Queer Philologies Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time [Paperback]

For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. InQueer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like homosexual, sodomy, and tribade in a variety of cultures and historical periods, Masten argues that just as the history of sexuality requires the history of language, so too does philology, the love of the word, require the analytical lens provided by the study of sexuality.

Masten unpacks the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of key words within the early modern discourse of sex and gender—terms such as conversation and intercourse, fundament and foundation, friend and boy —that described bodies, pleasures, emotions, sexual acts, even (to the extent possible in this period) sexual identities. Analyzing the continuities as well as differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, he offers up a queer lexicon in which the letter Q is perhaps the queerest character of all.

A masterpiece as well as a great intellectual joy. Masten finds in philology and in the history of the book a new approach to the analysis of norms and normativities—that is, to practices of standardization, including the standardization of sex and gender. This queer manifesto for the mutual implication of the history of sexuality and the materiality of language is as powerful as it is scrupulous, as original as it is radical. No one who reads this book will ever think of the letter Q in the same way again. —David Halperin, University of Michigan

[A] tour de force of erudition and intellectual wit that maps out a new region of scholarship: 'queer philology.' . . . Masten unl“,