Intersections Of Sexuality Research Articles

Evidence for Sex Differences in Depression, Sexual Attitudes, and Impulsivity as Predictors of Breaking Shelter-in-Place Orders During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Although the call to understand how sexual behaviors have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic has been established as an important area of study, research examining the extent to which gender, sexual attitudes, impulsivity, and psychological distress predicted breaking shelter-in-place (SIP) orders to engage in sexual behaviors with partners residing outside the home is undefined. Obtaining a deeper examination of the variables which predict risky sexual behaviors during SIP has important implications for future research at the intersection of public health, sexuality, and mental health. This study addressed the gap in the literature by considering how partnered sexual behaviors may be used during the COVID-19 pandemic to alleviate stress, as measured by breaking SIP orders for the pursuit of sexual intercourse. Participants consisted of 186 females and 76 males (N = 262) who predominately identified Caucasian/White (n = 149, 57.75%) and heterosexual/straight (n = 190, 73.64%) cultural identities with a mean age of 21.45years (SD = 5.98, range = 18-65). A simultaneous logistic regression was conducted to examine whether mental health symptoms, sexual attitudes, and impulsivity predicted participants' decision to break SIP orders to engage in sexual intercourse. Based on our results, breaking SIP orders to pursue sexual activities with partners residing outside the home during the COVID-19 pandemic may be understood as an intentional strategy among men with less favorable birth control attitudes to mitigate the effects of depression. Implications for mental health professionals, study limitations, and future areas of research are additionally provided.

Intersectional Masculinities in Heteronormative Spaces: Exploring Power and Privilege amongst Gay Men in South Africa

This paper discusses the power differentials between various gay men that shape the construction of multiple unequal gay masculinities in South Africa. I argue that there is no single homogenous gay masculinity but multiple gay masculinities informed by various intersections that privilege some gay men while disadvantaging others. Considering the historical and continuing unequal racial divisions, class differences, power differentials, and gender normativity, this paper presents an intersectional analysis of three gay masculinities: White gay masculinity, Black middle-class gay masculinity, and Black working-class township gay masculinities. Intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and space shape power differentials amongst gay men in the same manner as heterosexual men, and through a review of literature, the paper demonstrates how intersectionality can help develop nuanced understandings of gay masculinities in South Africa. The paper highlights the need to interrogate the multifaceted nature of South African gay masculinities through an intersectional lens.

José Antonio Villarreal and Pocho: A Mexican American Novel and Its Tragic Plot by Roberto Cantú

