Beard Fetish in Early Modern England
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A01=Mark Albert Johnston
anthropological perspectives
Antonio's Revenge
Antonio’s Revenge
Author_Mark Albert Johnston
Beard Colour
Beard Signals
bearded
Bearded Women
Beardless Boys
Category=JBSF
Category=NHTB
City Dame
culture
Doctor's Clerk
Doctor’s Clerk
Early Modern
Early Modern English
Early Modern English Culture
early modern sexuality
english
English cultural history
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Facial Beard
Female Insubordination
Fetish Objects
fetish theory
gender performativity
Golden Beard
Half Beard
idol
Lyly's Midas
Lyly’s Midas
Male Beard
naturae
object
pagan
Phallic Possession
power dynamics in Renaissance England
Ram Alley
Renaissance masculinity
scala
Scala Naturae
Sexual Determination
Smooth Boys
Vice Versa
woman
worship
Yellow Beard
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781409405429
- Weight: 566g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Sep 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Focusing on representations of beards in English Renaissance culture, this study elucidates how fetish objects validate ideological systems of power by materializing complex value in multiple registers. Providing detailed discussions of not only bearded men but also beardless boys, bearded women, and half-bearded hermaphrodites, author Mark Albert Johnston argues that attending closely to early modern English culture's treatment of the beard as a fetish object ultimately exposes the contingency of categories like sex, gender, age, race, and sexuality. Johnston mines a diverse cross-section of contemporary discourses -- adult and children’s drama, narrative verse and prose, popular ballads, epigrams and proverbs, historical accounts, pamphlet literature, diaries, letters, wills, court records and legal documents, medical and surgical manuals, lectures, sermons, almanacs, and calendars -- in order to provide proof for his cultural claims. Johnston’s evidence invokes some of the period’s most famous voices -- William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Phillip Stubbes, John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Samuel Pepys, for example -- but Johnston also introduces us to an array of lesser-known Renaissance authors and playwrights whose works support the notion that the beard was a palimpsestic site of contested meaning at which complex and contradictory values clash and converge. Johnston’s reading of Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological theories of the fetish phenomenon acknowledges their divergent emphases -- erotic, economic, racial and religious -- while suggesting that the imbrication of diverse registers that fetish accomplishes facilitates its cultural and psychic naturalizing function.
Mark Albert Johnston is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Windsor, where he teaches courses on Early British Literature, Shakespeare, and Drama.
