Mario DiGangi. Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. viii + 296 pp. $65. ISBN: 978–0–8122–4361–1.

Abstract

Mario DiGangi's latest book is an ambitious and eminently compelling study of sexual types in early modern English literature and culture. Though he may have chosen any number of types available in the period's cultural imaginary, DiGangi focuses on six: the sodomite, the tribade, the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the monstrous favorite. As DiGangi defines the concept, ''the sexual type'' is not ''the bearer of a sexual identity or subjectivity,'' but rather ''a familiar cultural figure that renders sexual agency intelligible as a symptom of the transgression of gender, social, economic, or political order'' (6). This is not to suggest that sexual types are static ideological formations. Indeed, another chief aim of DiGangi's book is to show ''that when a sexual type is embodied in a dramatic character, the character's own strategies for resisting the constraints of dominant social and sexual ideologies can disturb the logic of the reductive and vilified associations imposed by the type'' (6-7). For DiGangi, then, embodiment becomes an important strategy for unsettling boundaries between the normative and transgressive, the licit and illicit. DiGangi organizes his book into three parts, each with two chapters. In part 1, ''Sexual Types and Necessary Classifications,'' he examines perhaps the two most familiar sexual types: the sodomite (chapter 1) and the tribade (chapter 2). Whereas critics tend to emphasize differences between these types, DiGangi considers what they have in common: both ''organize social fantasies about what is alien to dominant early modern ideologies of marriage, reproduction, and patriarchal authority'' (60). In chapter 1, DiGangi surveys a variety of nonliterary texts that he then puts in conversation with Troilus and Cressida. These materials reveal the sodomite to be a ''composite sexual type'' that could be deployed both to establish and to destabilize definitions of orderly relations and communities. In chapter 2, DiGangi turns to medical texts and travel narratives that articulate logics of female homoeroticism that belie the imitative thesis critics often impose on the tribade. With these texts, DiGangi usefully rereads Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Paulina in The Winter's Tale as tribades who are not beholden to the patriarchal and heteroerotic models of sexuality and sociality typically associated with the type. RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY