualization Act” of

1909, for instance, using the term “asexualization” here to mean sterilization, argued for

criminals and the mentally ill to be “asexualized” in California.

427

In 1927, the Supreme Court

case Buck vs. Bell, ruled that a mentally disabled woman, Carrie Buck, was deemed

“feebleminded” and was thus sterilized.

428

These laws were soon used to forcibly sterilize

numerous mentally and physically disabled people, people of color, indigenous people, and

criminals, with NPR reporting that over 70,000 Americans who were deemed somehow unfit

425

Sanger, The Case for Birth Control, 8.

426

English, Unnatural Selections, 2.

427

Jeremy Rosenberg, “When California Decided Who Could Have Children and Who

Could Not,” KCET, June 18, 2012, https://www.kcet.org/history-society/when-california-

decided-who-could-have-children-and-who-could-not. See also: Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical

Sterilization in the United States, (Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of

Chicago, 1922) for details regarding the legal terminology of these laws.

428

Adam Cohen, interview by Terry Gross, “The Supreme Court Ruling that Led to

70,000 Forced Sterilizations,” Fresh Air, National Public Radio, March 16, 2016.

148

were forcibly sterilized throughout the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-

first.

429

In discussing plays in early twentieth century America, the ubiquity of eugenics and the

pathology of low sexual interest in modern American thought cannot be ignored. Using an

asexual lens to view these two plays can illuminate how compulsory sexuality can be

weaponized as a tool for eugenic ideals that promote racism and ableism. Owen is keen to stress

that asexuality scholars must remain attuned to the ways that asexuality has been deployed in the

past, stating, “in addition to expanding beyond ‘born this way’, asexuality studies must hold

critical space for those who are ‘constructed this way’.”

430

In other words, asexuality has long

been interpellated as white and able bodied. Asexuality, through the process of desexualization,

has also long been assumed for certain racialized individuals as well as for individuals with

disabilities. Though separate from asexuality as a sexual orientation, the use of the term

“asexualization” in early legal discourse on forced sterilization demands attention from

asexuality scholars. This form of desexualization has reverberations into contemporary discourse

surrounding asexuality studies and its intersections with critical race theory and disability

studies. Of course, twentieth-century eugenic desexualization is not the same as twenty-first

century asexuality as a sexual orientation. However, the historical reality of eugenics needs to be

unpacked and recognized as part of the historical context in which passionlessness and

spinsterhood (in the particular case of these two plays) functioned.

429

Cohen, “The Supreme Court Ruling” and Sanjana Manjeshwar, “America’s Forgotten

History of Forced Sterilization,” Berkeley Political Review, November 4, 2020,

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/04/americas-forgotten-history-of-forced-sterilization/.

430

Owen, “Still, Nothing,” 77.

149

The two plays in question feature young women who are not only on the verge of

spinsterhood but are among those for whom lack of sexual desire or activity has been constructed

and imposed. Not only that, but these unmarried women are also considered failures at the end of

their respective plays, because they are not upholding the heterosexual ideal of creating the

nuclear family. By taking an asexual lens to Rachel and The Glass Menagerie, I examine how

these two women are constructed as tragic spinsters in a world that forces them into a life of

nonsexuality.

Rachel, Black Femininity, and Reproductive Justice

Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel centers on an African American woman coming of age

in the early twentieth century. The title character, Rachel, begins as a naïve and hopeful young

woman who slowly becomes aware of the racist structures that surround her through her

interactions with the young black children in her community. As the play’s central character,

Rachel becomes Grimké’s tool for uncovering how racism takes its toll on black women.

At the start of the play, Rachel is seen as joyous, full of love and life, and expressing an

enormous love for children. She cares for several children in her community, helping them dress

before school, and even acts as a mother to a small boy she helps raise. The Loving family is

presented as a respectable bourgeois family, headed by Mrs. Loving, a single, widowed mother.

Rachel herself is presented as a naïve but loving young woman, both sympathetic and intelligent.

With this characterization of Rachel, Grimké distances her title character from the stereotypical

depictions of a black woman as either mammy or a whore.

431

In countering these harmful

431

Anne Mai Yee Jansen, “Under Lynching's Shadow: Grimké's Call for Domestic

Reconfiguration in ‘Rachel,’” African American Review 47, no. 2/3 (2014): 394,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2458976.

150

stereotypes, Grimké attempts to speak to white audiences while also depicting a positive example

of a black family for black audiences.

432

At first, everything seems to be looking up for Rachel, until she encounters three stories

of racism that profoundly affect her and lead her to make the final decision at the end of the play

to forego marriage and motherhood, refusing the societal expectation for women at this time. In

the first act of the play, Rachel is seen interacting with a young boy, Jimmy, while her mother,

Mrs. Loving, becomes visibly distressed by the presence of Jimmy. By the end of the act, Mrs.

Loving tells Rachel and her brother Tom the devasting tale of how her husband and her

seventeen-year-old son were both lynched in the south by white churchgoers many years prior to

the events of the play. Hearing that story, Rachel begins to realize the terrible injustice that faces

African Americans. Rachel tells her mother, “Then, everywhere, everywhere, throughout the

South, there are hundreds of dark mothers who live in fear, terrible suffocating fear, whose rest

by night is broken, and whose joy by day in their babies on their hears is three parts – pain.”

433

is in this moment that she begins to doubt her relationship to the expectation of motherhood.

The lynching story is not meant to be mere background information about a supporting

character to flesh out the title character. Rather, this story is the decisive moment that casts a

shadow over the rest of the play. Grimké wrote this play during a time when lynching was

occurring with a horrific frequency and meant for it to serve as a vehicle to speak out against

lynching, with some considering Rachel to be the first play that kickstarted the antilynching

genre of theatre.

434

Rachel’s reaction to the lynching story is meant to demonstrate the

432

Jansen, “Under Lynching's Shadow,” 392.

433

Grimké, Rachel, Act 1, 28.

434

K. Allison Hammer, “‘Blood at the Root”: Cultural Abjection and Thwarted Desire in

the Lynching Plays and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké,” Frontiers: Journal of Women’s

Studies 42, no. 1 (2021): 28, https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2021.0005 and Kathy A. Perkins and

151

cumulative effects of racialized violence over multiple generations. This story has profound

effects on Rachel as the play continues.

Act Two begins four years later. Rachel has essentially adopted Jimmy and she also

frequently interacts with other young children in her building. She seems to be just as happy, if

not a little wearier then in the first act. This changes when Rachel meets Mrs. Lane and her

daughter Ethel who come to Rachel to inquire about the schools in her neighborhood,

specifically looking to find a new school for her daughter after the little girl’s mistreatment at her

previous school. From here, Mrs. Lane tells the of how her child was mistreated by the white

students and a white teacher at their school. At the end of her tale, Mrs. Lane despairs herself,

similarly questioning God and motherhood like Rachel did in Act One. She tells Rachel that she

would never have another child, swearing that “if I had another – I’d kill it. It’s kinder.”

435

Her

last piece of advice before leaving is to tell Rachel not to marry. Following right on the heels of

this encounter with Mrs. Lane, Jimmy enters and tells Rachel that the white children at school

called him racist names and threw stones at him. The injustice of the world finally hits home for

Rachel, and she falls into a deep depression.

