{"id":1439,"date":"2011-02-07T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T09:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=1439"},"modified":"2011-02-07T09:00:38","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T09:00:38","slug":"an-alphabet-of-femininism-17-q-is-for-queen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/02\/07\/an-alphabet-of-femininism-17-q-is-for-queen\/","title":{"rendered":"An Alphabet of Feminism #17: Q is for Queen"},"content":{"rendered":"
Q<\/h6>\n

QUEEN<\/h2>\n

To sour your happiness, I must report
\nThe queen is dead.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare, Cymbeline <\/strong>(1611)\u00a0V.5.3400<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Queen <\/em>is\u00a0one of the few Alphabet words with a firmly\u00a0British <\/em>origin, but it makes up for its lack of Latinate pedigree by being extremely complicated. So this is the part where the rap breaks down – it comes from the Old English cwen<\/em>, the proto-Germanic kwoeniz<\/em>, and (follow it back far enough) the proto-Indo-European\u00a0gwen<\/em> (= ‘woman, wife’). Proto-awesome, man. In this form it coincides rather nicely with the Greek\u00a0gyne<\/em>, meaning\u00a0‘woman, wife’ (thus gynecology<\/em>, misoGYNy<\/em>, gynophobia<\/em>, and indeed gynocentric<\/em>), and a whole host of other languages that I don’t think we need all up in our grill just now.<\/p>\n

My Family and Other Animals<\/h3>\n

The interesting thing about these origins is their relation to another word: quean<\/em>, originally a variant form of queen<\/em>, meaning then ‘woman, female’ but now mostly an ‘effeminate homosexual man’ (cf., er, queen<\/em>). Its etymology is similar, but with more emphasis on the insults: thus, quean<\/em>‘s forebears\u00a0include the Middle Dutch quene <\/em>(= ‘older woman’), the Dutch kween <\/em>(= ‘hussy’) and the Middle Low German quene <\/em>(= ‘woman, wife, old woman’). It eventually gives us ‘a promiscuous woman’ sometime around the sixteenth century.<\/p>\n

\"State<\/a>

Anne, later Queen Anne, at the time of her marriage, 1683.<\/p><\/div>\n

As is often the case, plenty of forebears inevitably only leads to plenty of embarrassing cousins, and many of these roots (cwen <\/em>and the Greek gyne <\/em>in particular) have also been claimed as parents to cunt<\/em> ( = \u00a0‘the vulva or vagina’), spelled quaint <\/em>and sometimes\u00a0queynt <\/em>by Chaucer, just to illustrate the fluidity of ‘cw’, ‘qu’ and ‘cu’. When you know that portcwene <\/em>( = literally ‘a public woman’) means ‘prostitute’, the association of quean \/ quean <\/em>and cunt <\/em>may perhaps become somewhat clearer: it’s what you might call synecdoche<\/a>. This may also throw some light on quean\/queen<\/em>‘s\u00a0gay associations: inevitably, words that suggest penetration of the female (pussy<\/a>, bitch<\/em>) are eventually seized upon to denigrate an ‘effeminate’ man.\u00a0Queen <\/em>as ‘a flamboyant homosexual’ is from the 1920s (as is\u00a0queer<\/em>, which originally means ‘oblique, off centre’), thus coinciding with a modicum more gay visibility than its sixteenth century usage.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

But it’s not all doom, gloom and back to the Unmentionables: let’s talk thrones. English is unusual in giving a queen <\/em>her own word, and not simply feminizing king <\/em>(= ‘of noble birth’) – compare the French roi <\/em>and reine<\/em>, from the Latin rex <\/em>and regina. <\/em>Nonetheless, the first definition of a queen <\/em>in the dictionary is as ‘a king’s wife or consort; a lady who is wife to a king’\u00a0but the second sense, as ‘a woman who is the chief ruler of a state, having the same rank and position as a king’, is Old English itself, so the two definitions are likely to be essentially simultaneous.<\/p>\n

The English the English the English are best.<\/h3>\n

Yes, over here on Albion’s chalk-ringed shores, we’ve had no less than seven reigning queens<\/em>. By contrast, even pre-1789, the hated French would never let Ringo have a go – lol Salic law<\/a> \u2013 and all their famous female royals were lowly consorts (Margaret de Valois<\/a>, Catherine de Medici<\/a>, Marie Antoinette<\/a>…), although Henri IV<\/a> was several degrees more awesome than any English king, ever. Look at how pleased with himself he is<\/a>! But I digress.<\/p>\n

