Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter

Judith Butler's biggest contribution to the field of gender theory is without a doubt her definition(s) of performativity. She first introduced this term in 1990's Gender Trouble, when she began to assert that feminism's central reliance on the category of "woman" was problematic because it relied on the established school of thought that maintained though gender was socially constructed, sex was biological(11). Butler disagrees, saying that both categories are the result of social construction, but also that it's more complicated than that. Things we consider as fixed categories may have carried different connotations not much earlier in our history, like pink for girls and blue for boys.In the Victorian period, the color associations were actually reversed, as blue was considered calm amd pink was considered a lighter, age-appropriate version of the masculine red. Because of this arbitrariness, Butler says identity politics should be abandoned in favor of politics that ask where sex and gender come from (21). That's the first chapter.

The second chapter critiques the notion of patriarchy, with its primary argument being that notions on which we depend in order to say that patriarchy is a norm against which feminism should rebel (such as Levi-Straussian kinship theory and Freudian Oedipalism) are also social concontructions, and by using their oppositional structures as a jumping off point for feminist response (in establishing either woman-dominant or separatist communities), we as feminists are unknowingly accepting presuppositions with which we disagree. The third chapter deals with the political implications of the work of Wittig and Kristeva. I'll discuss this chapter when I deal with The Lesbian Body (Wittig) and Powers of Horror (Kristeva), both on my prelims list. The last chapter questions whether gender-neutral pronouns (ze, zir, etc.) might be a way out of the problems Butler sees with conflation of sex and gender.

Then, in 1993's Bodies that Matter, she had this to say on the subject of how sex and gender are constructed:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. (95)

In saying that performance of gender is a conscious act that appears or becomes naturalized through repetition, Butler bridges the theoretical gap between feminists who claim gender is wholly socially constructed (cf. deBeauvoir's The Second Sex--"One is not born a woman, but becomes one.") and those who rely more on the existence of the innate and the bodily to determine femininity (cf. Irigaray and Cixous). In making performativity about simultaneous consciousness and reiteration, Butler seems to suggest that seeing social construction and biological essentialism as binarily opposed concepts is to oversimplify both theories. Instead, she provides a grey area that enriches both sides.

Freud's "Femininity" and Irigaray's "This Sex Which Is Not One"

In conformity with its peculiar nature, psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a women is -- that would be a task it could scarcely perform -- but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition (Freud, 1933, p. 116).

Freud immediately says that woman is other, both in the quote above and in the introduction to his lecture, when he says that only men think about "the problem of women" because women themselves "are the problem" (114). He then argues against such dichotomous thinking, saying that psychology proves variation of strict gender norms due to the existence of things like motherhood (active caretaking) and manners and social graces which temper male aggression (115). He, like many feminists, actually blames socially constructed ideology for stringent gendered associations: "You have decided in your own minds to make active coincide with masculine and passive with feminine. But I advise you against it. It seems to me to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge" (115). Despite this seemingly progressive statement, Freud continues to assert the otherness of woman in his insistence that female/female bonds must be subordinated to male/female bonds following puberty, in order for normal psychosexual development to occur (116-7). If the relationship that

is most important for a woman's growth is an oppositional one, it seems to me that binary thinking follows fairly logically behind.

The connection between the importance of the oppositional relationship between father and daughter and the concept of woman as lack comes in the form of the castration complex, which occurs, according to Freud, when girls first observe male genitalia and

[t]hey at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to 'have something like it too,' and fall victim to 'envy for the penis,' which will leave ineradicable traces on their development and the formation of their character and which will not be surmounted in even the most favorable cases without a severe expenditure of psychical energy. (118)

Though the "severe expenditure of psychical energy" described here seems to go along with Freud's claim that female does not necessarily equal passive, I think there's a huge difference between unconscious action and conscious socialized behavior. If that unconscious action to possess a penis can only be accomplished by socially prescribed feminine passivity, then it seems to me that the unconscious action is subordinate and Freud's argument falls apart.

Freud ends by describing both femininity and his knowledge of it as "incomplete and fragmentary," mentioning that though his discussion has centered on " women insofar as their nature has been informed by their sexual function" and that "an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well." An individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well. This says that women, as a group, are not human beings, and that individual women only have some chance of not being completely overcome by their sexuality. UGH.