Act Three begins about a week after Act Two, and Rachel’s character has changed. She is

no longer the naïve and lighthearted character from Act One. Her outlook has shifted so much

that she refuses her suitor, John Strong, when he asks her to marry him. Her refusal of marriage

comes at the culmination of a life affected by racial oppression. Rachel says, “We are all

blighted; we are all accursed – all of us –, everywhere, we whose skins are dark – our lives

Judith L. Stephens, “Angelina Weld Grimké,” in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American

Women, ed. Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Bloomington : Indiana University Press,

1998), 24.

435

Grimké, Rachel, Act 2, 58.

152

blasted by the white man’s prejudice.”

436

In this moment, Rachel makes the decision to refuse

motherhood in an act of defiance against social expectations and to protect herself from despair.

Her journey through the play, in bearing witness to the suffering of children,

demonstrates the devastating affects racism has on black women. As a young woman,

motherhood is expected of her, but Rachel, seeing the trap black women fall into having to watch

violence inflicted on their children, refuses to bring children into the world. This refusal becomes

a radical act of defiance against a racist system with a history of using black women specifically

to “breed” black children to propagate the system of slavery. Rachel rejects this legacy and

refuses to participate in the imperative of reproduction. She tells John that her unborn children

visit her in her dreams, “and beg me – weeping – not to – bring them here – to suffer.”

437

The

play ends with the sound of weeping in a blackout.

Joyce Meier suggests that black women such as Rachel realize “their powerlessness as

mothers when through the examples of a relative or a family friend or even a casual

acquaintance, they are forced to witness the murder or pain of a young black person.”

438

In other

words, Meier underlines the intersectional nature of Rachel’s oppression, doubly felt not only as

a black person, but also as a black woman seeking motherhood. William Storm observes a

similar aspect of Rachel’s status as a multiply oppressed person. He states, “Grimké’s drama, at

its most potent, is located in the psychological effects of racism upon the development of a single

personality, from early childhood to barren womanhood, and in the impossible circumstances in

436

Grimké, Rachel, Act 3, 76.

437

Grimké, Rachel, Act 3, 77.

438

Joyce Meier, “The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Theater,”

Melus 25, no. 3/4 (2000): 118, https://www.jstor.org/stable/468239, (original emphasis).

153

which this character must inevitably find herself at the end of her fated journey.”

439

In the end of

this journey, she refuses motherhood, seeing no other way to combat her oppression.

While the play functions primarily as an antilynching drama, it also promotes

reproductive justice, which refers to the right to choose when one has children and is most often

seen through the lens of abortion rights and access to birth control. Rachel’s refusal of

motherhood has been compared to both birth control and abortion by several scholars.

440

Lourdes

Arciniega states that Rachel “aborts the possibility of parenthood by using self-denial as a form

of birth control.”

441

Thus, Rachel’s commitment to non-procreation can be interpreted as a form

of reproductive justice.

Further, reproductive justice is not merely limited to preventing or ending pregnancy; it

also accommodates the women who feel unsafe having their own children, including when

women either refuse to have children through celibacy or through voluntary self-sterilization.

442

439

William Storm, “Reactions of a “Highly-Strung Girl’: Psychology and Dramatic

Representation in Angelina W. Grimké’s Rachel,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (1993):

470, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3041935.

440

Elizabeth Brown Guillory, “Disrupted Motherlines: Mothers and Daughters in a

Genderized, Sexualized, and Racialized World,” in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter

Relationships in 20th Century Literature, ed. Elizabeth Brown Guillory (Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1996), 193 and Helene Keyssar, “Rites and Responsibilities: The Drama of Black

American Women,” in Feminine Focus: The New American Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 228.

441

Lourdes Arciniega, “Fixating on and Fixing the African American Woman’s

Representation of Self in Modern Periodicals,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 44,

no. 2 (2017): 238, https://doi.org/10.1353/crc.2017.0020.

442

Leandra Hinojosa Hernández and Sarah De Los Santos Upton, “Intersections of

Culture, Gender, Religion, and Politics: Problematizing the Notion of Choice in Reproductive

Feminicides in Latin America,” in Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in

the Américas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights (Lanham: Rowman and

Littlefield Publishing Group, 2018), 73. While this book focuses on and interrogates the rhetoric

of “choice” in Latin American countries where women are undergoing forced sterilization in the

face of extreme gendered violence, the issues regarding reproductive justice are still applicable

here.

154

Since the anti-lynching short story that was the precursor to Rachel, titled The Closing Door,

appeared in Margaret Sanger’s The Birth Control Review, Grimké was clearly dedicated to

exploring reproductive justice in terms of racial justice in the early twentieth century.

443

Her ties

to Sanger demonstrate that even though Grimké was championing reproductive justice, it should

still be remembered that there is some uncomfortable overlap between reproductive justice

movements and eugenics. Furthermore, the original title of this play, Blessed are the Barren,

highlights Rachel’s commitment to anti-natalism even more stringently.

444

Her construction of

barrenness as both a blessing and a terrible fate can be read as a bit ableist, especially to those

who are lack the ability or desire to have children. With the dramaturgical choice to end the play

with the sound weeping in the darkness, audiences are left with viewing the choice, or by

extension, the inability to have children as a tragedy. While Grimké seems to frame Rachel as a

victim acting out of a sense of powerlessness, Rachel could alternatively be seen as attempting to

wrench power back from an unjust system.

In considering Rachel’s decision as a form of reproductive justice for herself and her

future unborn children, Rachel’s anti-natalism becomes an intentional decision that comes in the

form of nonsexuality. Anne Mai Yee Jansen argues “her refusal of marriage represents not

passive compliance with white society's dominance, but instead active resistance to it.”

445

Her

decision to remain unmarried and childless butts up against the dominant discourses of her time

regarding women’s proper place within the system of compulsory sexuality. By actively

443

Arciniega, “Fixating on and Fixing,” 232.

444

Storm, “Reactions of a “Highly-Strung Girl,’” 468.

445

Jansen, “Under Lynching's Shadow,” 399.

155

choosing a nonsexual life, Rachel desexualizes herself to resist the racist systems that constrict

the flourishing of the black family.

Rachel Nolan focuses on a particular production of Rachel: the inaugural performance in

March 1916 that was sponsored by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and

held at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, DC.

446

Nolan’s

analysis focuses on this premiere and on the audience who were mainly upwardly mobile and

unmarried black women educators. However, Nolan argues that in staging Rachel at this school

where most of the teachers were unmarried professional women, it “acknowledges the vaunted

promise of bourgeois class formation – and then dashes it.”

447

In a way, Rachel and its

production at the Miner school demonstrate that marriage and a nuclear family may be a pipe

dream for young, upwardly mobile black women. Pushing this idea further, Rachel also suggests

that not only is motherhood doomed to failure, but it is also immoral to enter into it in such a

thoroughly racist society.

This production is important because it speaks to the lived reality of single black women

at the turn of the century, especially as Grimké herself remained unmarried. K. Allison Hammer

uses a queer lens to analyze Rachel in light of Grimké’s supposed lesbian status, reading the play

alongside Grimké’s erotic poetry.

448

Hammer also notes that lynching is not an incidental aspect

of the play, but that Grimké deliberately spoke of lynching to demonstrate how it was used to

police the sexuality of black people.

