Disguise, gender and voice in Decameron 2.9 and the Porter and the Three Ladies

Anna Dini (Berkeley), visiting PhD student in Italian, will give a research presentation on her current work.

About Anna's research

Gender crossing and sartorial disguise is paramount for Zinevra in the Decameron. To escape an attempt on her life, she lives six years as the masculine alter ego Sicurano da Finale. This person earns a sultan's confidence to be hired as a grand uomo — a dignitary — for official business in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the Thousand and One Nights tradition, Shahrazad also ventriloquizes a famous dignitary in one of her stories.

In the Porter and the Three Ladies (al- Ḥammāl wal- ṣabāyā al-thalāth), the famous caliph Haroun al-Rashid and his renown vizir, Ja'far al-Barmaki, disguise themselves as merchants while wandering through Baghdad. Through the alibi that Ja'far construes in disguise, Shahrazad tells the tyrannical king about the injustices of his city. Moreover, by bringing narrative life to the caliph and the vizir from centuries past, she continues to dissuade Shahrayar from committing perpetual femicide.

Through clothes and storytelling, Zinevra and Shahrazad employ gender crossing, thereby gaining the power of persuasion before their powerful audience members. Reading these texts together indicates the necessity of gender crossing in these medieval frame tale collections.