Irigaray responds to the common psychoanalytic assertion that the feminine exists only insofar as it is a negation of the masculine (this sex which is not one) by saying that in its variance and multiplicity (this sex which is not one), femininity is deeper, richer, and more complex than masculinity. She frames this debate, as Freud does before her, in terms of sexual pleasure. In referring to the psychoanalytic practice of viewing the feminine as a lack, she says that " the vagina is valued for the 'lodging' it offers the male organ" and not on its own terms (cf. Inga Muscio) (1).

She ultimately argues that instead of characterizing female multiplicity as negative (women's eyes "false in rolling"Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, Spenser's Duessa, etc.), we should glory in it, realizing that, unlike male sexuality being located mainly in the phallus, women's entire bodies are erogenous zones and even their genitalia is not only multiple (see also her "Two Lips that Speak Together") but also constantly stimulating itself: "she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation[like men need women or hands], and before there is any way to distinguish [commonly male] activity from [commonly female] passivity (1). Thus, Irigaray sees the possibility of power in the position of the woman in the psychoanalytic model. Fellow French feminist Helene Cixous applies this notion of enjoying female deviation from a male norm to the concept of writing in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa."

Irigaray clarifies that it's not enough to just flip the power binary: [Though] the powers of slaves are not negligible powers, the master is not necessarily well-served. Thus to reverse the relation, especially in the economy of sexuality, does not seem a desirable objective" (6). She concludes the essay by saying that, while consciousness of such patriarchal formations is necessary for liberation, alternative social constructions (like lesbian separatism) could ultimately cause "history to repeat itself" in the form of "phallocratism" if power structures become the ultimate goal (7).

Lacan's "The Mirror Stage" and "The Signification of the Phallus"

After reading these two essays again, I have noticed a few things about Lacanian theory that I had heard, but that had never really clicked in my head. In "The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I in psychoanalytic experience," Lacan postulates that the point at which a pre-verbal child can first recognize her own image in a mirror is both the beginning of that child's concept of a stable self and "an essential stage of the act of intelligence" (1). This definition of the mirror stage lines up with what I already knew about the theory. What's new to me is how that stage, given that it finds stability in instability by saying that self is self because self is not reflection, falls in line with Deconstructionist theory and semiotics. Deconstructionist semiotics teaches that all language both differs and defers; that we derive meaning from a unit of language both by comparing it to what it it isn't, and by thinking through its connections and mental associations with other words. Example: When I say "dog," you probably think "not cat," but you also (quickly and perhaps unconsciously) think "retriever or shepherd or collie or poodle or etc." "Dog" both differs and defers. Seeing this connection makes me dislike Lacan less, or at least respect the importance of his theoretical contributions more.

The second thing I had heard but never understood is that while most readers of psychoanalysis differentiate heavily between its Freudian and Lacanian iterations, Lacan considered himself a Freudian. This was unclear to me until I began to notice how many references to dream interpretation appear in "The Mirror Stage...". In dreams, Lacan says, we discover how our "fragmented bodies" as delivered to us through our reflections are a vehicle to the wholeness represented by the individual self. We dream of having mangled limbs or growing wings when we analyze the existence of our individual selves and try to separate "true" self from reflected or perceived self (4), and we dream of fortresses and journeys to locked and isolated places when we try to reconcile the true with the perceived (5). He concludes that there is really no difference between truth and perception in terms of the self, as the so-called true self is also filtered through perception(6-7).

It's when I get to "The Signification of the Phallus" that I start to get really upset. Because the phallus is significant (in that it contains signifiers semiotically, but also in that it is considered important, in the more common sense of the word) and woman is lack, "Woman finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love’ (577). Like the child in the mirror, she is because she is not. It gets tricky, though, because for Lacan, woman is the site of the impossible return to the realm of the Real (unity of self and unconscious that only happens pre-birth). The French feminists turn this around and mine power from it. More on that tomorrow when I discuss Irigaray and Freud.

