Hello, lovely people, welcome to the latest video in my historical profile series, where
we discuss wonderful queer or disabled people from history. Today we're going to be talking about a
princess who became a queen who just didn't want to do what other people wanted her to!
And, of course:
Women kissing women.
I’m very familiar.
Nowadays, it’s not so surprising to see two women kissing on screen.
- Not to say that there couldn’t be more. Keep
that meaningful representation coming, please and thank you.
Why has it been an uphill struggle to get queer representation in mainstream media?
Well darlings, let’s take that one all the way back to the big boggyman:
The Code era. During which time films (and later television) that aired to US audiences had to
conform to the Motion Picture Production Code, otherwise known as... the Hays Code!
Yes, the theatrics are necessary.
The Hays Code was in effect from 1930 to 1968 and
it was a moral regulator of film. Among other things like prohibiting blasphemy,
detailed or sympathetic depictions of crime, “sexual perversion”...
- Hmm.
…detailed or positive mentions of abortion…
- Hmm.
…sexual relationships, and specifically interracial sexual relationships…
- [sarcastic] Scandalous.
…children’s genitalia…
- Okay, no, we agree with that one!
…the Hays code effectively censored all depictions of anything queer-related
on the grounds that anything “no picture shall be produced which
will lower the moral standards of those who see it” so that “the sympathy of
the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin”.
Basically: you can have your gays, but they'd better be criminals and punished for it!
Queercoded Disney villains? Sound familiar? Yep. Watch this video here for more.
- ime: when was the first known on-screen kiss between two women? Was it 2014,
when same-sex marriage was legalized in the U.K.? Maybe 2015 when same-sex marriage was
legalized in the U.S.? What about 1968 when the Hays Code fell out of use?
No, actually, the first on-screen kiss between two women aired pre-Code in the 1930 film Morocco…
…and it was followed shortly by the 1933 film Queen Christina,
A fascinating film about the life of the Swedish queen.…
So Queen Christina is considered pre-Code,
but the Hays Code actually was in effect in 1933 when Queen Christina was released.
It just wasn’t rigorously enforced until the following year in 1934.
Thus, while the film is considered pre-Code, the crew of Queen Christina was still expected
to avoid mentioning the titular historical figure’s female lovers, her traditionally
masculine presentation, you know, anything that wasn’t ‘perfectly morally upright’
Yeah, about that…
- They may have missed the memo.
Well actually, excitingly, that memo may actually just have been screwed up
and set on fire (metaphorically speaking) by star of the film,
famed bisexual Swedish actress Greta Garbo- who, along with her rumoured lover,
script writer Salka Viertel, is credited for encouraging the film’s queer themes.
- Not that it was very hard to find queer themes in the source material. I mean, have you heard
anything about Queen–or rather, King–Christina? No? Well, picture this if you will:
You’re born. You could have had two older siblings,
but due to the unfortunate realities of infant mortality in the 1600s,
you find yourself an only child AND the heir to the Swedish throne. Congratulations? You’re
a girl to your mother’s disappointment, and you’re alive to your father’s delight
- Good priorities, Dad! Mum...
You receive a prince’s education–not a princess’s–at your father’s behest. Wonderful,
you’re excelling in your classes and are well on your way to becoming a great monarch one day–
- What’s that? Your dad is dead?
Change of plans! Congratulations, you are now ruling the country of Sweden at the wise old
age of…six? Oh. Well, not to worry, we can work with that. Because you have a regent*
to oversee the ruling of the kingdom whilst you figure out how to do whatever it is six
year olds do. - Lego?
You’re educated by the finest of tutors, you begin attending council meetings at
the very wise, very old age of 14, you come into your own political power,
you maintain the tenuous peace of your warring and then newly-not-warring country, you- abdicate?
Alright. You abdicate after 22 long years of rule. And you’re still only 28.
You name your cousin, who also happens to be your former suitor-
-You’re a royal in the 1600s. It happens.
Anyway, you abdicate, name your cousin-turned-suitor-turned-heir*
the new ruler of Sweden, and flee the country, all in the same day!
Okay, maybe ‘flee the country’ is a bit much, but you certainly make your way off
to Rome to go meet a pope who is delighted to receive you because– did I mention that you
converted to Catholicism from your country’s dominant religion of Protestantism to the great
chagrin of your people? No? It's A CHOICE. Well, the pope is delighted to receive you.
You take a quick sojourn up to France where you may or may not make a bid
for the throne of Naples. You may as well. It’s so boring not being
the reigning monarch of a country, and you already gave your own throne away.
It’s a good thing the king of Naples abdicated,
leaving this shiny, new throne ready for a shiny, new monarch.