449

Hammer further states that “the sexual economy of

446

Rachel Nolan, “Uplift, Radicalism, and Performance: Angelina Weld Grimké’s

Rachel at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers

35, 1 (2018): 1-2, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/696338.

447

Nolan, “Uplift, Radicalism, and Performance,” 6.

448

Hammer, “‘Blood at the Root,” 32.

449

Hammer, “‘Blood at the Root,” 34.

156

lynching reveals the multiple ways in which a Black lesbian had no access to ‘normativity’— to

having children or family or a relation to sexuality whatever. Lynching became the ultimate

symbol of this closed circle of sexual relationships.”

450

In other words, existing outside of the

white heteropatriarchy was dangerous for anyone, and even more so for a black lesbian. For

Grimké, her only option was to refuse to participate in the sexual economy that saw black men

lynched and black women used as “breeders” and otherwise hypersexualized through the

imagery of the jezebel or desexualized through the image of the mammy.

451

Thus, Rachel refuses

to participate in adult sexuality, a choice that Hammer argues allows for Grimké to express “the

impossibility of domestic life for queer people at this time.”

452

This impossibility was compounded by the intersection of race and sexuality. As noted

previously, eugenics was a driving ideology of the early twentieth century, but it was not only

built upon white supremacy. Daylanne K. English points out that several leaders of the black

community, such as W.E.B. DuBois, were also proponents of a positive eugenics that promoted

racial uplift through selective breeding.

453

In fact, Rachel had been criticized for going against

this ideal, and with some accusing Grimké of promoting race suicide.

454

In her response to these

critics, Grimké stated that she hoped that her play would have an effect on white mothers in

particular as her primary audience, so that they could understand the effects that racism would

have on “the souls of the colored mothers everywhere, and upon the mothers that are to be” and

450

Hammer, “‘Blood at the Root,” 35.

451

Owen, “Still, Nothing,” 74.

452

Hammer, “‘Blood at the Root,” 41.

453

English, Unnatural Selections, 16.

454

Perkins and Stephens, “Angelina Weld Grimké,” 23.

157

would thus help evoke change.

455

Grimké was tapping into the commonality of shared

motherhood in order to speak to white audiences, and yet, she was also critiquing the eugenic

agenda of the nuclear family. English observes that Grimké and other African American women

writers of the early twentieth century were protesting not only interracial violence, but also “a

specifically modern intraracial and gendered oppression – that is, African American ideologies

of uplift that emphasized black women’s domestic and reproductive value.”

456

In other words,

Rachel is not only a critique of lynching, but also of the compulsory sexuality that equates

women automatically with motherhood. Rachel’s refusal of motherhood is thus a rejection of the

role of a breeder.

457

While Rachel’s refusal has been coded as a queer resistance, an asexual reading is still

compatible as a form of queer resistance, especially since asexuality has been coded as queer.

Additionally, the refusal to participate in a bourgeois heterosexual economy is relevant to the

lives of asexual individuals as well. Furthermore, an asexual reading is more in line with the play

itself, since Rachel does not express any desire at all, not for another woman, and not even for

John Strong, her suitor. Rachel is thus shown to have a marked lack of sexual desire. While she

does show some romantic tendencies towards her suitor, that does not negate an asexual

interpretation of her character. Asexual people can and often do desire romance and pair

bonding. Asexual people also often desire children and family. In the play, Rachel only

demonstrates a clear and pressing desire for motherhood which she eschews in a radical act of

455

Perkins and Stephens, “Angelina Weld Grimké,” 23 and Angelina Weld Grimké,

“‘Rachel’ The Play of the Month: The Reason and Symposis by the Author.” The Competitor 1,

no. 1 (1920): 52.

456

English, Unnatural Selections, 122.

457

Hammer, “‘Blood at the Root,” 35.

158

reproductive justice. Her nonsexuality then contains a powerful anti-racist choice to opt out of

various and interlocking systems of oppression.

White Femininity and Disability in The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is a semi-autobiographical play and also one

of his most famous works. Williams portrays the character of Laura Wingfield, the waifish sister

of the main character Tom. Laura is known to be based on Williams’ sister Rose, who underwent

a lobotomy as a young woman and was subsequently institutionalized.

458

While much of the

focus and scholarship of the play falls on Tom and his latent queerness, the character of Laura

has also been given significant attention from scholars and critics.

459

Recently, Laura has been

examined from scholars in disability studies, as well as some scholars noting her potential

queerness as well as Tom’s.

460

Branching off of the work done by disability and queer scholars, I

am interested in the intersection of asexuality and disability, especially in light of the history of

eugenics, which in the late 1940s (after the revelation of Germany’s genocidal regime) began to

acquire an immoral connotation..

461

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, narrated by Tom Wingfield, who tells the story

of his life with his mother and sister, Laura. The majority of the plot centers on the mother’s

458

Delma E. Presley, The Glass Menagerie: An American Memory (Boston: Twayne

Publishers, 1990), x-xi.

459

Michael F. Paller, Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-

twentieth Century Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 38.

460

Alicia Andrzejewski, “Blue Roses and Other Queer Energies in Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie,” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 16 (2017): 37,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/48615576 and Ann M. Fox, ““But, Mother – I’m – crippled!’:

Tennessee Williams, Queering Disability, and Dis/Membered Bodies in Performance,” in

Gendering Disability, ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchinson (New Brunswick, Rutgers

University Press, 2004), 234.

461

English, Unnatural Selections, 177.

159

quest to find her daughter a husband. Laura is described in the stage directions as being fragile

with a slight limp or suggested disability, while their mother, Amanda, is described as having a

sort of paranoid vitality. From the very first scene, while Tom is positioned as the narrator with

the first and last lines of the play, Amanda is the driving force. Her entire purpose for being

seems to be centered around finding a suitable husband for her daughter. Not very long in the

first scene, Amanda tells her daughter keep herself “fresh and pretty for the gentlemen callers,”

and alluding to her own girlhood with seventeen men coming to call on her.

462

As Amanda

recalls her many young beaus, Laura finally mentions that she doesn’t think that she’ll be

receiving any gentlemen callers that day and says “Mother’s afraid that I’m going to be an old

maid.”

463

Even in the first scene, Laura’s status as an unmarried woman is set up, almost to the

point that its conclusion seems inevitable. While the term “old maid” is often seen as

synonymous to “spinster,” Rosenthal notes that it is usually a “considerably less-neutral

appellation” for an unmarried woman, especially one that was past the usual age for marriage.

464

In the very next scene, this fear is brought to light when Amanda discovers that Laura has

been failing to attend typing school and lying to her mother about where she goes all day for

several months. The ensuing confrontation has Amanda worrying for Laura’s future. She tells

Laura, “I know so well what happens to unmarried women who aren’t prepared to occupy a

position in life. I’ve seen such pitiful cases in the South – barely tolerated spinsters… little

birdlike women – without any nest – eating the crust of humility all their lives!”

465

While this

statement from Amanda is usually played as the paranoid mother desperately seeking a husband

462

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act I, scene 1, 13.

463

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act I, scene 1, 15.

464

Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities, 10.

465

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act I, scene 2, 18.

160

for her daughter, there is also a glimpse of a material reality at work here. As noted by Trisha

Franzen, opportunities for unmarried women were few and far between.

