With LGBT Feminist Film Project, S/He Stoops to Conquer Gender Depictions in Shakespeare

By Jessica Nathanson

“Directors who don’t understand the historical and cultural background in which Shakespeare wrote, rob audiences of the experience that Shakespeare meant to give his audiences,” s/he said, with startling confidence.

The person sitting before me, 53 year-old writer and producer Hannah Miyamoto, insists that Shakespeare was as interested in the fluidity of gender as setting up contrasts between the sexes. S/he bases that view after studying the topic for many years as an academic scholar. In addition, s/he has lived all hir life in a body that is not firmly one sex or the other.

Hannah Miyamoto. She may look like Sarah Palin, but don't

be deceived.

“I was ten years old the first time someone asked me if I was a boy or a girl,” she tells me. “I was over 30 when I learned that I was exposed to DES before I was born.”

Between 1938 and 1971, physicians prescribed DES, or diethylstilbestrol, to millions of pregnant women around the world because it acts like a powerful substitute for estrogens produced normally. According to the Centers for Disease Control, DES is one of the most powerful agents for causing birth defects ever released upon human beings. Due to the low price of DES, and energetic marketing by drug companies, the effective strength of the DES prescribed to many women for just one pregnancy exceeded the natural estrogen she would make in her entire life.

In the case of Hannah, s/he has a body with male characteristics, but is largely insensitive to the testosterone that hir body produces. As a result, s/he looks and sounds as much like a woman as a man. Hannah normally presents herself as an biologically-ordinary woman, but she asked me to use "S/He" just for this article.

Rosalind, by Robert Walker Macbeth (1888).

Living a life between the sexes draws Hannah to the cross-dressing heroines of Shakespeare like Rosalind in As You Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night, girls whose lives and safety depends on convincing everyone that they are young men. For example, Hannah points out that in Twelfth Night, Count Orsino appears to maintain such a male-dominated household that Viola—pretending to be a boy named “Cesario”—faces a constant threat of being raped if her true sex is discovered. Yet Shakespeare makes clear that, because Viola is a feminine girl, she only just gets away with it, particularly in the early scene where Orsino admits that “Cesario” looks like a girl: “All is semblative a woman’s part.”

Like most Twelfth Night characters, Count
Orsino is a complex mix of characteristics.
For some reason, the danger he poses to Viola
is usually overlooked, and his overwrought
passion for Olivia is emphasized instead.

Likewise, when “Cesario” appears at the gate of countess Olivia, her servant emphasizes the intermediacy of Orsino’s “love-attorney.” When Olivia finally does she “Cesario” she almost immediately falls in love with this unusual “youth.”

To present her perspectives about gender, sexuality, and violence in Shakespeare, Hannah adapted Twelfth Night into a full-length play entitled Twelve Nights with Viola & Olivia. In her 2005 script, Olivia’s love for Viola is taken seriously, as is the fact that Viola would be safer in the home of Olivia, who loves Viola openly, than masculine Orsino, who constantly battles his attraction to his young new servant. These and many other topics are discussed in extensive scenes Hannah wrote in a style that imitates Shakespeare which are fitted between brief snippets of Shakespeare’s play.

A team of experienced professionals in Southern California, including the production company behind the independent feature South of 8 is now raising funds to produce a film using a screenplay by Hannah; details are on https://fundrazr.com/TwelveNightsWithViolaandOlivia, and filming is scheduled to begin in 2017. By bringing the overlooked aspects of Twelfth Night to the general public, the film is intended to help convince people to advance support for social justice and fairness for LGBT people.

“We are only asking the public for $9,000 because so many people have promised to contribute their services for free, and we are receiving the support of a non-profit organization. The final film will be as good as if four times as much money had been spent on it.” Miyamoto added that “Southern California is the perfect place to film a story set in the Italian Renaissance, and the audience is the best for gaining early attention before seeking a national and global audience.”

Now that strong opponents of gender equality and fairness for LGBT people are leadng the new Trump administration, we must support writers like Hannah Miyamoto and productions like Twelve Nights with Viola & Olivia to maintain the dramatic cultural shifts that have transformed the attitudes of Americans toward LGBT people until now.