Part 9 (season 13): The Intersex Princess

Below is the script for episode 10, the final episode of Season 13 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

You can listen to this episode here

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Hello and welcome to the last episode of Season 13 of Philosophy Fluency. Let's enjoy some coffees with rose petals on top, to celebrate and support the England Roses' dominant wins so far during the current Women's Rugby World Cup. Their sporting excellence is paving the way for women and girls in Sport and is another shining example, in addition to the Lionesses women football team, of how sporty English women really are. 

At the end of the previous episode, I put forward my suggestion that the real life Queen Christina is a plausible model for the character of the Princess. There are intriguing parallels between Queen Christina and the Princess:

As I touched upon previously, both:

1) have their biological sex questioned and 'a mistake' is declared, changing their perceived sex to the opposite, whilst a Princess. At birth, when Christina was a Princess, before she became a Queen Regnant, the women who assigned her male later said they'd made a mistake and reassigned her female, apparently to great embarrassment. The mediator uses the same word "mistake" when she says, and I quote from Act V, Scene II: 

"How, never such a Mistake; why we have taken a Man for a Woman." 

2) they both try to escape societal stricture on gender by entering a convent, albeit very different types of convents. Nevertheless, Queen Christina enjoyed more freedoms than most women in her convent.

3) both suffer from genderphobic women having an hysterical fit over the biological sex of Christina and the Princess. In this way, the mediator could be modeled on the narrow-minded and rather sexist women around the baby Princess Christina. Moreover, an even closer match to the hysterical character of the mediator is Christina's mother, Maria Eleonora, whose poor mental health, hysterical behaviour and terrible attitude problem and lack of love for her son turned daughter Christina, was such that her husband, the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, decided it was best she didn't bring her up herself, so that her madness didn't affect the young Christina. 

I suggest that a 17th century reader or audience may recognise the life story of Queen Christina in the plot of The Convent of Pleasure. Furthermore, I think it's plausible that the root cause of the bigotry could be the same between Christina and the Princess. Given that the mother is hysterical and negative about her own daughter after her biological sex reassignment as a baby, so the mediator's hysterical prejudice and attitude problem may also be due to intersexphobia. 

4) both Christina and the Princess are crowned a King: Queen Christina was literally, officially crowned a King during her coronation. The Princess wins the prize of being unofficially crowned King, while Lady Happy is crowned Queen, for being the couple who danced the best at a maypole event. However, the Princess is a Prince and ruler in a foreign country. So in that sense, the Princess can also officially function like a monarch and can rule like a King. 

So I argue that there's at least a strong possibility that the Princess/ Prince is intersex, in which case, Cavendish can leave both the so-called biological sex and the gender identity of this character an eternal mystery, always somewhat ambiguous. This would have the advantage of bringing out the inherent, naturally occuring complexities within both sex and gender. 

5) like Margaret Cavendish herself, Queen Christina and the Princess both feel comfortable wearing full male and full female attire in public and all three of them are on the receiving end of bigotry as a result, both in the 17th century and still today, such as Virginia Woolf in the 20th century who famously made derogatory remarks about Cavendish and universities still in the 21st century have an attitude problem towards Cavendish and scholarship on her, especially Philosophy departments. And that's not just sexism, because not all women philosophers in the past are affected by this prejudice, especially if they're cis, heterosexual, religious Christian women in history. 

Unlike any other scholarly interpretation, my intersex reading would illustrate Cavendish's theme and questions in the play, about the nature of gender: 

Would we really know who is male and female, simply by observing them? 

Are people neatly in the binary categories of male or female by nature or not? 

Although this is clearly a long-standing debate, this is also a very contemporary debate. It involves the topic known as the nature or nurture debate. It asks very modern day questions about whether gender is biologically-based or identity-based, or both. 

Perhaps Cavendish wants the play to end somewhat up in the air. I suggest that Cavendish wants to dispel the gender binary. And she'd be right. Gender isn't clear cut. People are not clearly this or that, which is why the sports world ceased to do sex testing decades ago and why some experts today still insist sex testing is still not always 100% reliable and informative. 

It's amazing to think that Margaret Cavendish had the brains to work this out four centuries ago yet TERFS and so-called gender critics still haven't reached that advanced, nuanced stage of thinking in the 21st century. 

I shall conclude this season on Cavendish now by highlighting that, although The Convent of Pleasure has some serious messages about gender, biological sex, social expectations, genderfluidity and feminism to analyse, this play is nonetheless meant to be light-hearted, witty, and entertaining. 

I shall be taking my usual week off after a season. I need some time for research. I'll be back on Friday 12th September with the next season, Season 14. Until then, enjoy yourselves and take care! 

References:

Cavendish, Margaret 'The Convent of Pleasure', 1668, available at: 

https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/convent/convent.html