Shepheardes Calendar and Antony and Cleopatra

I would argue that both Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are about establishing stringent binary oppositions only to dismantle them later, thereby questioning any stability those organizing principles may have possessed. The twelve stories in the Shepheardes Calendar are arranged (as the titles suggests) from January to December, beginning with the hope of Spring's rebirth and ending with the other end of the life cycle: death. Many of these months examine opposing viewpoints or conditions. January begins with Colin Clout, who has just been rejected by his beloved Rosalind, journeying from the country into the town. Now only is the pastoral juxtaposed with the more industrious city, but love is also contradictory in and of itself, as Colin laments that it should "breede both joy and payne, " cursing and blessing his meeting Rosalind by turns (54, 49-51). February opposes youth and age, with the young Cuddie wishing for the frivolity of Spring while the aged Thenot asks him to be patient, saying that the fertility rituals Cuddie wishes for are a young man's game, a silly public display that he is glad to be rid of. Though Cuddie does not heed the warnings he is given at the end of the poem, I get the sense that he acts so not from any failing of character, but becuase hes role in the cycle of life is to be young and kind of stupid. If he did not fulfill this role, the natural order of the Calender would be disrupted. Spenser's deliberately archaic language (a trope he uses to slightly different, more nationalistic effect in The Faerie Queene) helps cement the "It's always been that way, it will always be that way" stasis that the poem both thrives on and confuses.

March, as the beginning of Spring, touches on two boys' stories of romantic knowledge, and things get really interesting in April, when Hobbinol (a shepherd) sings a song of Colin's love of a woman named Eliza who is "Ycald in Scarlot like a mayden Queene / And Ermines white" (lines 58-9, page 73). The colors and fabrics associated with this "mayden Queene" are a not-so- subtle nod to Queen Elizabeth I, thereby placing the Queen at the center of a homosocial triangle created by the two opposing young men. This placement of the Queen within a pastoral motif mirrors many royal parties of the period and glorifies a form that, as it praises the natural, is quite reliant on artifice. May centers on a Protestant/Catholic worship debate that never rally gets settled, and the rest of the poem frames Colin's pursuit of Rosalind various ways, with December causing him to conclude that he is like fruit that fell off the tree before it really had the chance to ripen, since he is old but unlucky in love. Therefore, though the whole poem tries to say that it is youth and love that are compatible, it ultimately contradicts itself, choosing to end the poem by saying that mortality is the only stable fact; all the other rules we make for ourselves are negotiable.

Antony and Cleopatra works to dismantle binaries as well : masculine/feminine, logical/emotional, Roman/Egyptian, and normal/excessive are the big ones, and the play wants us to think that all the words on the left and all the words on the right line up with one another, that Rome is tough and strong and cool-headed and Egypt just wants to get laid and then cry about it. Or at least the play wants us to think that's what it wants to do. At first. Except that Antony cries an awful lot, and Cleopatra is pretty good at getting stuff done in her kingdom, even when she uses some stereotypical feminine wiles to do so. Some of the other soldiers attribute this to Cleopatra's corrupting influence, and then they all get scared of being feminized to the point that when Lepidus gets rip-roaring drunk to celebrate the formation of the Triumvirate, the other men refer to his hangover as greensickness--a form of anemia that Early Modern medicine attributed to virgins, the cure for which was sex ASAP (and preferably sex that resulted in pregnancy). At worst, women are all things negative in the world of the play. At best, they're bargaining chips, as in the case of Antony's marriage of political alliance to Octavia.

Not that this sexism is limited to Romans in the play, or to dudes in general. The moment that Cleopatra hears of Antony's marriage to Octavia, she sends her attendants to gather information about the woman in order to prove that she is more beautiful and younger than Antony's current wife. Even though Cleopatra is often frivolous in similar ways, she dies with dignity, on a throne, refusing to witness her kingdom's downfall. With this ending (and because Antony's death happens much earlier, letting Cleopatra's death occur in Act 5, when tragic climax deaths usually occur), a woman who has embodied Egyptian excess embodies Roman logic and ruling ability. Everything the play relies on for its stability is made unstable in the end.

Another Prelims Update

Since I last posted, I have read the following:

• Shakespeare's Pericles (1607/8) - I have a feeling I'm going to need to come back to this one, particularly when I get to Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, due chiefly to conflicts between a young woman's filial duty and her view of her spiritual calling. I also see parallels with The Tempest (Dreher says both Marina and Miranda are "redemptive daughters" as are all the daughters in Shakespeare's Romances), though I think Pericles is less of a straightforward romance due to the complications introduced by the incest plots between Antiochus/Thaisa and Pericles/Marina. Other things to consider: Pericles thought to be cowritten with George Wilkins. WS responsible for just over 800 lines, most of those concerning Pericles and Marina. This seems to validate the filial duty connection I'm seeing with some of his other works. Lastly, there's obvious shades of Oedipus, what with taboo sexuality being prophesied and proven unavoidable or fated. Not sure what to do with that, but I think I should know it's there, at any rate.
• Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600) - This is the first play I'm teaching in my Women in Shakespeare class in the Fall, so I'm thinking about it on multiple levels. I know I want to point to the publication year and relate that to questions of Elizabethan succession. Indeed, the play begins with a question about identity (Bernardo's "Who's there?" to Francisco upon the changing of the watch), and that unsure tone continues until its body-strewn ending. All the play's characters are trying to figure out their places in a rapidly changing world, and none of them do this very well. Bradley says Ophelia is sheltered and naive, but I think he overstates that case, especially given that she seems to both understand and respond to Hamlet's innuendo prior to The Mousetrap, and because of how frank and accusatory she is after she goes mad, when she passes out flowers. Perhaps she is freed to do so by her madness, but that seems empowering to me. Bradley reads it as wholly tragic, speaking of her eternally surrounded by delicate flowers in the minds of readers. I think he's patronizing. I'll talk about Gertrude when I cover Janet Adelman's book Suffocating Mothers, as well as when I read Lacan and Freud, which should be next week sometime.
• Shakespeare's Othello (1603) - Need to mention animal imagery and the importance of storytelling/mysticism in connection with Daileader's discussions of "jungle fever." To contest/explain Bradley's distaste for Emilia, point to her protofeminism, as well as her understanding and use of figurative language (prove she understands Iago and can use his linguistic tools). If Desdemona is "wholly passive" as Bradley claims (and I think she is, mostly because of her response to "Who did this to you?": "Nobody. I myself."), I don't think it's because of her loving nature, but because of a naivete and a wish for escape. He actions are coded and passive because they are feminine and love-related.
• Diane Dreher's Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (1986) - Dreher discusses different types of daughters and fathers in Shakespeare's plays. Will edit this to provide more detail in the next few days once I organize my notes better.
• A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1905) - Bradley's mode is often called "character criticism," as he refers to the plays' characters as though they were real people, speculating often on their internal motivations and asserting that, while it may be impossible for modern readers to know these motivations for sure, Shakespeare did without a doubt. I'm not sure this is true (couldn't he have been being purposefully ambiguous?), but my biggest bone to pick with Bradley is his tendency to oversimplify the female characters he discusses, even those he admits are important and often improperly read, like Desdemona and Ophelia. I do agree with his assessment of Iago, who he says is a great villain because he's a fantastic observer of people, and that his downfall comes when he , in his desire to know these people and his motivations, does not truly know himself or his own motivations. I think this fits with Iago's refusal to "speak word" at the end of the play because he controls his environment as much as he can in that moment, just as he has all along, but, in the wake of the play's awful violence, all of which is the result of a lack of cross-gendered communication that he put in motion, further silence comes across as childish and petulant, even as Iago himself reads it as the end to a sophisticated master plot.
• Eve K. Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) Sedgwick uses the term "homosocial" to refer to same-sex friendships, noting that the line between such relationships and homoerotic or homosexual ones is thin and tenuous. Because of the threat of this overlap, women are often employed as mediators in male homosocial relationships, creating a relational triangle in which it appears the two men are focused on the affections of the woman. Sedgwick argues that such relational formations erase and devalue women while purporting to center and elevate them. Cf. Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man, Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Petrarch's sonnets and the courtly love social structure.
• Celia Daileader's Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth (2005) - Daileader coins the term "Othellophilia" to refer to the cultural obsession with romantic or sexual relationships between black men and white women, saying that such a preoccupation stems from a desire to divert attention from the much more historically accurate "slaveholder's secret"--the frequent rape of black female slaves by their white owners. Stereotypes: hypersexuality, exoticism, "jungle fever" as a result of both of the previous stereotypical characteristics.

This brings my total texts read to 16/99. Slowly making progress!

