The culture wars over Joan of Arc at Shakespeare's Globe - Bird Lovegod

It is an interesting strategy because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the product or service, and absolutely everything to do with beliefs and ideology.

I am not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it before, and I wonder how long before such marketing happens here in the UK.

Then I think about it, and all the brands wrapping themselves in modified Rainbow flags because that’s the cultural trend, and perhaps that is a similar thing? So what do we think about ideology as marketing?

Should businesses be in the business of ideological promotion? Is this something that belongs in commerce?

Ultimately it is a marketing call, and if the cultural trend is towards, for example, gender diversity, that is the bandwagon the corporations jump on. And in doing so, propel it, promote it, and accelerate the literal transition from one cultural reality to another, perhaps at a rate that not everyone is comfortable with.

What brought this to mind today was an announcement by the Shakespeare Globe Theatre that it is putting on a play about Joan of Arc, and guess what, Joan is ‘non binary.’ (They/Them.)

Okay, so it’s art, I get that, but here’s the thing. History is very short on heroic women, it having been written mostly by men, so to take one of those women, and make her not a woman, may be considered problematic. Would it be OK to portray an historic heroic black person as white? Or a heroic gay person as straight? Or a heroic trans person as the wrong gender?

Many would say not. But to portray a heroic historical women as ‘non binary’, that’s progressive? Actually, one might argue, it’s the exact opposite.

It is misogynistic. It is mis-gendering. It is hypocritical. It is anti feminist.

It is wrong, on so many levels, and there’s a certain validity to these arguments, of which there are many.

The Globe typically gets between two and 10 comments for every post they make on Twitter.

This post currently has 4,850 and counting, and almost all of them are highly critical of this production. Most of the comments are from women who are tired of being erased and their history re-written.

If The Globe had upset 4,000 gay people, or 4,000 Jews, or 4,000 Muslims I’m pretty sure the production would be in the bin already.

But it seems it’s okay to upset women because they’re not as important. And back to Joan of Arc we go, with life imitating art.

Where were we? Ah yes, culture wars, and the divisive nature of them. What’s troubling is that straws like the I Joan play are the breakers of camels’ backs, and rather than inclusivity they engender hostility, defensiveness, separation, and divide.

Some might say it’s much ado about nothing, and on one hand it is.

But on the other hand it’s a thermometer of feelings, how hot do they run, and in this summer of discontent, prior to the autumn and winter of the same, the feeling of people having had enough, of politicians, of Government deceit, of energy extortion, of reality distortion, it is notable.

We are not quite where America is with a population so divided that you can market to either side based entirely on ideology and nothing else, but we are not a million miles away from it either.

In fact, it may well be just around the corner.

“The day is hot; the Gammons / Woke Brigade abroad;

And if we meet we shall not scape a brawl, for now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”

To quote The Bard. He/Him.