Abstract

The long eighteenth century saw enormous upheavals and experimentations with gender, especially in theatrical practice. A group of female singers termed by Heather Hadlock as musicos played heroic, romantic leading men, often playing roles which had been written for the now out-of-vogue castrati. In examining the lives of these singers, this paper will look for intersections between Thomas Laqueur’s theorization of a shift from the one to two sex model and the performance of gender on the operatic stage.

Presenter Biography
Sophia Metcalf is an academic and performing artist interested by the queer and/or female body’s radical occupation of public and performative spaces. She has previously been published in The Channel Undergraduate Review (McGill University) and The Acacia Group (CSU Fullerton), and presented at the AGS Symposium (Honorary Mention; UC Irvine). She is currently completing her MFA in Acting at UC Irvine.