Product Description

A collection of essays looking at representations eroticism in the English Renaissance theatre and relating them to issues of identity and sexual definition in early modern culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #223723 in Books
• Published on: 1992-12-17
• Released on: 1992-12-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
""Erotic Politics is one of those rare collections in which the essays are of uniformly high quality--both thoughtful and responsible--and in which the essays establish a conversation among themselves which resonates after the book has been finished and put aside."
-"South Central Review ..the volume provides a number of excellent models for how the theater's erotic dynamic can be approached historically. A particular strength of the collection is its commit

From the Back Cover
Taking eroticism on the English Renaissance Stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, these essays 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; Erotic Politics widens the arena of debate to study the structure and cultural definition of erotic desire. The authors view the stage as a primary site for the display of eroticism and use it to decipher what may be radically different cultural codes and expectations: the Renaissance stage is seen as a decoder for erotic experience which is used both to 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 produced concepts of sexual dimorphism and `homosexuality' as a category. Thus, for example, several essays in Erotic Politics view the theatrical convention of cross-dressing or transvestism as a contribution to a distinctly erotic dynamics. Contributors argue that such a dynamics served to deconstruct gender itself, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent.
This volume also addresses a crucial theoretical problem in postmodern cultural criticism: how can subjective phenomena, such as Renaissance erotic experience, be examined without recourse to psychoanalytic theory? In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up a new and distinctive perspective in the cultural debate.