Valerie Traub

What do we know about early modern sex? And how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In this book, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns

David M. Halperin

Asking if the political requirements of gay pride have repressed discussion of the more uncomfortable or undignified aspects of homosexuality, 'Gay Shame' seeks to lift this unofficial ban on the investigation of homosexuality and shame by presenting critical work from the most vibrant frontier in contemporary queer studies.

Gay Shame

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama – circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional.

Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama

Desire and Anxiety (Routledge Revivals)

Medieval and early modern authors engaged with Ovid's tale of "Iphis and Ianthe" in a number of surprising ways. from Christian translations to secular retellings on the seventeenth-century stage, Ovid's story of a girl's miraculous transformation into a boy sparked a diversity of responses in English and French from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In addition to analyzing various translations and commentaries, the volume clusters essays around treatments of John Lyly's Galatea (c.1585) and Issac de Benserade's Iphis et Iante (1637). As a whole, the volume addresses gender and transgender, sexuality and gallantry, anatomy and alchemy, fable and history, youth and pedagogy, language and climate change

'Iphis and Ianthe', 1300-1650

Ovidian Transversions

Dympna Callaghan

Frederick G L Huetwell Professor of English and Women's Studies Valerie Traub

M. Lindsay Kaplan

Callaghan Dympna

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism.

Emerging Subjects

Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 42 of the most important scholars and writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Gender, Sexuality, and Race

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love and eroticism in early modern literature and drama.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England

The forty established and emerging scholars whose work is included in this volume bring an expansive understanding of feminism to questions of embodiment in Shakespeare and early modern studies. Using a diverse range of methods--historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, critical race studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, eco-criticism, animal studies, disability studies, textual editing, performance and media studies--they present original readings of Shakespeare's plays and poems while situating his work both in the early modern period and the present day. Paying particular attention to the intersections of gender with race and sexuality, the volume collectively offers an exciting snapshot of the ways that 'feminism' and 'Shakespeare' continue to speak to and challenge each another.

Valerie Traub

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