Queer (Mis)Representations of Early Modern Sexual Monsters

This chapter investigates Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations, and Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Fiction and Friction’. These scholars provide a reading of early modern scientific discussions of ‘sexual monsters’, such as hermaphrodites, which arguably could be construed as an historically validated alternative, destabilizing the discourse of rigid categorical differentiation and heterosexual imperative. According to Laqueur, Orgel, and Greenblatt, there were ways in which earlier forms of sexual science construed sexual categories as fluid or flexible. Although such an argument is compelling, this chapter shows that several historical case-studies were misread and misconstrued, and it suggests that this was done in an effort to adhere to a very specific political and scholarly agenda. Inspired by the emergent queer theory and historical methodologies developed by new historicism and cultural materialism, the literary and historical scholars were invested in reading early modern hermaphrodism in light of contemporary intellectual frameworks and concerns.

Art · Queer · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• Voicing Ovid, Transitioning Petrarch

  Jessica Goethals•Early Modern Women An Interdiscipli…•2024

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