Prelims Reading Update

I know no one is reading this, but writing it helps me organize some thoughts. Thanks for tolerating this, if anyone is out there. Since I posted two weeks ago, I've planned my courses for summer and fall semesters and read the following:

1. Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women - I found this to be more clearly focused and more thoroughly researched than Valenti's two earlier offerings (Full Frontal Feminism and He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know), and was encouraged that its last chapter leaves its reader not only with a call to action, but with specific, practical suggestions of how she can work to undermine the double standards invoked by and stemming from "the purity myth." While I do object to Valenti's unwillingness to take religion or its adherents seriously (and her tendency to refer to such a complex, varying system monolithically, as I was copying above), I think a certain amount of questioning how both sacred and secular institutions tie female worth to wholly bodily or physical factors is a healthy thing. The biggest and most interesting point that I took away from the book that I think will inform my reading and research this summer is the fact that the both the impulse to punish women for excess or inappropriate sexuality and the impulse to teach them to "save" and "guard" their virginities at any cost seem to come from the same overemphasis on embodiment.
2. Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation - Maybe it's because Hutcheon was endeavoring to write down something that had been discussed but not yet codified in academic circles, or maybe it's because I've been working with adaptations and appropriations a long time, but most of this book seemed like common knowledge to me at this point in my career. The most helpful points for me were these: First, there are three main types of adaptations--those that tell (novels, short stories, plays that are read), those that show (plays in performance, films, operas, dances, or musicals), and those that do ("interactive" media like second life, video games, VR, RPGs, or LARPing). Second, those categories are not static and can very easily bleed over into one another because of what Hutcheon calls the "palimpsestuous nature of adaptation." Besides that fabulously descriptive portmanteau, which I love and think is so accurate given the adaptation's simultaneous reliance on and contradiction of preexisting knowledge, I agree that adaptations lend themselves to making traditional forms of receiving information (like plays or novels) more "interactive" due to the back-and-forth that a knowledgeable reader or viewer goes through as she experiences an adaptation. Hutcheon also discusses the tricky notion of the authority of the "source" text (I use quote marks there because she questions the validity as well as the rhetorical aim of this term), and that's something I'll be wrestling with a great deal in my dissertation.
3. Ben Jonson's Volpone - I made sure to notice instances where traditional readings of the play presented themselves (as city comedy, as animal fable, as morality tale warning against greed), but I was mostly struck by the character of Celia, who eventually gets pimped out to Volpone, who is very rich, by her own husband--who had previously become outraged because he thought Celia was flirting with Volpone of her own volition, which was untrue--because her husband wants Volpone's money at any cost. After he forces her to go to Volpone and she does not want to submit sexually, Volpone attempts to rape her. She's quite literally damned if she does or if she doesn't, as well as used as currency within a male system. This got me thinking about The Purity Myth again in a way I didn't expect to.
4. Shakespeare's The Tempest - This play is the subject of the only dissertation chapter I've started so far. As you most likely suspect, I'm most interested in the character of Miranda, or more specifically in the typical scholarly response to her, which I feel is reductive at best, and at worst, flawed in a way that is destructive to literary young womanhood. Many critics see her as a wholly passive daughter who submits to her father's will for her life. This view is HUGE with Victorian critics, which are, not coincidentally, the same critics who begin to emphasize the usefulness of Shakespearean heroines as didactic tools young women should follow (see Charles and Mary Lamb, Anna Jameson, and Mary Cowden Clarke). While Miranda is certainly servile and obedient at the play's end (see her chess game with Ferdinand where she says she will call lies truth if it serves him for her to do so), she is defiant and questioning to Prospero from her very first lines at the plays beginning. I'm also interested in the lines in 1.2.351-ff ("Abhorred slave / which any print of goodness will not take..."), which the First Folio attributes to Miranda, but subsequent editors gave to Prospero because she would never say such rough things to Caliban. I tend to agree with recent feminist critics, who say that Caliban, as the character directly below her in the play's hierarchy, is the easiest person over whom she can express any kind of anger and power.
5. John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed, or The Woman's Prize - I love this play, and I'm super excited to teach it for the first time in the Fall. Though Fletcher wrote it some time around 1609, it wasn't performed until at least 1633, due to bawdy and improper content. It tells the story of Maria, Petruccio's second wife after the death of Katerina. Lots of critics have called it a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew, but it's so much more than that. It critiques women's social roles in a hugely progressive, protofeminist way, and it does so while exhibiting a clear understanding of Shakespeare's own style and common tropes (Examples: Bawdy Maria in Twelfth Night and sex-as-food in Othello). The main ways the play does this are through an emphasis on the female homosocial and that community's appropriation of the language of several typically male spheres, namely the military, higher education, and religious service. In response to Petruchio's physical and sexual deprivation of Kate, Maria, her sister Livia, and the other women of The Tamer Tamed lock him out of his own house by degrees until he ends up in a coffin at the end of the play. As he is being given a taste of his own medicine, the women are joyously separatist, eating rich food, drinking ale, and masturbating. They fight deprivation with excess to the point that, when they realize the men are spying on them, they "dance with their coats tucked up to their bare breeches / And bid the kingdom kiss 'em"--they literally tell the men to kiss their asses, because the women know that voyeurism motivates the men's actions just as much, if not more, than does their anger. The other great thing about this play is that the women work together across class lines, with several country wives joining Maria's ranks. While these women are not given first names, Tamer's class consciousness is still a definite step up from that of Shrew, which literally places class conflict outside of the play, in the Christopher Sly frame narrative. A question I have: The play's introduction says that its subtitle is ironic because women weren't up for public prizes in the period. I don't doubt this, but I think there may be some virginity punning happening there as well, especially given Petronius' (Maria and Livia's father) repeated pleas to he daughters to give in to their husbands. I'm also seeing patron/patriarch in his name, but I may be reaching for that one.
6. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own - I'll talk more about this in conjunction with Cixous and Clement's The Newly Born Woman. For now, two things that stick out are the question of class and Woolf's seeming anticipation of the academic discipline of Gender Studies. The first is important because according to Woolf, to write, a woman must not only have access to private space, but also to private money. Lower-class women have reduced access to both, if any at all. The second comes up in the section about the imagined Professor von X. This professor wrote a famous book about the inferiority of women and "was laboring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for irritation remained" (31). Woolf not only suggests here, as Cixous does later, that "Woman must write woman," but seems also to say that the academic establishment combines with the patriarchal one in a way that is inherently violent and confrontational. This tone is opposed to the one Woolf herself uses in A Room of One's Own, concerned as she is with supposed trivialities like positive depictions of female/female friendships and descriptions of food and drink.
7. Shakespeare's Sonnets - I'm most interested in the first third or so of these, the ones chiefly referred to as the sonnets to the young man. I'm thinking a lot about how women are erased in these sonnets, as the speaker implores the young man to immortalize his beauty by having children, paying almost no mind to the woman or women who must suffer through the carrying and birthing and long lying in (a period practice that isolates a pregnant women in a dark , hot room to aid the birthing process according to the required humoral balance (hot and dry to balance out the naturally feminine cold and wet). Sonnet 3 is one of the few to acknowledge the female role in pregnancy, saying that if the object of the speaker's affection were to forgo procreation, he might "unbless some mother / For where is she whose unear'd womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?" Here, the woman in question is present, but still not really acknowledged as a significant part of the process of childbirth. She's just supposed to be grateful to be chosen, because she just supplies the stuff of the baby and the man forms the child (c.f. Galen). More on this with Sedgwick's Between Men.