466

Amanda’s worry for

Laura’s future is a very real and very present fact of their lives, especially considering the

constant talk of money throughout the play, and the very real problem of the lights being turned

off in the very end of the play. Amanda’s concern is not merely about policing Laura’s sexuality,

nor is it about a desire for grandchildren; it is solely about her fear of her daughter becoming

destitute.

She eventually asks Laura if she’d ever liked a boy, and Laura answers that she did, once.

Laura the mentions Jim, a young man from high school who nicknamed her “Blue Roses” when

he misheard her say “pleurosis.”

467

Laura here merely mentions her high school crush, and while

this might seem to negate reading Laura through an asexual lens, asexuality does not

automatically equate to aromanticism. Asexual people are able to have romantic crushes, and the

implication here is that Laura may have simply viewed him as a friend who treated her kindly.

Amanda dismisses Laura’s crush and confidently proclaims that she’ll end up married,

while Laura exclaims “But, Mother… I’m – crippled!”

468

The scene ends with Amanda loudly

telling her not to use the word “crippled” and arguing that Laura merely has a slight defect or

disadvantage. This dismissal of Laura’s disability here is important for several reasons. First, it is

deeply ableist for her to suggest that Laura’s disability is a defect that she needs to somehow

make up for. Secondly, Amanda blatantly ignores Laura’s lived reality in favor of a fantasy born

out of the system of compulsory sexuality that insists that Laura marry. In positioning the desire

466

Trisha Franzen, Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Womanhood in the United States

(New York: New York University Press, 1996), 7-8.

467

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act I, scene 2, 19.

468

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act I, scene 2, 19.

161

to be married as more important that engaging in Laura’s existence as a disabled person, Laura’s

disability comes to define her as unmarriable. Here again is the subtle foreshadowing that Laura

will only ever end up unmarried, and that Amanda’s dismissal of her disability and insistence

that she cultivate charm to make up for it is nothing more than a fantasy. Third, due to this

implicit foreshadowing, Laura is desexualized due to her disability. Scholars in the field of

disability studies have noted the assumption of asexuality that is ascribed to people with

disabilities.

469

The construction of disabled people as asexual has been especially critiqued by

scholars who study the overlap between queer theory and disability studies. Ann M. Fox, for

instance, explores how this is read in the work of Tennessee Williams and argues that “both

queer and disabled bodies, seen as violations of natural masculinity and femininity, defy a

heterosexist ideal of sexuality and its attendant gender roles, although while the queer body is

read as deviant, the disabled body is rendered completely asexual.”

470

While this critique is valid,

it also pathologizes asexuality and connotes it as abnormal.

Asexuality scholars have recently begun problematizing this specific pathologization of

asexuality. As noted earlier in this chapter, many scholars have begun referring to the process by

which disabled people are constructed as asexual as a process of “desexualization,” thus marking

this as distinct from asexuality as an identity.

471

This is an important distinction to make, since

there is a convergence of people who are both asexual and disabled whose experiences deserve

469

Godfrey Kangaude, “Disability, the Stigma of Asexuality and Sexual Health: A

Sexual Rights Perspective,” Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 5, no. 4

(2009): 7, https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/188.

470

Fox, ““But, Mother – I’m – crippled!,’” 235.

471

Kim, “Asexuality in Disability Narratives,” 482-483.

162

attention.

472

This distinction holds true for those with both physical disabilities as well as for

those with mental disabilities or who are neurodivergent.

Laura Wingfield is considered an “iconic figure of disability, the essence of isolation,

virginity, and martyrdom.”

473

This construction of Laura speaks to the desexualization of

disabled characters, especially considering how she is portrayed as innocent and foreshadowed to

remain tragically unmarried. In fact, given that the character is filtered through her brother’s

narration, the audience knows little about Laura’s desires. She briefly mentions a high school

crush, but nothing further regarding romantic or sexual attraction. Neither her sexuality nor even

her desires are overtly mentioned. She is described as shy, but her shyness could easily be

interpreted as disinterest. However, the societal pressure of a heterosexual union is still placed

heavily upon Laura and Amanda. While Amanda may have unrealistic fantasies about Laura’s

marriageable prospects, beneath these fantasies are real, socio-economic pressures to find a

male-breadwinner for Laura’s survival and her own. It is likely that Amanda cannot imagine a

life for Laura where she can find material self-sufficiency without a husband. Not only does

Laura have a limp in an ableist society, but her social anxiety has also rendered her as lacking the

marketable skills necessary to hold down a job. In a way, the play frames Laura’s anxiety is just

as crippling as her limp.

This reading has been taken even further by Clay Morton who contends that Laura could

be read as a neurodivergent heroine.

474

Morton starts with the case of Rose Williams, arguing

472

Kim, “Asexuality in Disability Narratives.” 482.

473

Mohd Sajid Ansari, “From Subject to Object: Traumatic Staging of the Disabled Body

in The Glass Menagerie and Night Mother,” The Criterion: An International Journal in English

8, no. II (2017): 682, https://www.the-criterion.com/V8/n2/AM14.pdf.

474

Clay Morton, “Not Like All the Other Horses: Neurodiversity and Rose Williams,”

The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 13 (2021), 10, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45344159.

163

that if she was alive today, she would have likely been given an autism diagnosis.

475

This

hypothesis adds an interesting take on the character of Laura, especially considering the

desexualization that sometimes occurs with autistic and other neurodivergent people, same as

with disabled individuals. Melanie Yergeau claims the process of desexualization often assigned

to autistic people, describing a moment after confessing a possible asexual identity, they were

met with concern that they were playing into autistic stereotypes. They state, “Seemingly, my

neuroqueer disclosure had been read as an identification with desexualization, with perpetual

childhood.”

476

Laura is similarly seen as embodying a perpetual childhood, most notably

demonstrated in her inability to find a stable job and her consistent interest in her glass

menagerie. Still, her sexuality or desire is never overtly mentioned; she is instead subject to the

desire of her mother to secure a husband.

Despite Laura’s seeming uninterest in the endeavor, eventually Amanda wangles Tom

into bringing over a coworker of his to meet Laura. Act two takes place entirely on the night of

the gentleman caller’s arrival. Amanda has redecorated their entire apartment in preparation for

the visit, attempting to make their home look more impressive for the young man. Amanda

suggests that Laura wear pads in her bra, an act of hypersexualization that Laura promptly

refuses. When Laura gets wind that the young man visiting is her old high school crush, Jim,

Laura refuses to attend dinner. Amanda asks her if she was in love with the boy, but Laura denies

this, saying: “I don’t know, Mother. All I know is that I couldn’t sit at the table if it was him.”

477

475

Morton, “Not Like All the Other Horses,” 3.

476

Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness,

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) 192.

477

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act II, scene 7, 45.

164

Once Jim arrives, there are several aborted attempts to get Laura to join them, but Laura instead

rests in the living room while the other three eat.

When the power is suddenly turned off due to Tom neglecting to pay the bill, Jim and

Laura are finally left alone to converse by candlelight. The ensuing conversation between Laura

and Jim is awkward and stilted at first. Soon, it turns into a friendly conversation as they both

reminisce about high school. Laura mentions her self-consciousness at the obviousness of her

disability, while Jim insists that her physical disability is not noticeable. He tries to get her to feel

confident in herself, even engaging in her interests, such as the eponymous glass menagerie.

