Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Catherine Belsey (essay date 1985)
Catherine Belsey (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies, in Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis, Methuen, 1985, pp. 166-90.
[In the following excerpt, Belsey maintains that the spectable of women dressing as men in Shakespeare's comedies generally has the effect of challenging commonly perceived distinctions between traditionally "masculine" and "feminine" characteristics.]
Meaning depends on difference, and the fixing of meaning is the fixing of difference as opposition. It is precisely this identification of difference as polarity which Derrida defines as metaphysical. In conjunction with the common-sense belief that language is a nomenclature, a set of labels for what is irrevocably and inevitably there—whether in the world or in our heads—this process of fixing meaning provides us with a series of polarities which define what is. These definitions are also...
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