effeminated

comparative more effeminated · superlative most effeminated

1. derogatoryoftenHaving feminine qualities; effeminate.

   Lisa Jardine sees Viola as an effeminated male, as does Stephen Greenblatt .

   2000, Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, page 57

   5 more examples

   whereas, presently upon his censure at this time, his ambition was moderated, his pride humbled, and the means of his former injustice and corruption removed, you would he not relinquish the practice of his most horrible and secret sin of sodomy, keeping still one Godrich, a very effeminated youth, to be his catamite and bed-fellow,

   1834, Letters of the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, page xv

   So we get him between the upper and nether mill-stones of a compusory law that requires him to go, and a baffled teacher who forbids him to come– till he is fit for nothing but the reform-school, or the jail, where at last he encounters that physical force which our effeminated public opinion was afraid to have touch him in the first place, when it might have saved him.

   1886, Ford's Christian Repository - Volumes 41-42, page 300

   While all readers of Praxis occupy the effeminated reader position and double-read, within that position, readers are interpellated as feminists, and as feminist women in particular.

   1991, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Re-visionary Heteroglossia, page 298

   The emperor fortunately did not want to demolish the Alhambra but he tried "to conserve it, but reduced, neutralized and effeminated".

   2012, D.M. Mark, Andrew U. Frank, Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, page 59

   Echoing standard eighteenth-century moral-philosophical platitudes, ancient Highland society is portrayed as "manly" and noble, in contrast with the "effeminated" state of civilizatioon and luxury.

   2013, Matthew Wickman, The Ruins of Experience

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of effeminate