Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis, İstanbul, Türkiye, 13 - 15 Mayıs 2026, (Yayınlanmadı)
William Shakespeare’s "Macbeth" plays a crucial role in reflecting the gender and moral norms of the Elizabethan Age, in which it was written and staged. Through a textual analysis of gender and moral crisis as intertwined dynamics in the light of Butler’s concept of performativity, which suggests that gender is not innate, but constructed through performative norms socially imposed on the individual, this study seeks to explore how Lady Macbeth and Macbeth navigate a gender crisis by destabilizing heteronormativity in their society in order to numb their moral crisis. Though Lady Macbeth displays no explicit political ambition, a choice visible in the absence of any discursive sign of her doing so, she wishes to expedite the realization of the prophecies telling her husband’s future reign. To avoid moral crisis due to the regicide, she desires a gender-neutral form emancipated from all those behavioural and psychological characteristics of femininity, especially those determined by the gender norms of the period. In addition, she manipulates her husband by establishing a link between the act of killing and masculinity. Whenever Macbeth questions the moral dimensions of regicide, she constantly questions his masculine identity and accuses him of not behaving like a man, weaponizing gender performativity to stimulate him. Macbeth’s act of murder to fulfil the demands of masculine performance imposed by his wife at the cost of moral integrity makes him ironically go beyond the most important gender role, honour, imposed by society, as regicide is morally unacceptable due to the King’s role as an entity of God on Earth in the beliefs of the Elizabethan monarchical order. In the play, the Macbeth couple reveals gender crisis to override their moral crisis, which dominantly affects the trajectory of the tragedy. Thus, both gender crisis and moral crisis appear to be more than peripheral thematic concerns, playing a central role in the formation of the characters’ hamartia.