There is a sense of urgency to Shakespeare / Sex, an interest in extending the boundaries of the field of not just Shakespeare studies but early modern research methodologies as well. Part of the Arden Shakespeare Intersections, this collection highlights intersectional and interdisciplinary ways of approaching sexuality while acknowledging the complexity of such approaches. In doing so, it sheds light on a number of issues, including toxic masculinity, climate change, childhood/compulsory/crip sexualities, and gender normativity.
One of the collection's key appeals lies in its attention to contemporary issues. This is especially true of Sharon O'Dair's chapter on sex and ecology, which provides a glimpse into climate change and the ecological costs of bearing children. Kay Stanton's chapter on Lucrece speaks to the transhistorical nature of rape and trauma, offering an interesting reading of suicide as a feminist choice despite its toxic masculinity that Stanton attributes to the poem's setting rather than the poem itself. By attending to these issues, these chapters highlight the importance of recognizing overlaps between the past and the present moment.
The collection also excels in bringing together interdisciplinary scholars with some marvelous insights into disability, trans studies, and race. The essays by Allison Hobgood, Urvashi Chakravarty, and Colby Gordon successfully demonstrate how literary studies can and should learn from critical race, disability, and trans studies models. Hobgood's essay, for example, begins exploring crip sexuality in Measure for Measure by looking at nonnormative sex, disability drives, intentional contagion, and facilitated sex. Chakravarty's work analyzes homonationalism in Richard III by attending to early modern obstetric texts, accounts of monstrous births, and ableist desires for reproductive sex. Gordon's work looks at the idea of techne and trans bodies in Sonnet 20, convincingly reframing the ambiguity surrounding the young man's beauty by detaching gender significance from body parts.
Gender and sexuality remain a binding thread throughout the collection, with each essay playfully subverting normative expectations about identity categories. Like Gordon, Kathleen E. McLuskie explores the uncertainty of recognizing specific gender characteristics, and in doing so, offers a reading of identity as a fluid category that depends on social affirmation. Jessica Murphy's chapter on greensickness extends the study of female health by pointing towards toxic masculinity and gender normativity. Melissa Sanchez negotiates heteronormative and homonormative views through the absence of sexual desire in Measure for Measure. Such feminist approaches expand what it means to think of Shakespearean sex by juxtaposing asexuality, Protestantism, greensickness, toxic masculinity, and other important aspects that underline desire and desirability in the early modern world.
Such juxtapositions can be extended to the logic of the collection as well. While the sections are broadly divided according to their focus on heteronormativity, intersectional identity, homoeroticism, and transness in Shakespeare, there are significant overlaps within and across sections. Kate Chedgzoy's intersectional approach and Goran Stanivukovic's queer framework both draw heavily on the comparative analysis of Shakespeare's Roman predecessors. Hobgood and Sanchez's approaches to Measure for Measure provide a complementary look at queer and crip sexualities. Jennifer Drouin and Huw Griffith's readings both depend on queering the gaze, but while Drouin focuses on patriarchal control, ocular excess, and the production of divided subjectivities, Griffith's brilliant close readings draw on the play's performance history in order to identify the conditions that make a text seem homoerotic. Such overlaps demonstrate the value of intersectional and interdisciplinary dialogues while offering multiple ways of approaching the same source texts.
Given that many of these works are actively engaged in constructing and expanding the fields of disability, trans, and environmental criticism, they offer a lot more context for their readings and interventions than may be expected of such short essays. However, this is precisely what makes this collection more accessible to new readers who may otherwise be unaware of some of the stakes of these interventions. As a whole, then, Shakespeare / Sex provides some wonderfully succinct and astute readings of important issues surrounding desire, embodiment, and identity politics. The collection succeeds in gesturing towards new directions in Shakespeare criticism, raising a number of tantalizingly open-ended questions that productively leave room for future scholarly engagements. Through their open questions, critical insights, and new disciplinary frameworks, these essays invite readers to reevaluate their own understanding of early modern sex.