Eventually he asks her to dance, and as they do, he knocks over the glass unicorn (which is

hinted at is Laura’s favorite) and breaks its horn off. Laura dismisses his apology, stating that the

unicorn will now be less freakish without its horn and will fit in with the other horses.

Towards the end of the evening, Jim kisses Laura on impulse, after which he apologizes

and reveals that he is already engaged to another girl. He briefly speaks about how much his love

for his fiancée has changed him, offering up a typical amatonormative ideal that is often seen in

romantic stories. In her final act of the play, Laura gives Jim the unicorn, as a souvenir. Once Jim

leaves, and Amanda realizes that this was a failed opportunity to set up Laura and Jim

romantically, she despairs and blames Tom for the whole evening going wrong. Laura only has

two more miniscule lines for the rest of the play, suggesting that her story has ended with this

one failure to achieve a romantic relationship. The play ends with a monologue from Tom, who

mentions that he left both women that night, and yet he still remembers Laura, and apologizes to

her. The audience never finds out what becomes of Laura, but the implication is that she remains

unmarried. Tom’s departure is seen as a half-tragic/half-heroic act of self-making, yet he leaves

Amanda and Laura financially destitute. Since the play is filtered through his eyes and through

165

his memory, the audience is left assuming that Laura lived out her days unmarried, penniless,

and unhappy.

In playing into the idea of Laura as an icon of virginity and martyrdom, her character is

exemplifying the equation of white femininity with passionlessness that came to the fore in the

nineteenth century. Laura then represents the double bind of compulsory sexuality: on the one

hand, she conforms to the fragile and virginal aspect of white femininity, but on the other hand,

her fragility and virginity are a tragic inevitability due to her disability. Laura is both exhibiting

the proper purity and passionlessness expected of a young white woman, but her disability

renders her undesirable, so that her purity and passionlessness become forced upon her through

desexualization.

Laura is thus articulated as a failed heterosexual likely because of her disability. In this

way, her failure to become a proper wife and mother further demonstrates the process of

desexualization that occurs for disabled individuals. Laura is upholding the system of

compulsory sexuality in that her existence as a disabled person renders her undesirable as both a

potential sexual partner but ultimately as a wife and mother. Even though Jim tries to get her to

have a better self-image, he still refers to her as being different. He tells her that “being different

is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people aren’t such wonderful people… They’re as

common as – weeds, but – you, well you’re – Blue Roses!”

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Jim brings this reference to his old

nickname back here, to explain to Laura that her difference, as a shy disabled woman, is part of

what makes her unique.

The unusual naming of “Blue Roses” can and has been read through the lens of a queer

aesthetic. Alicia Andrzejewski reads this as “her choice to claim irrational forms of naming, and

478

Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act II, scene 8, 63, (original emphasis).

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in so doing, to step outside the heteronormative aesthetics that fails her and into a queer one.”

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In other words, Laura refuses to conform to a version of femininity that would uphold

heteronormative ideals of marriage and motherhood. By identifying as “Blue Roses,” Laura, and

implicitly, her disability, are cast as outside of the natural world.

This rendering Laura as unnatural speaks to the legacy of eugenics even into the mid-

twentieth century. While Laura’s disability is meant to be subtle in the play, and while her

disability is never mentioned as the reason why she is not able to secure a husband for herself,

there are traces of eugenic thinking with how she is framed. Alan Santinele Martino points to a

more subtle form of eugenics that has reverberations today, termed neo-eugenics or “newgenics”

by scholars and activists, and can be seen in such practices as “forms of prenatal testing,

selective abortion and a lack of social policies that support disabled parents and disabled people

who choose to get married.”

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What this “newgenics” points to is the tacit ways that disabled

people’s sexuality and reproductive choices can be and often are undermined. In Laura’s case,

she is desexualized from the very beginning, with her singleness foreshadowed as an unfortunate

consequence of her disability.

Furthermore, presenting disabled characters as desexualized subtly suggests that even

someone as “pretty… in a different way from everyone else,” is still unfit for marriage and

motherhood.

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This point is challenged in the 2017 production of The Glass Menagerie which

featured Madison Ferris as the first wheelchair user to perform in a lead role on a Broadway

479

Andrzejewski, “Blue Roses and Other Queer Energies,” 43.

480

Alan Santinele Martino and Margaret Campbell, “Exercising Intimate Citizenship

Rights and (Re)Constructing Sexualities: The New Place of Sexuality in Disability Activism,” in

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism, ed. Maria Berghs, Tsitsi Chataika, Yahya El-

Lahib, Kudakwashe Dube (London: Routledge, 2019), 100.

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Williams, The Glass Menagerie, Act II, scene 8, 63.

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stage.

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In making Laura’s physical disability overt as opposed to a slight limp, this production

both highlights and challenges the assumption of Laura’s frailty. Yet this production also turns

Laura’s disability entirely physical and into a matter of mobility, seemingly ignoring her

neurodivergent status.

Ultimately, the play desexualizes Laura because she exists in an “undesirable” body.

Throughout the play, she is unable to perform as expected, so it comes as no surprise that she

ends the play unmarried. Interpreting Laura as asexual highlights the ways that disabled people

(either physically or neurodivergent) are often desexualized to the point of being infantilized. An

asexual reading also allows for a way to read her position as one that is more than just a tragic

spinster who ends the play alone and tragically unmarried. It further lays bare the system of

compulsory sexuality that made singlehood societally and financially bleak for many women.

Laura is “Blue Roses,” someone who does not quite fit inside the system of compulsory

sexuality.

The Cruel Optimism of Compulsory (Hetero)sexuality

Both Rachel and Laura demonstrate how compulsory sexuality selects and polices who

has access to sexuality. In Rachel, the title character makes a choice that forces her into a

nonsexual life, desexualizing herself in protest of the racialized violence she sees around her

every day. In The Glass Menagerie, Laura is remembered as an already desexualized character

whose nonsexual life is inevitable. These women’s subsequent spinsterhood is seen as a tragedy

of life’s circumstances, due to racism on the one hand and ableism on the other. Their

commonality engages in the different aspects of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth

482

Seth McBride, “New Production of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Stars Wheelchair User

Madison Ferris,” New Mobility, March 9, 2017, https://newmobility.com/glass-menagerie-

madison-ferris/.

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century and how that helped shaped how America viewed the heterosexual couple and the

nuclear family unit as the ideal social structure.

While both plays construct Rachel and Laura as tragic spinsters, I do not mean to suggest

that Grimké and Williams engaged in this construction without criticism. Considering that both

playwrights were possibly queer, their commitment to upholding the system of compulsory

sexuality, which so often resembles compulsory heterosexuality, is tenuous at best. Instead, I

would argue that both playwrights criticize this very system, though perhaps not with an eye

towards asexuality. An asexual lens explores how these characters are disidentifying with not

only heterosexuality, but compulsory sexuality. Hammer analyzes The Glass Menagerie using

Lauren Berlant’s idea of “cruel optimism” and explores how the play can be read “as actively

resisting heteronormative narratives of the good life.”

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Branching off of this interpretation, I

read both The Glass Menagerie and Rachel as resisting the heteronormative narrative that

promises marriage and the resulting nuclear family to be the primary achievement of a good life.

