my professor was saying it's problematic to call Shakespeare characters queer because our concept of queerness didn't exist when the plays were written which i get but just... don't see the big deal with thinking Antonio and Sebastian are in love

i just feel weird that we were kinda joking and fooling around in regards to the characters being queer and she's like "we cannot deny the heterosexual pairings in the end" and it's kinda like... yeah, obviously?

Her exact words are "if we do not know how someone self-identifies, it is fair to identify them within a category hundreds of years later, a category that did not exist then and in which they possibly would not even understand?"

We're reading "Twelfth Night" and we were calling it queer and she said, "it does not necessarily mean that, if they feel desire for a character of the same gender, then they are necessarily queer" and I'm not trying to attack I just genuinely don't understand???

i feel bad for tweeting this now because it sounds like I'm dunking on her. she's a good professor I just really don't get this! and hoped other people did