Although why abdicate if you then want another…
Unfortunately that doesn't go anywhere and there is also that... um... THING... that
makes you... um... 'not like the other girls'. You know. The thing the pope is not too keen on.
Although apparently now he's saying that same-sex unions are... you know
what? Don't get over excited by the headlines! Different pope anyway.
But speaking of different popes, you did then later butt heads with another pope when you
demanded he outlaw the practice of chasing Jews through the streets of Rome during Carnival.
So that's a plus. And pretty different to the other monarchs of your time. I'm looking at
you Margaret Theresa of Spain, who told her husband-slash-uncle(-slash-cousin?)
to and every other Hapsburg who blamed their fertility issues on
Jewish people rather than inbreeding and their genetic pool being a puddle.
But where were we? Right, what made people say
that Queen Christina was just that little bit... different?
From the very moment of her birth,
Christina defied gender expectations. Born so infamously “hairy” and “hoarse-voiced”,
the professionals attending the birth believed her to be a boy and announced this
fact to the entire Swedish court. Imagine their embarrassment when they had to issue a correction.
Everybody was waffling about telling the king until his sister got fed up and just told him
forthright that he had a lively little daughter, to which King Gustav II Adolf
replied “Let us thank God, sister; I hope this girl will be as good as a boy”. He predicted,
“This will be an arch girl, she has put tricks upon us so soon”.
Throughout her life, Christina defied traditional femininity. Her habits were
likely informed by her princely upbringing and tended towards activities traditionally
practised by boys such as hunting. She also kept a man’s valet in place
of a woman’s personal maid, and she famously disregarded binary dress.
At times, she would dress in men’s garb,
at other times, women’s, and she often mixed men’s and women’s pieces together.
- A style icon.
The public of the time…disagreed. They not only took affront to Christina’s gender
nonconformity–they turned it into an inflammatory weapon with which to defame her character.
They could not conceive that someone assigned female at birth could assume,
and in fact embrace, such traditionally masculine attributes.
There was speculation that she may in fact have been assigned male at birth or that her
genitalia may be a mix of what was accepted as female and male.
- Because our relationship with gender is entirely dependent on... uh, floppy body parts.
One such speculator called her a “sort of boy in petticoats”
While this did not have the biological basis the speculator had imagined,
was it true? Unfortunately, Christina cannot jump out of her grave and let us know if
she felt like a woman, man, or someone undefined by the false binary of gender.
In this video, I am choosing to follow the consensus of most sources and am
referring to Christina as a woman who did not conform to gendered norms of her time,
but my understanding of King Christina is someone who perhaps did not connect
deeply with womanhood and may not have identified as a woman.
I do refer to Christina as King, and that is because Christina was actually crowned King,
not Queen, due to Swedish laws of monarchy at the time. A king was
a monarch in his own right, while a queen was the wife of a monarch.
Christina wasn’t overly fond of women, saying “she liked men,
not because they were men, but because they were not women”
- which... is kind of a 'pick me girl' but we'll let it slide because it's also 'I'm a
baby lesbian who is only friends with boys and I haven't put the pieces together yet'
In his book Memoirs of Christina, Queen of Sweden, Henry Woodhead
theorises that this resentment may stem from Christina’s relationship with her mother,
Maria Eleonora, whose affection for Christina was stunted by the queen’s desire for a son.
Not that your parents being weird makes you gay or
gender queer- there would be a lot more of us if that were the case!
In her autobiographical memoirs, Christina speculated “that her attendants frequently let her
drop on purpose, thinking it would not displease her mother if she were quietly disposed of”
One of these dropping incidents actually resulted
in the permanent injury of Christina’s right shoulder, causing her lifelong asymmetry.
- snap!
While Christina’s suspicions cannot be confirmed,
they reveal much about Christina’s bitter relationship with her mother.
There were exceptions to Christina’s distaste for women:
most notable of which was her beloved lady-in-waiting, the Countess Ebba Sparre.
Here comes the obligatory disclaimer that we can never know for certain how historical
figures actually felt or identified on account of them being dead for centuries and centuries.
I mean... we also don't know that they WEREN'T
- [cough] they were.
Hmm? What’s that?
What we do know about King Christina is that she was intimately familiar with the
Countess Ebba Sparre, who was widely known as la belle comtesse, or the beautiful countess.
Letters written by those acquainted with Christina report Christina calling Ebba her
“bedfellow” and declaring that she was “in love with the beautiful Countess”.
In surviving letters by Christina to Ebba, Christina writes “My happiness would be second
to none if I were allowed to share it with you and if you could be witness to my happiness. I
swear to you that I would be worthy of the envy of the gods if I could enjoy the good of seeing you”.