Lauren Berlant defines cruel optimism as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to

a significantly problematic object,” with that object being not merely physical, but also an

idea.

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Arguably, the promise of marriage and children that is set down in the modern era as the

pinnacle of happiness could be viewed as this problematic object. In other words, the system of

compulsory (hetero)sexuality promises the cruel optimism that everyone will find joy and

fulfillment though heterosexual marriage and procreation.

This cruel optimism of compulsory (hetero)sexuality is that it is a fantasy that is only

accessible to certain individuals, specifically white, able-bodied cisgender heterosexual people.

483

Andrzejewski, “Blue Roses and Other Queer Energies,” 37.

484

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 24.

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This is part of the cruelty of the compulsory sexuality: the “good life” is only accessible to

certain people. The eugenic thought that permeated much of American society in the modern era

(and still continues now) exposes cruel optimism of compulsory (hetero)sexuality. While the

myth of the American dream of financial stability and a nuclear family is baked into the zeitgeist

of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the reality of eugenics suggests that this option

is only suitable for certain bodies. Compulsory sexuality thus policies who has access to this

good life through various tactics, such as desexualizing disabled people, such as Laura, or

creating the unsafe environment for black women, such as Rachel, to bring children into the

world.

Of course, the system of compulsory sexuality works on everyone, not just black and

white individuals. This system also functions to police the sexuality of other racialized

individuals, such as hypersexualizing Latina women and desexualizing Asian men. This can also

extend to fetishizing and/or desexualizing disabled people as well as desexualizing neurodiverse

people.

I chose these two characters because they exist outside of the typical construction of an

asexual individual (that of a white, able-bodied, cisgender male), while also existing at the

intersection of race and disability. Situating these two characters as potentially being asexual

allows for a broader reading that can fully interrogate how compulsory sexuality in twentieth and

into twenty-first century America is constructed not just in terms of gender and sexuality, but

also in terms of race, able-bodiedness, and disability.

Part of the reason why an asexual reading is so difficult is because until the twenty-first

century, asexuality has been neglected as a sexual orientation in its own right. As previously

noted, the shifting conception of those who remained unmarried, particularly spinsters, rendered

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marriage as the pinnacle of happiness. As homosexuality was first named as a deviant or

perverse sexuality, heterosexual couple was constructed as the norm.

485

From there, the existence

of spinsters and happily unmarried women shifted into a controlling image that sought to justify

the system of compulsory (hetero)sexuality.

Especially considering the change in perception of unmarried women, compulsory

(hetero)sexuality sought to erase any opposition to heterosexual marriage during the twentieth

century. While queer theorists have long since questioned the heterosexist assumptions that

underpin compulsory heterosexuality, I am interested in looking one layer deeper and

questioning the assumption of sexual normativity at all. In particular, spinsters have long been

assumed to be potential lesbians that resist compulsory heterosexuality. Many spinsters did live

with other women or hold secret desires for other women during the late nineteenth and into the

mid-twentieth century. However, automatically equating spinsterhood with lesbianism erases and

neglects the existence of asexual individuals.

The neglecting of asexuality can arguably be traced to both the shifting image of the

spinster and the sexual revolution in the mid-twentieth century. As sex began to be touted as a

normal and required human function, sexuality began to be something that all normal humans

had and could speak about.

486

A further change saw the decoupling of sex with procreation and

marriage, allowing women to be sexual/romantic without having children or have material self-

sufficiency without a husband. As the century wore on, a lack of sex or expressions of sex

became tied up with repression, specifically in terms of women’s sexuality. Rosenthal observes

how the spinster was “increasingly depicted as a consequence of repression or a flight from

485

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 43 and 45.

486

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 18.

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femininity – in either case, a problem of psychosexual development.”

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In other words, the

increasing discourse about sex and sexuality, gave way to the erasure of nonsexuality and/or

celibacy as a viable option for people. Rosenthal even brings up her contemporary students’

attitudes towards spinsters, and notes that “young women of my past have recoiled from what

was assumed to be a specter of lifelong abstinence; today [2002] they reject the very possibility

of its existence.”

488

In other words, as the spinster’s image has shifted, so too has the idea of

asexuality being a possibility, which has led to its erasure and neglect from theories of sexuality.

Asexuality, if not erased as being unimaginable, is additionally sometimes considered

immature or repressed. Megan Milks marks this alignment and assumption of asexuality as

inherently repressive, stunted, or immature, viewing asexual identifying people as “not-yet-

human but also not-yet-liberated.”

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She cites Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, which assumes

that sex, which was once free, has become oppressed by society, and that the only way for people

to become free again is to free sex and seek truth in sexual identity.

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Foucault however cast

doubts upon this process and instead revealed that sexuality is produced by how we talk about

and think about sex, noting the necessity to “abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial

societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression.”

491

For Foucault, the push against

repression does not automatically equate to liberation. Milks then, echoes this frustration with

the ways in which this idea of sex and liberation being tied together still pervades theories of

sexuality.

487

Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities, 147.

488

Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities, 5.

489

Milks, “Stunted Growth,” 107.

490

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 23.

491

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 49.

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Benjamin Kahan notes a similar trend in discussions of sexuality and nonsexuality and

puts forth what he calls the “expressive hypothesis” which “posits that the regimes of censorship

(the closet, antipornography feminists, etc.) create not only a proliferation of sexual discourse (as

Foucault’s discussion of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ suggests) but also a proliferation of

perceived sexual expression.”

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In other words, instead of sexuality being repressed, sexuality

became something that needed to be expressed specifically to demonstrate that it was not being

repressed. In a way, this creates a feedback loop where the push to deny repression ends up

laying the groundwork for more repression. Kahan states that “the well-intentioned effort to

make certain that nonnormative identities, desires, and pleasures are not suppressed has the

unintentional result of canalizing sexuality into forms of sex that aspire to normative sexual

acts.”

493

So instead of repressing sexuality, Kahan suggests that there was an outpouring of

expressions of sexuality, with the goal to make sure that marginalized sexualities were not

censored or policed. In doing this, expressing, or more particularly performing, one’s sexuality

became the imperative, and thus left any notion of an absence of sexuality to be equated

automatically with repression and censorship, further demonstrating the reach of compulsory

sexuality.

The desire to perform sexuality was not necessarily a ploy to erase asexuality, but rather

it likely happened unintentionally. As the twentieth century wore on, the need to remove

sexuality from censorship became tied to sexual liberation, especially with the sexual revolution

of the sixties and the second wave women’s movement. From there, into the late twentieth

century, the AIDS epidemic became a flash point of sexual expression, since for many AIDS

492

Kahan, Celibacies, 5.

493

Kahan, Celibacies, 146.

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activists, silence surrounding sex literally meant death. Around the same time, conservative

groups were fighting to ban or censor pornography and other so-called “obscene” works of art,

mostly from queer artists, creating moral panics. Joining in on the fight against pornography

were the anti-porn feminists who considered pornography to be bound up with gendered violence

and oppression. This linking with conservative movements prompted the response from pro-sex

feminists and queer activists to link sex with empowerment and liberation. From there, a host of

feminist and queer theorists championed the sex-positivity movement. Feminism and queer

theory thus became tied to the idea of sex as being liberatory since to suggest otherwise would be

to give up hard-won ground in the fight against censorship. In the midst of these concerns, it is

no wonder that the idea of opting out of sex was considered a step backward. Simply put, the

legacy of compulsory sexuality has reverberations to how sexuality was understood throughout

the twentieth century and to how asexuality was neglected until now.

