Prosthetic Forms of Sex in Early Modern Warrior Women Ballads

Bernadette Kelly

During their popularity, ballads were held in the collective memory of those who sold them and those who sang them for entertainment. Although most ballads passed out of favor fairly quickly, we can see that favorites were kept in various collections. The street callers had to know the popular tunes that were often shared by many ballads or have a working knowledge of the ballad genre to cry them out to the crowds. There is also the rowdy imagery of the alehouse where ballads could be collectively sung. This human network of collective memory has taken a turn from a neuropsychological function to the technological as more digital humanities projects appear. Databases, such as our Warrior Women Project, allow us to save, sift through, and interact with information in new ways. I would like to look at how digitally archiving Diane Dugaw’s collection of warrior women is a way for us examine the ballads subjects differently. As we remove the ballads from their physical broadside form, we can also separate the female- by-birth women from the social construct of gender and the ontology that is created by gender binaries. An example being the column dedicated to sorting out which ballads mention feminine characteristics (which will be discussed further below). We are building a technological memory that connects the subjects through their subversion of normative female behavior. 

Gender and queer theorists have already discussed how gender is a societal construct based on the normative representations of the gender binary put forth by ideological power structures. However, I would like to look at the construct of gender by separating the subjects from the bodies in Diane Dugaw’s warrior women ballads to dismantle the idea that gender can simply be assigned by tallying up features that society has denoted as abstract characteristics of a woman or man. Some of these female signs are visceral, such as their hands, hair, arms, breasts etc. Other female signs are material, such as skirts and adornments. By viewing the visceral as material, they become just another material sign of femininity. Hands— those five-pronged lumps at the end of our arms— are only feminine because society deemed that women, or at least upper-class women, should not work with their hands. I look at my own thick hands and see them as manly, but why? I was born a female, yet my hands are larger than plenty of males. By viewing the body as an object, one can see how certain, non-sexual parts are not necessarily gendered at birth, but rather gendered by the sexual parts that are attached. Furthermore (and more tangibly), the ontology that exists due to gender binaries is also connected to female ballad callers. Some of those women built personas for themselves by taking children (sometimes their own, sometimes orphans) with them when they worked to incite sympathy from the crowds. By representing themselves as mothers, the women boosted their function within the network of society. Mothers, as reproductive, were productive members of society because they contributed to the social hierarchy. By privileging women who had children, without considering her own identity, we are also separating their female bodies from their subjective existence. Although these topics, from digital memory to social ontology, seem far from each other, I think that they are interwoven through our digitalization of Diane Dugaw’s Warrior Women collection.