Judi Dench as Viola
Performing Gender: Shakespeare,
Whitehead, and Queer Theology
Jay McDaniel and Open AI
Can we intentionally perform our gender identity in ways that disguise our internal sense of self? The answer is yes—and Shakespeare shows us how.
In Twelfth Night, Viola survives a shipwreck and washes up in Illyria. To navigate this unfamiliar and potentially dangerous world, she disguises herself as a man, taking the name Cesario. What begins as a strategic act of survival soon evolves into a layered performance of gender identity. Viola’s external presentation conceals her internal identity, but it also becomes a site of revelation, confusion, and transformation. Her performance creates relationships that blur the lines between desire and disguise, between truth and artifice. Through Viola, Shakespeare gives us an early and enduring exploration of gender as performance.
Viola is not alone in this. Shakespeare frequently employed cross-dressing as a dramatic device, often placing characters in situations where gender identity becomes fluid, ambiguous, or comically unstable. In As You Like It, Rosalind dresses as the young man Ganymede, using the disguise to explore love and power in ways she couldn't as a woman. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia disguises herself as a male lawyer, taking on a public and intellectual authority denied to her as a woman. Two Gentlemen of Verona features Julia donning male attire to follow her beloved, and Cymbeline includes Imogen disguising herself as a boy named Fidele. Each of these characters enters into a new realm of social possibility through their performed gender, navigating danger, desire, and identity along the way. These acts of cross-dressing reveal Shakespeare’s deep interest in the instability of gender roles and the transformative possibilities of performance.
This exploration becomes even more striking when we remember that in Shakespeare’s time, all female roles were performed by men or boys. So in the case of Viola, we have a male actor playing a female character who is herself pretending to be a man. This recursive layering of performance unsettles any easy distinctions between male and female, actor and character, truth and illusion. It reveals something fundamental about gender itself: that it is not a fixed essence, but a set of signs, gestures, and roles performed within a social script.
Gender Theory
Modern gender theory affirms what Shakespeare dramatized. Philosopher Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), argued that gender is performative—that is, it is constituted through repeated acts and stylizations over time. Gender is something we do, not something we are. The way we dress, speak, carry ourselves, and relate to others becomes a kind of theater in which the self is both actor and audience. The illusion of stable gender identity emerges from the repetition of these performances, not from some internal truth that precedes them.
And yet, there often is an internal sense of gender—an intimate feeling of being a certain way, of belonging to a particular identity or none at all. This internal identity may or may not align with the roles we perform externally. Sometimes the performance is a mask. Sometimes it is a shield. Sometimes it is a protest or a poem.
Across history and culture, people have performed gender in ways that diverge from or deliberately obscure their inner lives. Trans people may present in socially conforming ways before coming out, not because the performance reflects their truth, but because it protects them. Drag performers exaggerate gender norms to both celebrate and critique them. Nonbinary people may mix and remix gender cues to reflect the complexity of their experience. Even those who consider themselves conventionally “cisgender” engage in gender performance—every time they pick an outfit, change their voice, or adjust their posture to fit in.
The theater has long been a space for exploring the constructed nature of identity. From ancient Greek tragedies to Japanese Kabuki, from the cross-gender casting of Shakespeare’s time to modern drag shows and performance art, the stage reveals how artificial—and how powerful—gender roles can be. It becomes a laboratory for deconstructing norms and imagining new possibilities.
But performance is not always liberating. It is also shaped by surveillance, power, and fear. The roles we are expected to play are often enforced by social pressures, laws, and even violence. Performing a gender that hides one’s truth can be an act of safety, but it can also be a source of pain. And yet, even within these constraints, people find ways to improvise, to resist, and to express themselves.
Zooming out, we see that Viola is not just a character in a romantic comedy. She is a symbol of the human capacity to navigate identity through performance. Her disguise is an act of agency in a world of uncertainty. Her story reminds us that gender, like all identity, is shaped in the space between the self and society, between inner truth and outer expression.
To perform gender is to participate in an ancient and ongoing drama, one that each of us enacts every day. Whether we conform, rebel, conceal, or reveal, we are all actors on a stage. And sometimes, as in Shakespeare’s best plays, the most powerful truths are spoken in disguise.
A Whiteheadian View: Becoming, Relationality, and the Fluidity of Identity
From the perspective of process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, gender identity—like all forms of identity—is not a static possession but a dynamic and evolving process. In Process and Reality, Whitehead proposes that each actual entity is not a substance but a moment of concrescence—a process of becoming shaped by inherited past data, present relational feeling, and the lure of future possibilities (Whitehead, 1929/1978). The self, then, is not a fixed essence but an unfolding event in a larger cosmic rhythm of creativity.
In this light, gender can be understood as a pattern of becoming, emerging from the felt tensions between body, history, imagination, and relational response. Each act of gender performance is a creative negotiation of these factors—always open to novelty, always relational, and always in process. Identity, including gender identity, is never simply discovered or expressed—it is composed, performed, and recomposed in the flow of life.
Whitehead’s notion of subjective aim—the inward striving of each actual entity toward harmony, intensity, or satisfaction—offers a lens for understanding the quest for authentic gender expression. For trans and gender-diverse individuals, the aim is not to conform to external categories but to realize deeper resonance with the self, others, the world, and the Life in whose consciousness the world unfolds, God. Gender identity, then, is not a deviation from metaphysical truth, but an expression of it. The freedom to become, to shift, to improvise, is written into the fabric of existence itself.
Queer Theology
This theological orientation is deeply affirmed by trans and queer theologians, who challenge the notion of a fixed, binary God and instead envision the divine as fluid, relational, and transgressive of boundaries.
Marcella Althaus-Reid, in Indecent Theology (2000), insists that God is not confined by decency or orthodoxy, and that theology must emerge from the lived bodies and desires of marginalized people. Her “indecent” theology opens space for queer and trans experiences as sources of sacred insight.
Justin Tanis, in Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith (2003), articulates a vision of the divine that affirms transition, multiplicity, and embodiment. For Tanis, trans lives bear witness to the complexity and beauty of divine creativity, challenging rigid conceptions of both gender and God.
Patrick Cheng, in Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (2011), proposes that God is radically inclusive love—queer in the sense of being ever-disruptive, boundary-crossing, and transformative.
Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, in Activist Theology (2019), emphasizes the relational, justice-centered, and improvisational work of becoming, both theologically and politically, in ways that resonate deeply with process thought.
These thinkers propose a theology in which the sacred is found not in stability but in transition, not in orthodoxy but in transformation. God is not the guardian of binary systems but the companion of change—a divine presence who lures all things toward richer expressions of love, freedom, and authenticity. In Whitehead’s terms, God is both the lure toward creative transformation (the initial aim) and the compassionate recipient of the world’s experiences (the consequent nature), embracing each act of becoming in a divine memory that holds all lives with tenderness and care.
To be queer, to be trans, to perform a gender that defies expectations, is to participate in a holy act of becoming. It is to embody what Whitehead calls the “creative advance into novelty.” And perhaps, like Viola stepping onto the stage of Illyria, each person who dares to live into their truth—no matter how unconventional—is engaging in a sacred drama, where the divine is not behind a curtain, but in the very act of performance.
Works Cited
- Althaus-Reid, Marcella. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics. Routledge, 2000.
- Cheng, Patrick S. Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology. Seabury Books, 2011.
- Henderson-Espinoza, Robyn. Activist Theology. Fortress Press, 2019.
- Tanis, Justin. Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith. Pilgrim Press, 2003.
- Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality, corrected ed., eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. Free Press, 1978 (original work published 1929).