No, it's still not "Lysistrata time"
and it never will be until we have trans liberation
In the aftermath of the election, appeals to follow the example of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and stop sleeping with men until they get their shit together have been making the rounds again — as they did during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote in October 2018, and after a fetal heartbeat bill was passed in Georgia in May 2019. And even earlier, in November 2017, when an article in McSweeney’s declared: “Listen Up, Bitches: It’s Lysistrata Time!”
I do highly recommend that piece, which includes gems such as, “Their chorus sings, ‘Not all men.’ But our women’s chorus answers back, ‘Yes all men, you smegma-brained douchenozzles.’” Flawless.
However, I am once again out here pointing to the sign that says THE CONCEPT OF “LYSISTRATA TIME” AS IT IS CURRENTLY CONCEIVED IS QUEER- AND TRANSPHOBIC. I should probably come up with a catchier sign.
Several amazing writers on this platform have already written about the interest in the 4B movement in the US in the context of the current moment’s absolute exhaustion with how much heterosexuality sucks. Which is great news for me, because I don’t need to retread that ground! Instead, start with this piece by
, this one by , and this one by .On the one hand, I can’t believe we’re talking about sex strikes and Lysistrata again. (I also wrote about the topic here and spoke with
about it on her podcast last year.) But I also know that we will always, always keep talking about this, especially considering the dramatic shift of young male voters to the right. Our electoral politics are already a battle of the sexes.So I get why people are excited about the possibilities of just swearing off sex and romance with men. But we can’t ignore the valid critiques of the 4B movement, including its deep roots in transphobia. It’s worth sticking with that for a moment, because the transphobia is, as they say, a feature and not a bug of most Lysistrata-esque movements.
When I was studying the reception of Lysistrata, I came across a handful of passing references to the existence of queer people. One woman in Chi-raq says “Thank god I’m a dyke,” and the 2012 comic Lysistrata in Gangland ends with the men finally agreeing to parley but instead making out while their horrified partners look on. But I’ve never seen any acknowledgment of trans people, who might complicate the neat gender binary of Aristophanes’ play.
It’s not an accident that Lysistrata was translated by Germaine Greer, who was broadly criticized and deplatformed in 2015 — nearly a decade ago!! — for saying that trans women aren’t women and doubling down every time she was criticized. Greer’s translation is still broadly read and was one of the recommended translations in the 2003 anti-war protest The Lysistrata Project.
Fascinatingly, Greer sets her version of Lysistrata in a bathhouse — a men’s locker room, really, that has been taken over by Lysistrata and her comrades. Greer situates the men’s locker room as a place of power, where wheeling and dealing are done and decisions are made. The women’s entry into that space is a powerful incursion that blocks the normal workings of male-centered government.
There’s some kind of psychic overlap between Lysistrata and locker rooms. I’m not exactly sure what it is. But between Greer’s translation, the two young adult Lysistrata adaptations focused around sports teams (the YA novel Shut Out and Broadway play Lysistrata Jones) and the widespread call for it to be “Lysistrata time” after Brett Kavanagh’s sexual assault was dismissed as “locker room talk”… there’s clearly a fascinating nexus of meaning here.
But the invasion of the men’s locker room by Lysistrata in Greer’s translation is just the cheerful, happy obverse of the coin. On its dark reverse is the specter of trans women in women’s bathrooms. Greer is Australian but was educated in the UK, and it’s no surprise to hear her echoing the common TERF talking points there that position trans women as a danger to cis women in bathrooms and other single-sex spaces. It’s cute (and maybe politically efficacious) when women take over men’s locker rooms, but the policing of who belongs in women’s locker rooms has real teeth.
There are so many possible critiques against the idea of a Lysistrata-inspired sex strike, but the brief overlap with the 4B movement is showing just how deeply embedded essentialist ideas about the gender binary have been in our readings of Aristophanes’ text. This was a play written by a man, performed by men, for an audience of men — but now people want to use it to create a movement that exclusively accepts cis hetero women? Why?!
The feminist theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case makes a similar point in her 1985 article “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts.” Here’s the argument of her piece, in a nutshell:
The feminist reader of The Oresteia discovers that she must read against the text, resisting not only its internal sense of pathos and conclusion, but also the historical and cultural codes which surround it, including its treatment within theatre history… She definitely feels excluded from the conventions of the stage, bewildered by the convention of cross-gender casting which is only practiced in terms of female characters. Mimesis is not possible for her. Perhaps the feminist reader will decide that the female roles have nothing to do with women, that these roles should be played by men, as fantasies of "Woman" as "Other" than men, disruptions of a patriarchal society which illustrates its fear and loathing of the female parts. In fact, the feminist reader might become persuaded that the Athenian roles of Medea, Clytemnestra, Cassandra or Phaedra are properly played as drag roles.
My demand-avoidant ass felt a little bratty reading that passage — oh, the feminist reader definitely feels that way, does she? (Except that, yes, this particular feminist reader has indeed felt that way, and I even wrote my first-ever Eidolon article about it. But still! Stop telling me how to feel!)
Case ends the article with an appeal to Lysistrata specifically:
The feminist theatre practitioner may come to a new understanding of how to reproduce the classic Greek plays. For example, rather than considering a text such as Lysistrata as a good play for women, she might view it as a male drag show, with burlesque jokes about breasts and phalluses playing well within the drag tradition. The feminist director may cast a man in the role of Medea, underscoring the patriarchal prejudices of ownership/jealousy and children as male-identified concerns. The feminist actor may no longer regard these roles as desirable for her career. Overall, the feminist practitioners and scholars may decide that such plays do not belong in the canon — that they are not central to the study and practice of theatre.
Ignoring how badly she’s setting off my bratty side again with these sweeping declarations, I do think she makes an excellent point. I’ve never seen a drag Lysistrata, but I’d love to.
Obviously, this is a text that still speaks to the present political moment, even though it was created in a very different one. But for it to have real, activist potential, we’ll need to radically reimagine the gender roles in both the play itself and in its reception to accommodate the broad spectrum of gender presentation and identity. Only solidarity can save us.
Drag Lysistrata is a brilliant idea!