Reviewed by: José Antonio Villarreal and Pocho: A Mexican American Novel and Its Tragic Plot by Roberto Cantú Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita ROBERTO CANTÚ José Antonio Villarreal and Pocho: A Mexican American Novel and Its Tragic Plot Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Cambridge Scholars. 2022. 131 pages. IN THIS MONOGRAPH, Roberto Cantú critically revisits José Antonio Villarreal's novel Pocho some sixty years after its publication and scrutinizes it with an acute critical lens to note the work's literary continuities and discontinuities with respect to what would subsequently become Chicano literary production and literature more broadly in the United States. He reevaluates the novel to situate and recalibrate its place in Chicano/a letters. Cantú counters negative takes by some Chicano critics of Pocho, underscoring their lack of sensibility and understanding of Villarreal's bildungsroman and the particular aesthetic, philosophical, and existentialist concerns therein. As Ramón Saldívar notes in his work on Chicano Narrative, Villarreal's novel Pocho "has always been somewhat of an embarrassment to Chicanos," who decry the assimilationist tendencies of the narrative. Beyond what may be critiqued as an assimilationist bent, however, what is clear is that the novel provides a highly individualist, male-centered perspective—a trait shared with a good many Chicano novels of the 1960s and [End Page 93] early 1970s. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian observes that cultural nationalist narratives are marked by the saliency of a Chicano male subject imbued with a hypermasculinist patriarchal ideology in which male privilege goes unchecked. Likewise remarkable is that although Villarreal rejected being identified as a Chicano and having his work included as part of what he considered minor if not inferior Chicano literature, his novel closely follows similar Chicano narrative motifs: a glorification of Mexican Revolution heroes like Pancho Villa, and a celebration of a womanizing figure like the main character's father, Juan Rubio. Cantú's intervention focuses on countering negative critiques of Villarreal's novel by tracing the process of individuation in the work, rather than by, for example, noting the absence of a collective community perspective. Cantú presents the "identity quest" of Richard, the main character, not as an ethnic or political quest but as an individualist drive to deal with the intersection and mystery of sexuality, religion, and history in the protagonist's lived experience. For Cantú, Villarreal presents Richard as an individual, neither a follower nor a leader; his struggle is uniquely his. Villarreal's work is not oppositional or resistant in conception; he is much more centered on subject formation and individual agency. Cantú celebrates what he terms Villarreal's "stagecraft," his "constant and ingenious" experimentation with form, highlighting the novel's innovative-for-then fragmented structure, as it moves from a temporal/spatial division in its focus first on Juan Rubio's participation in the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century and later on the mid-twentieth-century plot concerned with the young Richard's life in rural California. Cantú's literary exegesis of the novel and its "tragic plot" deploys a historical-mythical literary lens, thoughtfully referencing the work of classical Greek dramatists and philosophers; more recent European writers such as Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Joyce; and Mexican writers like Juan Rulfo and—perhaps especially—Octavio Paz. Cantú makes clear that the novel draws deeply from Greek mythology, popular culture, and Mexican history. In 1994 Cantú would publish a Spanish translation of Pocho. The classical Greek motif of tragedy allows Cantú to see two parallel plotlines in the novel's fragmented structure, that of the father and that of the son. The novel is read as a tragic Mexican American family drama, comparable to the Greek struggle involving Dionysus vis-à-vis Apollo. Following Nietzsche's designation of these two central principles in Greek culture, Cantú notes the contradictory tensions within the Rubio family and within the broader community. More specifically, the tragedy in the novel will be linked to the dissolution of the Rubio marriage; the tragedy centers on patriarchy, not a critique of it, but a lament, as it were, of the upheaval resulting from the questioning of male privilege. Cantú, for example, suggests that the mother/wife Consuelo "miscalculates" and plots against...

Pinning down Pan-Africanism: Exploring the Definition(s), Utility, and Durability of an Ideology and the Movements It Engendered

