the trouble with gender in othello - Auburn University Electronic ...

(i.e., fitting her gender, race, culture and status) for her to sooner or later become
unfaithful.
In Act I, Brabantio is so convinced that it would be unthinkable for his
daughter to “run from her guardage to the sooty bosom/ […] to fear, not to
delight” (I.ii.85-86) that he suspects witchcraft. Some of his response may be
simple denial and some can be attributed to how he perceives Desdemona’s
personality; however, if “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time,
instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 140
Emphasis original to text) then we can not separate Brabantio’s perception of
Desdemona’s gender performance, i.e. what he believes to be her natural state of
behavior, from her gender performance itself. To put it another way,
Desdemona has performed her gender so well to this point, that Brabantio has
trouble believing that she would capable of going off the page so drastically:
“For nature so prepost’rously to err,/being not deficient, blind, or lame of
sense,/sans witchcraft could not” (I.iii.70-72) It is not only the shocking act of
“gross revolt” (I.i.148) that leads to Brabantio’s disbelieve, though that is an
integral part of it, it is also the fact that Othello is a Moor.
Heretofore, I have only dealt with her act of disobedience, her insistence
on being recognized as an acting subject in her own destiny. While that is a large
part of her “unnatural” gender performance so stressed by her father (and Iago,
as we will discuss shortly), however, it is not only the fact that she married
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