Gender Isn’t Real ‘Cause Shakespeare Said So: A Queer Feminist-informed Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20

Abstract

Shakespeare once famously said “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.” As someone intimately aware of how our lives are performative, Shakespeare likely had a heightened understanding of the performative nature of gender. One of his queerest sonnets, Sonnet 20, plays with the constructs of gender as the sonnet’s subject’s gender remains unclear. Using Judith Butler’s theory on gender performativity, in dialogue with Colby Gordon’s theory of trans technogenesis, my essay asks: what if Shakespeare was a gender theorist? What if the Early Modernists understood gender as a performance long before we did? What if gender wasn’t real, all because Shakespeare said so?