However positive the existence of historical female monarchs on this royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle<\/a>, the residual physicality of\u00a0queen <\/em>in relation to\u00a0cunt <\/em>is still lurking around, and the body of the\u00a0queen <\/em>has always carried a significance that goes beyond everyday concerns about legitimacy (although those are there too). Catherine of Aragon<\/a> and Anne of Cleves<\/a>, queens to Henry VIII,\u00a0were both publicly subjected to a\u00a0series of intimate questions<\/a> (and threatened physical examination) about their wedding-bed virginity, genital health and sexual history, and that’s before you get into discussions down the pub throughout history about When The King Is A Queen (thus\u00a0Edward II<\/a> roundly condemned for A Weak King and put to an ‘ironic’ death<\/a>), and the reigning\u00a0queen<\/em>‘s menstrual cycle and\u00a0likelihood of producing a royal heir<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This last was an issue that clearly dogged even those English queens ruling in their own right: in 1554, Mary I<\/a> was declared to be with child, triggering thanksgiving services and country-wide celebration, until over a year later her belly decreased in size and the ‘pregnancy’ was revealed to be a humiliating ‘phantom’ (pseudocyesis<\/a>), caused by her intense desire for an heir. After a second false pregnancy two years later, she died (possibly from a uterine tumour) in 1558.<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/a>

Elizabeth I carrying a sieve, the traditional accessory of the Vestal Virgins. c.1583<\/p><\/div>\n

A couple of hundred years later, amid some of the most spectacular changes in British history,\u00a0Mary ‘Williamanmary’ II<\/a> and\u00a0her <\/em>sister,\u00a0Anne<\/a>,\u00a0were competing to be the first to bear a child, and, in consequence, were rarely on speaking terms. Mary had an early miscarriage which may have permanently impaired her ability to have a baby, while Anne (despite being fairly definitely gay herself) had six children who died, eight still-births and four miscarriages. Meanwhile, a few\u00a0Georges and a William later,\u00a0Victoria<\/a>‘s famous fruitfulness was widely seen as a positive statement about British greatness in an imperial age: the truly maternal monarch, whose offspring gave England royal relations in Hesse, Prussia (though post-1914 we didn’t talk about that), and Russia (oops).<\/p>\n

Queen Of My Heart.<\/h3>\n

But, of course, we (along with everyone else, ho ho) have not touched on Elizabeth I<\/a>, the ‘Virgin Queen’, Gloriana, etc who\u00a0managed to make a virtue of childlessness by representing the immaculate body of the queen as the symbol of a healthy\u00a0nation.\u00a0Bang on cue, queen<\/em>‘s third meaning is ‘a female whose rank or pre-eminence is comparable to that of a queen; applied, for example, to the Virgin Mary, to the goddesses of ancient religions or mythologies, or to a woman as a term of endearment or honour’. This is the sense it has in\u00a0Twelfth Night <\/strong>when Viola is ‘Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen<\/em>‘, in which context it has something of lady<\/a> <\/em>about it, just ramped up to full throttle: someone who is also the ‘chief \u00a0ruler of a state’ is indeed a mistress par excellence.<\/em><\/p>\n

It was this tradition that Elizabeth milked till it had no more to give, presenting herself as the adored lady <\/em>at the centre of a courtly cult of virginity, an age which\u00a0produced Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene<\/a><\/strong> and Walter Raleigh’s The Ocean To Cynthia<\/a><\/strong>, as well as hundreds of portraits\u00a0depicting Queen Elizabeth <\/em>as immaculate goddess and virgin. Her fleshlessness was only exacerbated after 1592, when the elderly queen<\/em> stopped sitting for portraits at all, forcing artists to work from earlier templates of her face, creating an eternal ‘Mask of Youth’<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So queen <\/em>is a word that fuses sexuality and a microscopic focus on the body (where more so than in its use to attack people for what they like to do in the bedroom?) with a kind of awestruck ‘Glorianian’ respect. Those who sit on this lexical pedestal are perhaps a little wonky: it is unfortunate that queenly<\/em> success seems attainable only for those rulers who have produced litters of miniature monarchs and the one who maintained a virginal ice-princess sort of deal. But then, looking back over England’s history (and, of course, its present), it is cheering to see that Women Have At Least Done It. Now if we could just fix that male primogeniture business…<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/a><\/p>\n

NEXT WEEK: R is for Rake<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n