Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) - Hardcover

Johnston, Mark Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1409405427 ISBN 13: 9781409405429

Publisher: Routledge, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

'Providing new insights into familiar texts and detailed readings of lesser known English plays, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England is full of fascinating material. Mark Johnston incisively describes the many registers of cultural difference that signified through the beard, and he productively combines historical and theoretical analysis of the fetish.'
Mario DiGangi, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY; author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama and Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley

About the Author:

Dr. Mark Albert Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Windsor, where he teaches courses on Early British Literature, Shakespeare, and Drama.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1409405427
• ISBN 13: 9781409405429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312