Christina calls herself “the person in the world who honours and esteems [Ebba]
the most” and tells Ebba “wherever I am in the world, you have a person who is entirely yours,
as I have always been” and “I will never cease to be yours”. She signs off a letter
“I kiss you a million times and beg you to be persuaded that I love you with all my heart”.
- it’s… it’s pretty gay.
These gal pals certainly had SOMETHING going on.
BUT evidence suggests Christina may have had male lovers too- so whilst
today’s exact queer terminology wasn't available
in the 1600s... she wasn't necessarily a fixed point at one end of the spectrum.
The men whom Christina was attracted to were not topics of public consternation,
but Christina’s attraction to women was a very popular target for her critics.
In an article published in the journal Feminist Review, Sarah Waters finds that Christina’s
political enemies quote, “used accusations of lesbianism–along with allegations of heterosexual
profligacy–in a general attempt to undermine her intellectual and political standing”.
There were multiple publications which sought to
slander Christina and paint her as a dangerous lesbian.
In the 1660s, a series of pamphlets claimed “that respectable women refused to take their
daughters to visit Christina, because she’d been seen putting her hand up ladies’ skirts”
- Bad King! Or good King if they were okay with that... wait,
can you consent to a King? That's probably not a power dynamic that has a lot of wiggle room...
This was also around the time Christina was a prominent political figure who was bidding for
the throne of Naples, executing one of her chief attendants against the
pope's wishes and very publically living as a religious convert.
But her critics did not just attack her politics. They
instead capitalised on Christina’s social vulnerabilities, further estranging gender
nonconformity from societal acceptance and vilifying same-sex relationships.
The same alleged sexual voraciousness for which Christina was castigated was
praised under different circumstances, namely every king ever and heterosexual marriage.
Take Queen Victoria.
I mean, she had nine children. Even with the different state of access to contraceptives,
one does have to have a certain amount of sex to achieve nine children. That’s
not to mention the, ahem, detailed personal accounts Victoria recorded in her diaries.
But this was all sex had in wedlock with her lawful husband. Very upstanding and
not at all like Christina’s ribald debauchery.
Christina’s abdication is thought to be motivated by her reluctance
to enter marriage and produce heirs, and well, again, Victoria had nine children.
- Victoria’s governess recalls Victoria reacting
to the expectations set upon her by declaring “I will be good”
How these 2 women were thought of socially at the time and the iconography that was
built around the time was, as you can imagine, expectaculary different.
Whatever private misgivings Victoria had, specifically about pregnancy and motherhood,
(which she kind of hated) the public’s perception of Victoria’s personal life
was glowing. The public found Victoria to be a paragon of Victorian ideals of
womanhood which encouraged women to devote themselves to marriage and motherhood.
Two centuries earlier, Christina found herself subject to very similar expectations which she
thoroughly rejected with her princely upbringing, masculine habits, and androgynous style.
They both in a sense had to perform gender, regardless of their own internal feelings,
in order to be accepted as a very young female monarch in the society of that time. One became
the absolute pinnacle of womanhood and the other was expected to be Kingly.
Which is not to say that Victoria had a huge deal of freedom granted
by her role as 'mother of the country' or that Christina was somehow accepted
without question when she was clearly unapologetic in her gender nonconformity.
It isn’t about feminine or masculine gender presentation; it’s about the adherence to or
divergence from expectations. Expectations about how a woman should comport herself
and expectations about what power, knowledge, and competence look like.
Personally I always find it really interesting meeting people for the
first time in a professional setting like a corporate talk
- yes I do corporate talks, hire me
but sometimes people do a double take and tell me I look like a princess or 'adorable' or
'cute' and... I'm not entirely sure that they realise they'll often use phrases
that actually convey a lack of power or a childishness when what they mean to say is:
"you are very 'high femme' at the top end of where society tells me feminine is"
Thanks? I guess... this is just how I feel
comfortable. But less so when you stare at me like that...
If elle woods taught us anything it's that we can wear pink and be professional, right?
Also, you do you.
The point is whatever label we personally feel we identify with doesn't really have that much
attachment to our outsides and how we choose to express ourselves and it would be lovely
to see a greater variety of figures out there in the world who are also representing this.
Which is why I think King Christina is so great
and wanted to share her with you today if you haven't already come across it.
I hope you've enjoyed this video if you were intrigued by the woman involved in
Hollywood's very first kiss between two women then you can click the card right
up here in this corner or the link down in my description to watch my video about
bisexual anti-fascist Marlene Dietrich she's the one in the suit and top hat
and yes
yes I know
yes yes
Thank you so much for watching again um I hope you are just as fascinated by King Christina
as I am. Make sure you also click the link in the description to get your Surfshark offer.
Clicking through really helps support the channel
so I appreciate all of you who do and I'll see you in my next video!