Search Results

This chapter historicizes queer theory’s insight that lesbianism is often linked to a problem of representation by focusing on links between questions of reading and Platonic-inflected female-female erotic love. It first establishes the complicated discursive context of this larger hermeneutic question through the reception of Sapphic sexuality and, especially, of the female-female being who makes a brief appearance in Aristophanes’s myth of the origin of love from the Symposium. The chapter then turns to one of the very few Neoplatonic representations of female-female eros in the Renaissance, a series of poems by male poets written in the voice of a woman in love with another woman. Embedded within the poems by Jodelle, Tyard, and Ronsard are Neoplatonic commonplaces as well as references to male-male love. The poems are not so much inscribing same-sex female sexuality in the Neoplatonic tradition as much as they are writing it out by decorporealizing love between women. But also, the poets who write about female-female love are also inherently evoking male-male homoeroticism as a way to experience it vicariously, and for this reason, the “lesbian” poems can be taken as a newly-developed and rather sophisticated way to set Plato straight by detour.

The introduction begins by addressing how current debates about the value of literary studies and the humanities often return to the English Renaissance. It then lays out the argument of the book, outlining the study’s archive, its organization, its methodologies, its contributions to literary studies, and its style.

The coda identifies the double binds that the book attempts to grapple with. Specifically, it explains the performativity of the study and argues that rethinking the pleasures and literariness of criticism offers one way of moving beyond the impasses that mark current debates over the value of literature and the humanities.

Most readers of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II locate the play’s radicalism in the sexualized challenge that Edward’s homoerotic relations with Gaveston and the Spensers pose to dynastic monarchy and aristocratic governance. This chapter replaces erotics with necrotics to argue that royal sodomy and homoerotic friendship can be accommodated by the play’s political order with relative ease; royal death, by contrast, exposes fundamental weaknesses within dominant conceptions of sovereignty. While recent queer theory has aligned queerness with mortality, Edward II pointedly detaches sexuality from death, offering Edward political opportunities in dying that are unavailable through queer eroticism. In prison, Edward subsumes regimes of dynastic sovereignty within the biological existence of the body. Even once dead, Edward is not superseded because the theater suggests he may still be minimally present, in the slippage between bodies and in props, in the presence of an actor offstage, and in the violence carried out in his name. Rather than supporting a particular structure of power, Edward’s death indicates the range of political potentialities inherent in exposure to mortality, which might alternatively support republican, absolutist, bureaucratic, or tyrannical regimes.

The dastangoi tradition of storytelling speaks of desire in much the same way as Shakespeare’s drama does. It travels to different places, dresses up men as women, explores non-normative desires, and does not conclude so much as stop. Putting dastangoi and Shakespeare in conversation with one another reveals ways in which we can think of desire as a universal, as something that universally refuses the borders of identity.