Cosmic Painting – Amy Johnstone
On ‘Peter Hujar Dreaming’ by David Wojnarowicz – Louis Shankar
Cosmonaut – Andy Chen
Opera as Desire – Zachary L. Stewart
G(em)der and the Moon – Jessi Lloyd
Untitled 25/3/16 – Em Travis
Amy Johnstone
Content Note: masturbation, violence, abusive family mention, homelessness,
sex work, death from HIV/AIDs, homophobia, incarceration mention
Andy Chen
Content Note: gender essentialism, r*pe threat mention, castration, queer/transphobia, misogyny
Opera as Desire The queer affinity for opera, epitomized by the prototypical but ideologically-charged queer identity of the “opera queen,” is so well-established as to be stereotypical. Paul Robinson locates the root of this attraction in vocal eroticism in an essay in Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters (2002), writing that “opera queens are voice fetishists.” Yet Robinson’s second explanation—that “the ambiguities of gender, or what is now called gender construction, lie at the heart of the association of opera with homosexuality”—comes far closer to my experiences, and constitutes a significantly more sophisticated theory. Benjamin Britten’s operas may come to mind when one thinks of queer desire (Billy Budd, 1951; Death in Venice, 1973), but the most potent homosexual and transgender elements of opera are not staged but on stage, not built into the opera as a text or script but constructed in the realities of performance. Like the queer analyses of Schubert’s music that I discussed in my second essay, a queer view on operatic performance begins with the understanding that music can provide spaces in which alternative sensibilities can be constructed, dramatized, and enacted. Unlike with Schubert, however, now I am interested in performances rather than scores, and performers rather than composers. A natural starting point is the so-called “trouser role,” which constitutes the most visible transgression of gender boundaries and expectations in the modern opera house. The term “trouser role” refers to any part in which a female singer represents a male character. The part may have been intended for and sung by a high-voiced male singer in the past, or may have been originally designed with a female singer in mind. Terry Castle fascinatingly positions singers who play trouser roles as objects of lesbian desire in her discussion of mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993; see also En Travesti, 1995). Ostensibly the characters are male, but I have never perceived them as exclusively female or male: they occupy a convincing transgender position. The Royal Opera took particular delight in trouser roles this season, beginning with their historically-informed production of Luigi Rossi’s Orpheus (1647) in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in which soprano Mary Bevan created the title role. Love and loss animate Orpheus, and the twin scenes when Orpheus comes upon the snakebitten Eurydice and when Orpheus realizes that Eurydice is lost forever were two of the most profoundly moving scenes I have witnessed on the stage. Orpheus and Eurydice appear to the audience—or at least to me—as transgender and female, respectively, but Orpheus presents only beautiful and natural love. In Emmanuel Chabrier’s farcical L’Étoile (1877), the Royal Opera presented a wholly different transgender model in the form of the thoroughly roguish lead, Lazuli, played by mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey. Aptly described as “frothy” by the Royal Opera, the production by Mariame Clément heavily emphasized Lazuli’s rampant sexuality, erecting an enormous lipstick-phallus onstage and intimating a threesome using an oversized nineteenth-century erotic postcard. In the opera’s scenario, King Ouf threatens Lazuli with anal impalement via a special chair, which we can read as the equivocally gendered but unquestionably dominant Lazuli being threatened with submission. Two new speaking characters, Smith and Dupont, underscore Lazuli’s transgressive sexuality through their own implied homosexuality, as they waltz together and, towel-clad, lounge in a bathhouse. By emphasizing the implicit transgender quality of the trouser role, Clément and Lindsey create an onstage world that accepts and celebrates a flexible sense of sexuality. Preceding the trouser role in history was the castrato, and the two share a transgender status. The castrato owes its existence to the Catholic Church’s need for high-voiced male singers in its choirs. Promising prepubescent boys were routinely castrated for the purpose, and often enjoyed long and sometimes spectacularly successful careers. In The Castrato (2015) Martha Feldman discusses the peculiar social status of the castrati, who occupied an undefined but alternately privileged and ridiculed space between genders, and could even be defined as a third gender.
The castrati were the objects of both desire and revulsion; the society in which they lived seems to have been made uncomfortable by its own attraction to them. As elite musicians they were in demand as performers and teachers, playing the leading male roles in operas as gods, heroes, and noblemen, and often reaching positions of great wealth and influence. Yet they were also ridiculed for their strange appearances and compared to capons. Strangely, then, when the wealthy male patrons of the opera saw themselves represented on stage, they were vaguely transgender figures. The castrati thus challenged gender norms and asserted a alternative masculine or non-binary role. Finally, the prima donna in its historical sense referring to the foremost female singer of an opera company deserves brief recognition. Like any woman connected to the stage, the prima donna necessarily lived on the edge of respectability and had to take precautions to prevent even the slightest appearance of scandal. In exchange, however, she occupied a position of power and influence otherwise unavailable to women except by birth, and could command significant remuneration. Furthermore, Robinson notes that female singers enjoyed “absolute parity” vocally with male singers despite being (fictionally) subjected to every imaginable humiliation. Amazingly, then, on the early operatic stage some semblance of gender equality reigned, and powerful women practiced their professions and worked to challenge and redefine gender roles. Operatic subversion of gender norms and the gender binary has not always been purposeful; it origins lie in valued voice types, the practicalities of performance, and the need to maintain an operatic repertoire that spans centuries of composition. Certainly the opera house—a rarefied social preserve subsidized by the state and zealously guarded by a cultural elite—may seem an unlikely place to seek cultural transgression, but such subversion was permitted precisely because of the opera’s privileged position. The aegis of artistic necessity and artistic license allowed the otherwise forbidden into the alternative reality of the stage. As a result, the operatic stage functions as a place where traditional ideas of gender and sexuality can be transgressed, challenged, and redefined; where the trouser role functions as a covert transgender and homosexual model; and where homoerotic and transgender fantasies can be played out by and for the listener.
Zachary L. Stewart
Jessi Lloyd
Em Travis