Volume I Issue IV October 2021

Name of Author : Dr.P.Parthiban, Assistant Professor of English Chikkaiah Naicker College, Erode-4

Title of the paper : Queering the Forest and the Seaside: Fluid Self-Fashioning Beyond Gender Binaries in As You Like ITC

Abstract: The comedy As You Like It turns the forest of Arden into a space where bodies, clothes, and desires move beyond fixed gender roles. The present article reads the play through queer theory and the idea of gender performativity to show how the movement from court to forest and from imagined shore to inland retreat unsettles stable identity. Rosalinds adoption of the name and costume of Ganymede does more than protect her in exile her play acting as a boy who pretends to be a girl in love with Orlando exposes the theatrical nature of gender itself. The forest becomes a region where same sex attraction, cross gender desire, and layered gazes are staged without simple resolution into heteronormative comfort. References to travel, exile, and the edges of the sea add another layer, since border zones suggest a life lived between categories rather than safely within one. Queer theory, especially Judith Butlers idea that gender is an effect of repeated acts, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks account of homosocial desire, helps to frame the play as a drama of fluid self fashioning. The argument offered here is that Arden and its imagined coastal thresholds host a playful but serious experiment in living beyond rigid binaries of male and female.

Keywords : queer theory; gender performativity; cross dressing; forest of Arden; queer space; Shakespearean comedy

DOI :

Page No. : 146-149