Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

by Will Fisher

Through examining some of the everyday items that helped establish a person's masculinity or femininity, this book offers a new analysis of gender identity in early modern English literature and culture. Individual chapters focus on items such as codpieces, handkerchiefs, beards, and hair. Fisher argues that these seemingly peripheral parts were in fact constitutive, and consequently that early modern gender was materialized through a relatively wide range of parts or features, and that it was also often conceptualized as being malleable. The book deliberately brings together sexual characteristics (beard growth and hair length) and gendered accessories (codpieces and handkerchiefs) in order to explore the limitations of using the modern conceptual distinction between sex and gender to understand early modern ideas about masculinity and femininity. Materializing Gender engages with a range of historical materials including drama, poetry, portraiture, medical texts, and polemical tracts, and a range of theoretical issues.

Hardcover

First published June 1, 2006

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and thoroughly researched, but rather repetitive and, at times, ambling. Many points could have been made more succinctly.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beards and codpieces

Gender in the early modern period, Fisher argues, is not necessarily essential or merely socially-constructed, but `prosthetic'. Examining the use of 'accessories' - beards, codpieces, handkerchiefs and hairstyles - Fisher explores how these are made to function not just to indicate or to confirm gender, but to constitute it, to bring it into being.

This is an excellent example of modern scholarship which is both deeply theoretically-informed, and yet also relies on fresh and broad readings of cultural artefacts, from Shakespeare's Othello, to medical treatises, paintings and Henry VIII's famous codpiece.

The theory is dense but clear, and draws critically on feminist scholarship (Judith Butler, especially, on bodies) as well as broader cultural theory (Foucault et al.).

Lively, rigorous, impeccably presented, this is thoughtful and provocative.