Pinning down Pan-Africanism: Exploring the Definition(s), Utility, and Durability of an Ideology and the Movements It Engendered Kenja McCray Adi, Hakim–Pan-Africanism: A History. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. 297 p. Rabaka, Reiland, ed.–Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism. London: Routledge, 2021. 548 p. People are likely to provide a myriad of responses if asked to describe Pan-Africanism. This diversity of perceptions reflects the enduring challenge of defining and discussing the topic. Hakim Adi begins Pan-Africanism: A History by employing a broad understanding of the term as an ideology and the movements it catalyzed. He writes that Pan-Africanism is “the striving for the unity and liberation of Africa and Africans” (p. 221). According to Adi, a single, universally accepted definition has never existed. He goes further, determining that the hazards of pinning some authors down to a definitive meaning stem from the reality that Pan-Africanism has assumed so many different forms over time and space (p. 2). Adi’s conception of its protean and enduring nature dovetails with the central framing of the Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, which is edited by University of Colorado, Boulder Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies, Reiland Rabaka, and contains multiple, adaptable meanings. Both books address the critical need to formulate a clear, concise definition of Pan-Africanism. They also wrestle with conceptions like Ashley D. Farmer’s. A specialist in Black women’s intellectual history, Farmer writes, “the destruction of racism, capitalism, sexism, and homophobia will not come from a uniform idea but rather from the recognition and implementation of the array of political imaginings that those fighting oppression develop.”1 Adi and Rabaka deliberate on several interrelated issues in delineating Pan-Africanism. They examine its durability and [End Page 177] critique its pragmatic expressions from two different but equally useful entry points: a single-authored survey and a multi-authored compilation of essays. Undergraduate professors and scholars of Black liberation movements will appreciate Adi’s Pan-Africanism for its concise survey of a central topic in African and diasporic history, which he covers with appropriate depth. The book emerged from Adi’s experiences as a Professor of History at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom. Few suitable, up-to-date texts existed for instructors such as himself to assign to undergraduate students. Adi’s interests include the African continent and diaspora, with an emphasis on twentieth-century Britain. His specialization in Africa and the diaspora in Britain gives the book a particular focus on aspects of Pan-African history occurring outside the United States. He decentres both the United States and Whiteness, for example, when discussing the formation of the diaspora (p. 2). In contrast to Adi’s succinct survey, the term “handbook” is a misnomer for Rabaka’s hefty tome of detailed essays. With 36 chapters, it could be more precisely identified as a compendium on Pan-Africanism. A strength of this approach is that, like Adi’s survey, it generally avoids a longstanding tendency within the literature on Pan-Africanism to emphasize diasporic countries (especially the United States) and metropolitan cities in the West instead of centring continental African locales and Global South perspectives. The Handbook sidesteps this pitfall, in part, by showcasing diverse voices hailing from Kampala to Mexico City. When read together, these two books cover a breadth of subjects at the intersections of Pan-Africanism, race, class, gender, sexuality, politics, economics, and culture. Adi delineates Pan-Africanism by outlining two major phases. The first era began during the transatlantic trade with the concerted endeavours of eighteenth-century African-descended activists in the diaspora to either end the trafficking and enslavement of Africans or to emigrate to the continent. This initial period ended with the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress (PAC). Adi identifies the second phase as one during which “Pan-Africanism returns home” to the continent (p. 129). It emerged from anti-colonial struggles, beginning with the post-Second World War period, and ended with the establishment of the African Union (AU) and the reparations movement during the last years of the twentieth century. The way Adi organizes his chapters reveals a shorter, thematically driven periodization...

Random bisexual forests: Intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in /s/ production

The ideology of “the gay lisp” has inspired numerous quantitative studies examining the relationship between /s/ production and sexuality in American English (e.g. Linville 1998; Munson et al. 2006a; Zimman 2013). There are two key gaps in this literature. First, research in this area typically focuses on monosexual (i.e. lesbian, gay, and straight) speakers to the exclusion of bisexuality. Second, work in this area rarely considers the intersection of sexuality with factors outside of gender or sex, and to a lesser extent geographic location (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2011; Podesva & Hofwegen 2014). This article addresses these disparities by (1) centralizing bisexual speakers and (2) attending to social factors such as race, place, age, and their intersections in the analysis. To that end, we build upon previous work by Willis (forthcoming) and apply a random forest (Breiman 2001) to /s/ center of gravity measurements. In doing so, we follow Tagliamonte and Baayen (2012) in demonstrating the utility of random forests as an approach to quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. Ultimately, the analysis underscores the need to attend to power structures and biases within research practice: the monosexist ideologies of sexuality and gender normativity that obfuscate bisexuality, and the privileging of whiteness that permeates quantitative studies of sexuality and the voice.

Seeing Fotis: Slavery and Gender in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

The portrayal of the enslaved woman Fotis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses exposes the intersection of gender, sexuality, and slavery. Apuleius’ novel allows a window into interactions beyond the relationship of slaveholder and the enslaved person over whom s/he claimed dominium. Centering Fotis in Apuleius’ narrative shows how a discourse of slavery worked: an enslaved woman is made present as a body that may be sexualized and surrounded with fantasies of sex and violence. The sexual episodes of Lucius and Fotis reveal an aesthetic, facilitated by the system of slavery, of consuming bodies, watching bodies consumed by violence, and framing effacement and degradation as romance, an operation of power at the core of chattel slavery.

