Erotic Politics

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.Taking eroticism on the English Renaissance Stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, these essays explore the nature of sexual definition and desire in early modern culture. Identifying the stage as a primary site for the display of eroticism, the authors examine how the Renaissance stage...
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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.Taking eroticism on the English Renaissance Stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, these essays explore the nature of sexual definition and desire in early modern culture. Identifying the stage as a primary site for the display of eroticism, the authors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour.This volume also addresses a crucial theoretical problem in postmodern cultural criticism: how can subjective phenomena, such as Renaissance erotic experience, be placed in its historical, public context? And can this experience be examined without recourse to psychoanalytical theory? Contributors argue that theatrical erotic dynamics served to deconstruct gender itself, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. 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.