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Overview
Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture. Contributors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour. They argue that the dynamics of theatrical eroticism served to deconstruct gender definitions, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent.In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up an attractive and distinctive perspective in cultural debate.
Synopsis
Taking eroticism on the English renaissance stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, the essays in Erotic Politics examine the nature of sexual definition and desire in early modern culture. Recent studies of Renaissance sexuality have focused on the subversive potential of gender reversal, yet this collection widens the arena of debate to study the structure and cultural definition of erotic desire. The authors view the Renaissance stage as a decoder for erotic experience which is used to both reinforce and subvert expected sexual behaviour.
Any examination of Renaissance eroticism must acknowledge the profound shift in sexual sensibility which took place after the seventeenth century, a shift which introduced concepts of sexual dimorphism and constructed the category of "homosexuality." Erotic Politics views the theatrical convention of cross-dressing as part of a dynamic which served to deconstruct gender itself, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused, or absent. It also addresses a crucial theoretical problem in postmodern criticism: how can a subjective phenomena, such as Renaissance erotic experience, be placed in its historical, public context? And can this experience be examined without recourse to psychoanalytic theory? In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire, this collection opens up a new and distinctive perspective in the cultural debate.
Contributors: Catherine Belsey, Jean E. Howard, Lisa Jardine, Kathleen McLuskie, Stephen Orgel, Bruce R. Smith, Peter Stallybrass, Valerie Traub, and Susan Zimmerman.