Shakespeare and Queer Studies

Shakespeare and Queer Studies offers an accessible, comprehensive, and non-polemical account of queer approaches to Shakespeare's plays and poems. Addressing the strategies and stakes of different modes of queer critique, it encourages readers to develop their own interpretive strategies for reading sexuality and gender in Shakespeare. Mario DiGangi demonstrates how concepts such as queer temporality, reproductive futurism, and intersectionality can provide new ways of understanding same-sex relations in Shakespeare. At the same time, it avoids some of the ethical and intellectual pitfalls of an insufficiently capacious queer critical practice by examining the social and political power dynamics of same-sex relationships. Critiques of queer studies from the perspectives of critical race studies, trans studies, and asexuality studies have stressed the limitations of “homonormative” or otherwise exclusionary queer approaches. Shakespeare and Queer Studies argues that the full potential of queer as an analytic for the sexually non-normative in Shakespeare can be realized only when we acknowledge the importance of intersecting axes of embodied difference (such as size, species, race, or ability); non-dyadic, non-monogamous, and promiscuous relationships; embodied transgender experiences; the asexual or celibate rejection of marriage and compulsory sexuality; and the multiplicity of sexual acts and erotic pleasures that have no socially ameliorative or reproductive function. By devoting significant attention to all of these issues, Shakespeare and Queer Studies offers new insights into the queerness of erotic experience in Shakespeare's plays and poems.

Mario DiGangi is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.