To return to Rachel and The Glass Menagerie, these two plays speak to the way that our

contemporary understanding of compulsory sexuality began. They are also still being produced

today, which provides new possibilities for how the characters of Rachel and Laura could be

interpreted. While I have explored these characters in terms of their asexual resonances, why not

extend this further, and read both characters as purposefully asexual, actively refusing to

participate in the cruel optimism of compulsory sexuality on their own terms?

As a final thought experiment, I would like to engage in an interpretation of these plays

that has thus far been obscured by compulsory sexuality that has assumed that their concluding

nonsexual lives are victimizing choices rather than empowering choices they made for

themselves. Could their choices come from a sense of agency, or must they always be a kind of

surrender to oppression? While the following counter-readings may run against the grain of both

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Grimké’s and Williams’s plays, I offer a glimpse of an alternative future for both Rachel and

Laura.

Instead of viewing Rachel’s decision as tragic in its failure to reproduce, why not view

her refusal to bear children as a triumphant revolution against the cruel optimism that insists on

marriage being the key to happiness? The audience does not get to view the fallout of her

decision. What if in weeks, months, or years, she becomes comfortable in her decision to live as

an unmarried woman? She could have raised Jimmy as an adopted son and taught him the cruel

realities of the racism. Maybe she would have become a happy spinster, secure in her refusal to

marry and take part in the system that killed her father and brother.

Instead of viewing Laura as nothing more than a figment of Tom’s memory, what if she

too was able to live a full life as a single woman? Could Laura have made a quiet life for herself

outside of a heterosexual marriage? Perhaps she took Jim’s advice about being confident and got

a job at a museum or in retail and lived a quiet life away from the pressures to conform to

heterosexual marriage. She may have thrived without the constant desire of her mother to marry

her off to a gentleman caller. Laura may have created a private life for herself with a room of her

own filled with her records and her glass menagerie.

Audiences will never really know how Rachel or Laura may have ended up. Instead, they

are both constructed as unhappy spinsters without a choice. While these characters only exist on

the page, it is a worthwhile to consider an asexual life for these two women as something other

than a tragedy. Reading them in this way helps open up the possibility of an asexual life being

something worth living, rather than as a waste of their reproductive potential.

The purpose of this final thought experiment is to not to ascribe an ironclad asexual

identity onto these characters, but to envision a scenario where living a nonsexual or asexual life

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was a fulfilling possibility. Both Laura and Rachel are typically shown to be heterosexual

women who have fallen into spinsterhood, due to a failure of the systems of racism and ableism.

While it is tempting to take the position that both characters are, and have always been, asexual,

that reading is limiting. However, in using an asexual lens to read these two women, their

heterosexuality is not taken for granted. Instead, as I have shown, this lens can be used to

interrogate how the systems of racism and ableism work to desexualize (or hypersexualize) those

who fit outside of white, able-bodied heteronormativity.

Using an asexual lens to read Rachel and Laura as definitively asexual also involves

invented possibilities that are not in the scripts themselves. Imagining these two women as

asexual requires an imaginative “what if?” to interrogate the possibilities that their futures were

not lost to them. Instead, these reconceived futures bleed off the page and provide a hope for the

characters that may not have been previously seen without an asexual lens. So, while an asexual

lens can open up possibilities to read the plays in a different way, it also provides an opportunity

to imagine possible futures for these heroines that resist compulsory (hetero)sexuality.

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Conclusion.

Performing Asexuality

The Netflix animated series BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) made television history by

portraying one of the main supporting characters, Todd Chavez, voiced by Aaron Paul, as

asexual.

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Todd is among the first asexual characters to appear on television and is the most well

known representation of an asexual person in popular culture. What is unique about Todd’s

character is that he is given an entire story arc related to his asexual identity that is not limited to

a single episode, but rather spans several seasons.

The characters explored in this dissertation are not like Todd. They are not given a

coming out story, nor do they ever claim an asexual identity. Instead, they exhibit traces or

resonances of asexuality. While some resonate more closely with asexuality than others, their

experiences still require an interpretative leap to read them as having traces of asexuality or

nonsexuality. At times, an asexual lens works well with the characters explored; at other times,

an asexual lens admittedly seems like a bit of a stretch. In general, the characters here are already

ones who exhibit particular asexual resonances, through their relationship to virginity, celibacy,

queerness, or spinsterhood. Furthermore, the plays examined in this dissertation have all been

previously analyzed from a queer lens or a queered perspective. The purpose of this project has

thus been to add an asexual dramaturgical lens alongside a queer lens to the toolbox of the

scholar and theatre practitioner.

Some of the pieces explored in this dissertation might not work in terms of reading these

characters as asexual in the twenty-first century sense of the term. However, I hope to have

demonstrated that an asexual lens does not necessarily mean finding asexuals in past dramatic or

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BoJack Horseman, season 4, episode 3, “Hooray! Todd Episode!”

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historical texts. Rather, this lens should work alongside of other queer lenses to further

interrogate compulsory sexuality. Even more importantly, an asexual lens shows how

compulsory sexuality functions differently throughout history, depending on the overall context.

Compulsory sexuality thus is part of how sexuality and thus nonsexuality are deployed.

Some gaps in this study have appeared. An exhaustive list of all possible iterations of

asexuality in dramatic literature would not be possible, nor was that the purpose of this project.

Instead, consider this one attempt towards using this asexual lens to read and analyze characters

and their relationship to compulsory sexuality. I chose characters that already exhibit asexual

resonances and or traces of nonsexuality. There are so many more case studies that this lens can

be applied to that have been left out. As noted in the introduction, this work is already being

done by many scholars in the field of asexuality studies. The present-day increase in asexual

representation opens the door to future projects exploring asexuality/nonsexuality in prior eras.

In this conclusion, I examine two aspects of the future of this research. First, I illustrate

what the current landscape of asexual representation and backlash looks like. Even though there

has been a dearth of asexual representation, there are still some notable exceptions, including two

theatrical pieces that have been produced within the past few years. However, with this asexual

representation, there has also come some acephobic backlash. Additionally, there has also been

vocal pushback against anything that seems to threaten cisheteronormativity, especially with

resurgent authoritarian conservative movements in the United States and elsewhere.

Second, moving past representation, I lay out a set of guidelines for theatre practitioners

when considering using an asexual lens as a dramaturgical device in the staging of existing plays

as well as in the creation new theatre. Since the bulk of this dissertation has been focused on how

this lens can be used to read asexuality in dramatic texts, I would like to bring that lens into

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practice, and ask what kinds of tools could be used, based on what has been explored and

critiqued here, and how these asexual dramaturgies could be used in the rehearsal and/or writers’

room. Bringing these two threads of performance together, I hope to project what asexuality

studies can offer performance scholars and practitioners for the future.

Our Current Moment: Representation and Backlash

That the most prominent and fully realized representation of an asexual character comes

from an animated series about humans and anthropomorphic animals in a fantastical Hollywood

is a testament to the power of representation. BoJack Horseman is a combination of absurd

comedy and unexpectedly poignant drama, where the title character is a half-man/half-horse with

severe depression and substance abuse issues. Todd is introduced in the first episode of the series

as the loveable slacker who sleeps on BoJack’s couch.

