Is Queen Christina a Woman?

Abstract

This article interprets Pam Gems’s play Queen Christina as an avant la lettrethesis on the performance of gender, identifying correspondences between the protagonist’s trajectory and the successive feminist interventions. Focusing on the 17th-century Swedish queen’s transformation from a masculine-identified bastion of patriarchy into an untamed rebel against political and sexual conservatism, Gems, in fact, indirectly shares her views on aspects of western feminist thought. This article’s analysis demonstrates that following Christina’s initial appropriation and subsequent contestation of patriarchal values, she engages with radical feminism before briefly identifying herself as a socialist feminist. In the wake of her unfulfilled attempt at maternity, she moves on to embrace cultural feminism; though, eventually, she decides not to privilege any specific political position and thus echoes Gems’s own ambivalence and reservation towards explicit ideological commitment.