Expanding Notions of LGBTQ+

Sexual identity labels and meanings have been expanding. We explore how sexual identities are taking shape, intertwining, and emerging in new forms among a growing number of LGBTQ+ people (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning, or people whose identities are outside the historically privileged or dominant groups of heterosexual sexual identities). We situate contemporary sexual identities in theories of the social construction of identity, intersectionality, and the life course. We review recent research that illuminates identity complexity and intersectionality, the increasingly intertwined understandings and experiences of sexuality and gender, and intersections of sexuality and gender with identities embedded in race and social class. Finally, we consider new work that situates sexual identities in the context of life course development, including life stage, developmental processes, and relationships.

Influence of a Partner’s Pornography Consumption on a Christian Woman’s Sexuality: A Qualitative Exploration

The present study examines how a partner’s Problematic Pornography Use impacts the overall sexual experience of the Christian woman. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, we explored the intersection of gender, religion, and sexuality with 21 women of faith (the majority of whom had sought out mental health treatment) to better understand how the Christian woman’s sexuality shifts in response to her husband’s consumption of pornography. Three major themes emerged from the data: Discovery Impacts Desire, I Am Not Enough, and Sexually Disenfranchized. We discuss important implications for clinicians and clergy that promote the emotional, physical, and sexual safety of women.

Border Digs in the Circumpolar North

Abstract This article explores social identity borders at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in the Circumpolar North. Perspectives of those living in the Arctic who self-identify as women, LGBTQ+, Indigenous, or any combination thereof, is presented. An intersectional lens frames lived realities among marginalized communities within context of ongoing challenges and advocacy in the Circumpolar North. This exploration of social identity borders, or border digs, shows mutual imbrications of inequity across marginalized communities. Advocacy for equitable futures supports sustainable futures and these futures require cultural safety – a call to action.

Of the forbidden frontiers of the body: exploring teachers’ narratives about students’ sexuality in the south Indian state of Keralam

The intersection of childhood and sexuality is a relatively less researched topic in India. This paper presents teachers’ narratives and explores cultural beliefs concerning childhood sexuality. The investigation attempts to understand ways in which the cross-cutting modalities of religion, caste, gender, and sexuality of the teacher and the student shape students’ sexual subjectivities. The “Domains of Power” as outlined by Patricia. H. Collins is used to analyse teacher interviews to understand how dominant sexualities are privileged and attain their power within schools. Further, a descriptive analysis is provided for how power relations inform interactions between students and teachers and how such interactions shape teachers’ expectations of students’ sexual knowledge, experiences, and expressions.

Rethinking gender discriminations in modern India: reading Qala from a feminist perspective

Throughout the world, patriarchy has had a long and dominant presence in shaping power dynamics and gender relations. The manifestation of patriarchal ideology is complex and multifaceted and its influence can be observed in various aspects of life, within families and beyond. Patriarchal norms have become so deeply ingrained and normalized in society that both men and women conform to them almost instinctively. While feminist movements have tried to break the shackles of patriarchy, the process has never been complete. As such, patriarchy continue to strive in newer forms and through different agents. Cutting across the intersections of caste, class and sexuality, the article attempts to take a critical look at how women today traverse the conditions of patriarchy in India. The gender analysis of the Netflix-released Hindi film Qala investigates how patriarchy operates within and beyond the family. Using a backward narrative and locating the story in the India of pre-independent times, Qala represents the gendered society of India at a time when the world was witnessing a surge of feminist movements across nations. Yet by going back in time, we argue, the filmmaker very cleverly tries to dismantle the claims of progress and gender consciousness in 21st century India. By doing so, the filmmaker perhaps attempts to comment that the very structures of patriarchy that existed earlier are still relevant and glaring in the many instances of suppression and discrimination that exist in the India of today. The article therefore offers a critical reading of the Indian film Qala and the baggage it carries of patriarchal bias in society.