495

Throughout the first two seasons, we

simply see Todd as an aimless drifter, one of the fully human characters who provides comic

relief by engaging in several idiotic and absurd adventures. However, it is season three that

begins to explore Todd’s sexuality, with the writers giving Todd a coming out episode in season

four.

496

Seasons five and six let Todd explore his identity in terms of relationships with other

asexual individuals, resulting in him finding a happy ending with a fellow asexual.

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Todd’s

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BoJack Horseman, season 1, episode 1 “Bojack Horseman: The BoJack Horseman

Story, Chapter One,” directed by Joel Moser, written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, featuring Will

Arnett and Aaron Paul, aired August 22, 2014, Netflix.

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BoJack Horseman, season 3, episode 12, “That Went Well,” directed by Amy

Winfrey, written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, featuring Aaron Paul and Abbi Jacobson, aired July

22, 2016, Netflix and BoJackHorseman, season 4, episode 3, “Hooray! Todd Episode!”

497

BoJack Horseman, season 5, episode 3, “Planned Obsolescence,” directed by Aaron

Long, written by Elijah Aron, featuring Aaron Paul and Natalie Morales, aired September 14,

2018, Netflix and BoJack Horseman, season 6, episode 16 “Nice While It Lasted,” directed by

Aaron Long, written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, featuring Aaron Paul and Echo Gillette, aired

January 31, 2020, Netflix.

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journey is so unique in that he is given an asexual identity and then allowed to further explore

what it means over the course of the series. Julie Kliegman describes this journey, stating, “In

Season 3, Todd felt broken. In Season 4, he identified as asexual, slowly came out to people, and

met other aces. In Season 5, BoJack really sets him loose, offering subtle but hilarious

commentary on what it means to be asexual in a hyper-sexualized world.”

498

Through Todd’s

series-long journey, the writers of BoJack Horseman created a fully realized asexual character.

The writers of the show expressed a similar journey to coming to Todd’s asexual identity.

In a 2018 interview from PaleyFest, series creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg describes the slow

realization that the character might be asexual. Even writing the show, the intention was not

originally to write an asexual character, but in the process of developing the series, the writers

discovered this possibility and leaned into it. In this same interview Bob-Waksberg admitted to

getting some things wrong (for example, making the most childish character asexual, which is a

common stereotype of asexual people), but he expressed a desire to keep learning, going so far as

to bring in an asexual woman to help them develop the character more fully, which demonstrates

a clear desire to give voice to the asexual community.

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Aaron Paul, voice actor for BoJack Horseman’s Todd, has given several interviews

where he discusses how often he is approached by asexual individuals thanking him for his part

in the creation of a visibly asexual character. He states, “I was so proud to represent that

community. So many people came up to me, or have been coming up to me, since that came out,

498

Julie Kliegman, “Todd's Asexuality On ‘BoJack Horseman’ Isn't A Perfect Depiction,

But It's Made Me Feel Understood.” Bustle, September 26, 2018,

https://www.bustle.com/p/todds-asexuality-on-bojack-horseman-isnt-a-perfect-depiction-but-its-

made-me-feel-understood-12057178.

499

“BoJack Horseman - Anticipating Season 5.” YouTube, The Paley Center for Media,

September 19, 2018, video, 10:17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM_SyL3jOlY .

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saying, 'I didn't know what I was. You have given me a community that I didn't even know

existed,' which is just so heartbreaking, but also so beautiful, you know?"

500

Todd’s asexuality has led to several emotional articles from asexual and queer television

critics, many of them commenting on the emotional reactions they have had to the character.

Nico W. from The Mary Sue website mentions the very visceral and emotional experience that

came from witnessing the depiction of an asexual character on mainstream television, stating, “I

struggled to find the words to describe my emotions. All I knew was that a character on one of

my all-time favorite shows had just come out as asexual, and as an ace person, myself, it was

making me feel a lot of different things.”

501

The world of BoJack Horseman is a clear fantasy

world, full of absurd characters and situations. And yet, the show’s creators point to a future

where asexuality is perhaps not fully understood, but accepted without question, a hopeful future

and an ideal to which people can aspire.

Aside from Todd, asexual characters are few. Most characters that identify as asexual

come from television, and they are either one-off characters in an episode or their asexuality is

discussed, but not outright described as asexual. For instance, the character Lord Varys in HBO’s

Game of Thrones describes himself as being interested in neither sex when questioned about his

proclivities, and Raphael from Shadowhunters similarly describes himself as lacking interest in

sex.

502

Sex Education, while only devoting one episode to an asexual character, explicitly named

500

Aaron Paul, “Aaron Paul On Returning To Breaking Bad And Saying Goodbye To

BoJack Horseman,” AM to DM BuzzFeed News, October 24, 2019, video, 12:25,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPfPAXdmII.

501

Nico W., “BoJack Horseman Delivers the Asexual Representation We Need.” Mary

Sue, August 17, 2016, https://www.themarysue.com/bojack-horseman-asexual-representation/.

502

Game of Thrones, season 4, episode 6, “The Laws of Gods and Men,” directed by Alik

Sakharov, written by Bryan Cogman, featuring Conleth Hill and Pedro Pascal, aired May 11,

2014, HBO and Shadowhunters, season 2, episode 10, “By the Light of Dawn,” directed by

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and explained the experience of asexuality in a queer positive manner. However, the asexual

character in question, Florence, is a small character, and her journey is limited to one episode,

though she does appear as a background character in other episodes.

503

Asexual characters also

appear in comics, with Jughead Jones being reimagined as asexual in the comic Jughead

following the Archie comic.

504

While these examples are notable, Todd still stands out as a

leading character whose asexuality is fully realized.

505

Many pop culture characters are found to have similar resonances of asexuality and are

considered asexual in terms of fan theories and/or fan head canons. Elsa, from Disney’s Frozen

and Frozen 2 has become an asexual icon, even though the character is never described as

asexual or even hinted at lacking sexual desire. She is, however, a princess who does not end her

respective movies married to a prince, so many in the asexual community, especially with the

release of Frozen 2, have looked to her as being an aromantic asexual, or aroace.

506

Joshua Butler, written by Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer, featuring David Castro and

Emeraude Toubia, aired March 16, 2017, Freeform and Netflix.

503

Sex Education, series 2, episode 3, directed by Sophie Goodhart, written by Sophie

Goodhart, featuring Mirren Mack, Gillian Anderson, and Asa Butterfield, aired January 17,

2020, Netflix and Michele Kirichansaya, “‘Sex Education’ Season 2 and the Inclusion of

Asexuality in Conversations About Sex,” FemStella, January 23, 2020, https://www.femestella.

com/sex-education-season-2-review-asexual-storyline/.

504

Chip Zdarsky and Erica Henderson, Jughead, volume 3, issue 4, Archie Comic

Publications, (Pelham: New York, 2016) and Avery Kaplan, “Queerness in Comics: Jughead,”

The Beat: The Blog of Comics Culture, June 27, 2019. https://www.comicsbeat.com/queerness-

in-comics-jughead/.

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There are other characters that are canonically asexual, so this is a small list of the