![]() Castration is the surgical removal of the testicles. To appreciate the nuances of contemporary stagings of baroque opera, we must begin with the history of the castrato. The resulting performances move beyond heteronormativity, and reinforce the characterization by culture scholars Corinne Blackmer and Patricia Smith of opera as a very queer art form (1995:8). The lens is Georg Frideric Handel's opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto or "Julius Caesar in Egypt." I examine gender and sexuality interpretations that result from what has been called the "castrato problem." While this and many other baroque works were written specifically for castrati, the vocal superstars of the baroque era, the cessation of castration as a practice has thankfully forced contemporary opera directors to make a variety of choices when casting roles originally written for castrati. The culture-scape is baroque opera in the years 17. In my mediation, I want to take several voices from the past and, hoping that I do not put too many words in their mouths, contrast their constructed realities with related constructs in the present. Of course, a comparison of historical and contemporary attitudes is something of an artificial construct in and of itself while we might perceive past voices only through a glass, darkly, via diaries, documents, and art, these voices can enter into a dialogue with the present only through mediation by a third party, in this case, myself. ![]() Nothing is created in a vacuum, and while the cultural constructs of historical eras differ vastly from those of the present, they crucially inform the here and now, being not dead, or even completely past. This idea that the past is always present is at the heart of this paper. William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. ![]()
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