Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness

Shannon, Laurie

doi:10.1086/492960

Cited by 34 publications

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“…I would thus emphasize that Lacan’s imposition of the gender binary onto the binary between subject and object in his graph of sexuation should by no means foreclose other historical pairings of the four terms (male, female, subject, and object). If, as Laurie Shannon argues, Renaissance culture can most accurately be described as ‘homonormative’– as a culture wherein the attraction toward likeness is normal rather than deviant – then desire and the sexual relation are certainly more incongruous than Lacan allows.…”

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confidence: 99%

How to do the History of Heterosexuality: Shakespeare and Lacan

Stockton

2010

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This essay argues against two presumptions: first, that the psychoanalytic approach to sexuality is ahistorical; and second, that critics cannot speak of heterosexuality before its 19th‐century invention. Looking to Lacanian psychoanalysis, and particularly to Lacan’s theory of sexuation (or sexual difference), this essay develops a queer history of heterosexuality premised on the idea that ‘heterosexuality’ is simply the latest way of describing a structural relation between the sexes. Lacan calls this structure ‘the sexual relation’, and describes it as a fantasy that man and woman are two halves of the same whole. At the same time, he insists that ‘the sexual relation does not exist’: that neither sex can actually make the other whole. Lacan’s own reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet– focused in part on Hamlet’s antagonism toward Ophelia following the prince’s discovery of his father’s ‘castration’– offers an example of how to queer heterosexuality in pre‐19th‐century texts. My reading of Measure for Measure offers a second example, one that likewise evokes Freud’s mytho‐historical account of the murder of the primordial father and the subsequent creation of a disinterested ‘law’ in the father’s name (Lacan’s Name of the Father). This essay concludes by suggesting that the fantasy of the sexual relation falters in both plays on the ‘obscene’ revelation of the law’s/the Father’s sinfulness.

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confidence: 99%

How to do the History of Heterosexuality: Shakespeare and Lacan

Stockton

2010

Literature Compass

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“…5 In so doing he claims a rhetorical mastery, an individuating move potent enough to preserve his name alongside that of the author of the jest itself. Merry…”

Section: Wood and The Who's Who Of Caroline Composers Including Simonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…6 5 As Pamela Allen Brown notes of Merry Passages and Jeasts, "both textuality and orality have been put into play by a third power, the social consort of performance." P. Lawes' G--minor Aire, VDGS 337 Lawes' four--part aire in g--minor (VdGS 337) typifies Lawes' quirky partwriting for viol consort.…”

Section: Wood and The Who's Who Of Caroline Composers Including Simonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4 consort songs dated 1581 but compiled during subsequent decades. 5 Brett identifies a sub--category of these early songs he calls "psalms and spiritual songs," which includes roughly two dozen examples by Byrd, Wilbye, John Cosyn, and others. 6 In some cases, as in Cosyn's setting of Psalm 124 "Now Israel may say", a psalm tune is garlanded by loosely imitative partwriting for viols.…”

Section: The Consort Song and Delegation Of Devotional Voicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…5 Since the publication of Alan Bray's groundbreaking Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), the historiography of Renaissance England has served as an important testing ground for Queer theory and other approaches attentive to the history of conceptions of sex, gender, and power. 6 Among the most influential writers in this coterie, which include Bray, Sedgwick, Bruce Smith, Mario Digangi, and Jonathan Goldberg, a rough consensus has emerged about the nature of literary representations of male homosociality in the English Renaissance.…”

Section: Signification the "Dittie" And The Suitability Of Instrumementioning

confidence: 99%

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