Confounding Intersections: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Glossing in Pericles and Edward II

WOMEN, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

SPEAKER: Stephen Spiess, Babson College 

Modern glossarial practices remain rooted in a definitional project that suppresses the semantic relations and conflicts alive in many early modern signifiers. In this talk, I challenge the premise that a responsible gloss must render apprehensible what might otherwise prove opaque to modern readers. Tracing out the intersectional histories, relations, and relational opacities that can be evinced by attending to the early modern “lowne”—a term traditionally glossed as a stable if archaic appellation for a man of low status, but which can also index a sexually illicit woman—I demonstrate how conventional glossarial practices have limited our understanding not only of the glossed term and the texts within which it circulates, but of the relations between the intersectional identities and social affects that it conjures in early modern England. My methodology therefore insists that we take seriously the historical, political, and pedagogical affordances of writing glosses that “confound” rather than clarify meaning: i.e., that reveal a mixture of elements precisely where one might otherwise expect a singular sense; and that aim to curate, rather than quell, the kinds of cognitive disorientation, emotional embarrassment, and/or astonishment that may attend such encounters. I develop this argument through applied close readings of both Pericles (the brothel scenes) and Edward II (attempts to label Gaveston), with special attention paid to how terms such as “lowne” at once inform and confound efforts to know sex and gender in early modern England.

About the Speaker

Stephen Spiess is assistant professor of literature at Babson College. He specializes in early modern English literature and culture, with particular investments in Shakespeare and the interrelations of sex, language, embodiment, and knowledge in the English Renaissance. He is currently completing a book, Shakespeare and the Making of English Whoredom, for Oxford University Press, and co-editing, with Marjorie Rubright, an essay collection entitled Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World, which will appear as part of the Early Modern Conversions series at Edinburgh University Press. His new book project, Renaissance Undoing, examines an early modern fascination with, and fear of, "becoming undone." His work has appeared in Shakespeare Survey, Renaissance Quarterly, The Review of English Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, and Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World.