In the past few decades, feminist critics have conveniently regarded the sonnet as a fundamentally masculine genre, as a bulwark of male subjectivity and a site of female objectification. This essay argues that the gendered allegiances of the nineteenth-century sonnet are much more complicated, and originate in the feminization that this male-dominated genre underwent in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Taking William Gifford's critique on the Della Cruscan poets in his satires The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795) as a case study, it examines the use of the feminized sonnet genre as satirical tool and as a metaphor of marginalization