Prelims Reading: Day One, Part Two

David Herlihy aims to revise Joan Kelly-Gadol's claim that women did not have a Renaissance primarily by discussing the importance of hagiography to the period. While I agree with his assertions that literary renderings of female saints' lives complicate some of Kelly-Gadol's claims about women's social positions where Christianity is concerned, I can't help but think that he is benefiting from the exponential growth of feminist historicist scholarship in the 1980s and 90s to which she did not have access. Not that that makes him any less correct. It just seems like he's holding her to a slightly unfair standard, as well as painting her findings with a broad brush with statements like "[Kelly Gadol suggests] that this supposedly progressive period did nothing for women" (Herlihy 33). While she does say women are deprived of social and political opportunities that they had previously enjoyed, she makes a point to differentiate between decades and regions. She also points out how women of different classes fared better or worse than one another. To reduce these and other variances to "the period did nothing for women" is to do Kelly-Gadol's clearly painstaking research a disservice.

Herlihy's findings match up to Kelly-Gadol's initially, as he notes that "holy queens and abbesses fad[ed] from the ranks of the blessed in the Middle Ages (43), citing the Gregorian Reform that removed women from "centers of religious authority." But that's all too simple, Herlihy says. It's also necessary to examine the position of such women in families and estates, particularly within systems of kinjship and the passing on of property and wealth (43).