Shakesqueer

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Chicago, Ill.—The recent Shakespeare panel at the 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, ironically titled “Shakesqueer,” featured four queer theorists presenting articles soon to be published by the notoriously liberal Duke University press. The panelists described the collection as the first reputable, scholarly collection of Shakespeare queer theory criticism, and it will join other illustrious Duke Press lesbian bisexual gay transsexual (LGBT) titles such as “Barbie’s Queer Accessories,” “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies,” “Female Masculinity,” and “In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America.”

They presented a quick peek inside their theses:

Hamlet

According to Princeton Professor Jeffrey Nunokawa, Hamlet is the agonizing story of a sexually-dysfunctional protagonist which he describes as “torn between the enforcement of sexual norms to repair what is out of joint and the extravagance of his passion for enforcing those norms, which exceeds all normative bounds.” “And Hamlet understands immediately, like any moral zealot, that he’s charged not just to treat the symptom, but to wipe out the very disease,” Nonokawa asserts (emphasis added).

Asserting that Hamlet’s faults derive not from his hostile intentions, but from his overwhelming desire to reestablish the reproductive norm, Nonokawa implied that Hamlet is a “monster” because he uses ruthless methods to enforce monogamous, opposite-sex marriages. According to Nonokawa Hamlet is “stricken by his excess of filial passion for the reassertion of norm. Hamlet is truly too much in the son, too much, that is, his father’s son.” This turns him into a “monster of normativity incapable of … seeing how much he gets off on the luxury of his antiluxurious discourse.”

Romeo and Juliet

According to University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Professor Carla Freccero, the typical “heteronormative romantic readings of Romeo and Juliet are themselves historically anachronistic,” ignoring the complex sexual dynamics between Mercutio and Romeo and the universality of Romeo and Juliet’s love. “But to indict modern heteronormative readings of the play in favor of more accurate or authentic sexual and gender [representation]….is not necessarily queering,” she argues. “Changing the gender of objects of desire can easily leave intact the grand mystified romance of star-crossed lovers struggling—and failing— to surmount insuperable cultural impediments to their love… Romeo and Juliet can remain in tragically romantic dire straights, even when it’s a girl-on-girl song,” she said.

For Literature and Feminist Studies Professor Freccero, the central thesis of Romeo and Juliet is that “In the face of every ideological apparatus—parents, the church, the law—striving to inculcate a politics of reproductive futility, Romeo and Juliet insist that there is no time, the time is now. It is sonnet lyric time, not narrative time. There is no future.”

Cleopatra and Antony

In a celebration of loose verbal and physical sexuality, Tufts University Professor Lee Charles Edelman argues that the eunuch Mardian and Queen Cleopatra—who exchange sexual innuendos throughout the play—have a queer relationship, “not quite sexual, not quite chaste, but the word friend or lover fails grasp.” “Cleopatra has great f— hag potential,” Edelman adds, due to her “queer enthusiasm, not quite sexual, not quite feminine, not quite hetero, not quite homo, no polite name for it yet.”

According to Professor Edelman, the strange love triangle between Antony, Cleopatra, and Mardian parallels that of modern society, in which “regal ladies of a certain age, their brown hair mixed with gray…..their pleasures usually in excess of their pedigree, and their wealthy husbands, like Antony, conspicuously absent—at work, with the other woman, or dead” rely on the supplementary affections of “the gay men who design their dresses, the gay men who decorate their duplex, the gay men who dance with them, and the gay men who are their confidantes. The gay men, in short, who rescue them from the boredom and frustration of [marriage].”

These gay confidantes, who offer a satisfying alternative to absentee husbands, are “‘the neutral,’ the neuter—in homage to Mardian—that third party who participates in a marriage only by arriving conveniently at its point of elegantly maintained impossibility,” said Edelman.

Love’s Labors Lost

In her article, “The L Words,” Madhavi Menon describes Love’s Labor’s Lost as “comedy in drag” which “abounds with lipstick lesbians.” “Not that there are any lesbians in this play, with or without lipstick. At least none that we would recognize as lesbians,” she said. Menon argues that it is the women’s decision to “actively reject” their male suitors which marks them as lipstick lesbians, deliberately playing the part of heterosexual damsels while hiding an alternative sexual identity.

The common message of the panel was that Shakespeare, like queerness, is about transgressing social norms, disguising one’s true self in conformity to social expectations, genderless romance, and other issues of sexual identity. Thus, Professor Freccero describes “the meaningless, absolute, irrational queer force” as the drive that propels Romeo and Juliet to commit suicide. In addition, Freccero argues that the insinuation of romantic relationships between Mercutio and Romeo that leads to their friendship’s murderous destruction.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.

This article has been corrected. Revisions can be seen here.