ABSTRACT
Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boybegan as a performance when the sitter dressed up in an old-fashioned costume, climbed up on a platform, and posed as an aristocrat. In private and public venues where viewers saw the actual painting and in settings where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed. The original content of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy was altered as ironic and parodic reiterations shifted the contextual ground and transformed its meaning through performance and performativity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the ostensible masculine gender of Gainsborough’s subject has conflicted with the female actors who performed as The Blue Boy and with the cultural constructions of what constituted masculinity and femininity in everyday life. The conflation of gender and sexuality led to the prevalent and long-lived idea that sexual inversion explained homosexuality.
