Abstract
The strategies of identity formation analysed in the previous chapters by no means resulted in a universal form of subjectivity. On the contrary, despite being introduced as a configuration of humanity, this form of selfhood was inextricably linked to specific body configurations and body styles, and it was gender- and class-specific. The subjectivity formation of men and women, despite claims to the contrary, was (and is) no symmetrical process. As subjectivity depended to a large extent on a self-government that was in itself coded masculine, women could not become subjects in the full sense of the word. Rather, an allegedly universalist selfhood emerged through the exclusion of materiality, corporeality, and ‘nature’, all of which were implicitly feminized. Masculine identity formation and the feminization of material nature are two sides of the same coin.
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Notes
Introduction to ‘Amoretti and Epithalamion’, in William A. Oram et al., The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 587.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 198.
Nancy Vickers, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s “Lucréce”’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 95.
William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 129.
On the readership of Elizabethan sonnet cycles see Clark Hulse, ‘Stella’s Wit: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney’s Sonnets’, in Margaret W. Ferguson et al, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance. The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 272–86.
‘The inventory or itemizing impulse of the blazon…would seem to be part of the motif of taking control of a woman’s body by making it, precisely, the engaging ‘matter’ of male discourse, a passive commodity in a homosocial discourse of male exchange in which the woman herself, traditionally absent, does not speak. The “inventory” of parts becomes a way of taking possession by the very act of naming or accounting.’ Patricia Parker, ‘Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon’, in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 131.
Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Alberto Chiari (Rome: Mondadori, 1992), p. 83.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 23–63.
Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of...Guiana’, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1600) (Glasgow: John MacLehose, 1903–5), vol. X, p. 388.
Louis Montrose, The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’, Representations, 33 (1991), pp. 25–6.
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© 2000 Susanne Scholz
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Scholz, S. (2000). Gendered Objects: Sexualizing the Female Body. In: Body Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287686_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287686_4
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