Contending for Invented Space in African Context and Biblical Text: Intersecting Gender, Sexuality, Ethnicity and Economics

The Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research, through the work of Sithembiso Zwane, has theorised a continuum of contested space, including invited space (controlled by dominant sectors), invigorated space (whereby marginalised sectors contend for space within invited space) and invented space (as marginalised sectors transform these spaces into space they control). In this article, we extend our conceptualisation of contested space to the biblical text itself, recognising within biblical text these three forms of space, both in terms of socio-historical text and narrative text. We use the book of Ruth as our biblical text, recognising, first, the production of the canonical text as a contestation of space, following the hermeneutic of Itumeleng Mosala by working backwards away from the canonical form towards marginalised textual remnant voices and second, that literary-narrative setting within the book of Ruth can be read as a contestation of space. Socio-historically, we argue that the canonical text co-opts marginalised textual voices (in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and economics). Narratologically, we argue that the Ruth narrative includes traces of both socio-historical contestation and narrative contestation of space through Ruth's struggle for invented space. Alongside this focus on the biblical text, we reflect on how the Ujamaa Centre's community-based work might use these resources for re-reading Ruth with local Southern African communities (in both South Africa and Mozambique) struggling for redemptive invented space in the intersection of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and economics.

Changeable sexualities and fluid masculinities: The intersections of sexual fluidity with hegemonic masculinity

This article explores the concept of sexual fluidity and its applicability to men’s sexual experiences by approaching the surveillance and control of hegemonic masculinity. We carried out semi-structured interviews with 15 participants aged between 20 and 53 who state having experienced sexual fluidity. The analysis conveys how sexuality is a work in progress while highlighting the intersections of masculinities and sexualities in a heteronormative, mononormative, sexually rigid, and hegemonically masculine social context. The results indicate the potential flexibility, malleability, and changeability of all sexual identities, orientations, and experiences when disengaging from a heteronormative approach in sexual relations.

Youth’s Experiences of LGBTQ+ Inclusive Curriculum in a Secondary U.S. Classroom at the Intersections of Sexuality, Gender, Race, and Class

ABSTRACT Previous scholarship about LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum has tended to focus on teachers’ perspectives and drawn on binaries such as presence/absence. Extending past research, this article describes the experiences of youth, primarily but not exclusively LGBTQ+ youth, with LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum with respect to intersecting identities and power relations, specifically, sexuality, gender, race, and class. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography at a public, comprehensive high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, I focus on one literacy learning context, a cotaught sophomore humanities course combining English and social studies. Taking up intersectionality’s epistemological, ontological, and ethicopolitical commitments, the findings describe three sets of intersecting social dynamics that mattered for youth’s classroom experiences and ultimately the liberatory (im)possibilities of LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum: (1) queerness, disclosure, and agency; (2) social capital, class, and race; and (3) homonormativity, race, and outness. These findings offer implications for understanding the relations between LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum and classroom and school climate.

Por uma decolonização do HIV e interseccionalização das respostas à aids

Abstract With the advent of AIDS, a discursive journalistic-biomedical-mediatic articulation contributed to accentuate stigmatization on certain populations, implying a colonization of HIV in which the virus would reach some people while others would be free. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a critical literature review was carried out in some academic-legal-media areas from a narrative literature review (NLR). The theoretical, ethical and political references of decolonial studies were used for the present analysis because they understand that coloniality is reproduced in a triple dimension: that of power, knowledge and being. These studies were linked to an intersectional criticism in which multiple forms of discrimination can overlap and be experienced in intersection having the contextualization about what aids represented, in Haiti, as a comparative central axis for analysis. We were interested in thinking about the contribution of these perspectives to launch some provocations to the responses to HIV/AIDS in an attempt to overcome a reductionist view propagated by moral and criminalizing discourses that, by positioning themselves through supposed neutrality, conceal the intersectionality of gender, class, race and sexuality, raising barriers to health promotion and HIV/AIDS prevention policies and strategies.

