Deviant Soldiers: Gender Non-Conformity and Identity in English Military Ballads, c. 1650-1700

For much of history, war has been constructed as a masculine domain. Since the values of the soldier are typically expressed in distinctly masculine terms, a large part of martial identity can be understood as masculine identity. English ballads of the early modern period often told stories of manly heroes whose courage, strength and virtue in the face of violence served as a vindication of their masculinity. But from the late sixteenth century, a new protagonist entered the public imagination: the female warrior, a perceived woman who cross-dresses as a man to join the wars, often following a lover. Songs of this type had become a recurring trope in people’s singing traditions by the end of the seventeenth century. Crucially, their more or less set story pattern invariably presented the protagonist as an able martial hero, typically rewarded, rather than punished, for their transgressive venturing.

In this paper, I explore the popular trope of the cross-dressing warrior as a paradoxical protagonist in cultural representations of early modern martial identities. The trope of the male-disguised female soldier opens up the idea of gender non-conformity in the protagonist’s desire to crossdress to join the army, but also reinforces gender-conforming stereotypes of martialness by continuing to present war as a masculine domain and framing the hero’s actions as acts of love and loyalty to a male lover. It presents gender as performative by praising the protagonist’s performance of masculinity in battle, but also highlights the importance of embodied sex by ultimately removing them from the battlefield on account of an exposed breast or a pregnant belly. This narrative exposes connections between fluctuating ideas about gender and notions of martialness, demonstrating how alternative masculinities, performed in a deviant or non-conforming way, were an attractive way of constructing martial identities in the cultural imagination of the late seventeenth century.