PhD research
The early modern period bears witness to a wealth of images, from portraits and satires to mythological episodes, depicting gender ambiguous figures and fashions. In English Literature and History, this period attracted some of the first scholarship on cross-dressing, androgyny, and gender inversion, in particular surrounding the phenomenon of boy actors on the Shakespearean stage. Yet gender ambiguous figures in early modern art have traditionally gone overlooked, or else their comprehension has suffered from modern misunderstandings. This thesis reframes the discussion around ambiguity, in order to encourage an understanding of these works that is fully informed by their historical and artistic context.
These ideas are explored in English and French art. Being geographically close, culturally connected, yet varying greatly in their approach to gender ambiguity, these locations form ideal case studies for this method. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to provide a context for how these images may have been received by contemporaries, when written accounts of their reception do not always exist. This framework provides a period-appropriate way to account for gender ambiguity in art that maintains the essentially ambiguous character that challenged contemporaries, sometimes representing a thrilling interpretative challenge, other times a transgressive force that needed to be contained.