“mark antony in antony and cleopatra is nonbinary” is not really an ideologically coherent way of describing the section of my thesis on antony but it IS really funny to say out loud
Oh please please please give us more!!! You can’t leave us hanging with that!!! I didn’t know there was anything to be said about Antony’s gender identity and gender expression!
OH BOY IS THERE. YOU HAVE ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD. first of all, the reblog to this post is helpful for what i was specifically talking about--rome and egypt are set up as masculine and feminine respectively, figured by octavian and cleopatra, and antony is constantly vacillating between the two, which, no, does not make someone nonbinary, but i'm being silly. but the reason i'm being silly in this particular way is because antony's gender is HUGE in a&c, which is on some levels a play about the way gender is performed, especially masculinity. there's an absolutely fantastic essay that i will never fucking shut up about that examines the idea of antony's "dissolving" masculinity and his increasing inability to perform Manhood, which of course gets blamed on cleopatra (and on a metatextual level is commentary about performance and theater and how all of that makes gender lines squiggly). the quote i really like and never stop thinking about from said essay is:
If Troilus and Cressida is his [Shakespeare’s] vision of a world in which masculinity must be enacted in order to exist, Antony and Cleopatra is his vision of a world in which masculinity not only must be enacted, but simply cannot be enacted, his vision of a world in which this particular performance has broken down.
to quickly and probably poorly summarize Coppelia Kahn's essay on JC in Roman Shakespeare: Kahn says social life in Rome is driven by male-male rivalry/emulation, where you want to outdo the other guy so much that it becomes homoerotic. in this reading, portia and brutus and cassius are all terrified of being "penetrated" by weakness and thus showing themselves to be womanly. and i think there's SOMETHING there with antony as the guy who beats brutus pretty roundly in JC and thus proves himself effective/powerful = MANLY, and then some years later (in-story and on shakespeare's timeline) we get A&C, where antony is an absolute fucking failboat who gets compared to a eunuch and "bewitched" by a scary powerful hot woman (bucketloads of orientalism in the way this is portrayed obviously). i don't entirely know what it is! but there's something there! especially considering, well, y'know,
[image description: tags on this post left by @ganymede-time, reading: #antony and cleopatra #if ur such a man then why did you penis fail so hard at stabbing urself... with ur big dick sword... /end description]
remember how he stabs himself and DOESN'T DIE and then someone STEALS HIS SWORD it can't get worse than that
anyway, obviously it is not apt or even progressive/transpositive to call this "antony's nonbinary arc" but have you considered: i think it's funny