Riding the Wave to Ni-Chōme: Tokyo's Korean Gay Bars in the 2000s

Abstract: This article introduces Korean gay space, place, and identity in Japan, as revealed in Tokyo's Korean gay bars that emerged at the start of Japan's Korean Wave in the 2000s. It focuses on the intersections of race and sexuality in interactions among the actors that produce and consume these establishments, exposing racialized spaces of desire besides those limited to white Westernness. It presents an overview of Korean gay identity against the backdrop of Koreaphobia in Japan and homophobia among zainichi , along with an examination of the Korean Wave, its impact on the queer diaspora, and the gay commodification of Koreanness. The study comparatively analyzes racial groupings in the bar, seeking clarity on the representations of self and other among gay Koreans and with gay Japanese. A series of conclusions are made: (1) Korean gay men's experience in Japan is shaped by having to contend with separate closets for race and sexuality, compounded by racism and homophobia from within their own communities dissociated from "Japan." (2) The Korean Wave has created a new category of desire among gay men through a middle ground or third space around a borderless, hybridized community of communities. (3) Korean gay bars simultaneously function as consumer spaces for what the author terms "proximate opposites" with Japanese, and as community centers for racially one yet ideologically divided Koreans. The study sets out to recover and preserve a history that would otherwise have been lost from memory with decades of scholarly inattention to its existence.

Building Community Through Queer Learning Disability Amateur Filmmaking: Oska Bright Film Festival and Queer Freedom

Much has been written on the intersection of disability and sexuality since the publication of <i>The Sexual Politics of Disability</i> (Shakespeare et al., 1996), however scant literature refers to these issues as represented on the screen, where it can be argued representations have the most power to shape perceptions. Disabled characters in media narratives are invariably represented as lacking in any sexuality or negation of heteronormative gender and sexual expressions.<br /> In 2017, Brighton-based learning disability film festival Oska Bright (OBFF) launched their Queer Freedom (QF) strand as an intervention in this lack of queer representation within learning disability narratives. In 2017 and 2019, QF featured films made by or featuring queer people with learning disabilities and autism, including Glasgow-based queer femme filmmaker Mattie Kennedy. Devised by OBFF Lead Programmer and queer filmmaker Matthew Hellett after meeting Kennedy at a previous OBFF, Hellett believed he had a responsibility to create a space for these unheard voices.<br /> This article mobilises Bonnie Honig’s feminist refusal method of inclination and bell hooks’ theory of talking back to explore how OBFF and QF have enabled Kennedy and Hellett to create space and claim their visibility as queer learning-disabled filmmakers through a process of mutual affirmation. Learning-disabled people have historically been segregated from society, so in the spirit of Foucault’s heterotopia, by coming together to form a community of people who affirm and encourage other queer learning-disabled people to make their voices heard, they are refusing their assigned societal segregation.

RISK AND RESILIENCE: HIGHLIGHTING MINORITY STRESS IN A LIFESPAN SAMPLE OF SEXUAL MINORITIES

Abstract Older sexual minorities (OSM), or those older adults sexually attracted to the same sex, are at risk for poorer well-being, which is rooted in the stresses of being marginalized. There is limited knowledge on how older age contextualizes the minority stress process. OSM have witnessed more stigmatized sociopolitical climates, yet report less minority stress compared with younger adults, which may be due to having accrued lifetime practice with stigma. The current study explores age differences in the daily experiences of minority stress in a sample of sexual minorities stratified across the lifespan. Data from a baseline sample of 355 sexual minorities (ages 18-90) confirmed previous research that OSM experienced lower minority stress compared with their younger counterparts (p<.05). Additionally, an age-stratified subset of this sample (N=112; ages 19-79) answered daily surveys for 3 weeks (N=1,923). Using multilevel modeling, we found that older age moderated the daily stress-distress relationships between outness disclosure and positive affect (B=-.005, p<.05); internalized homonegativity and positive affect (B=.004, p <.05) and negative affect (B=-.005, p<.05), and experienced microaggressions and negative affect (B=.007, p<.05). OSM had weaker relationships among four different daily minority stressors and worse daily well-being. There also was support that the associations between age and minority stress were partially mediated by lifelong exposure with marginalization. This project highlights the intersection of sexuality and aging and emphasizes the unique resilience of OSM. The results of this study inform both theory and practice and contribute to a better understanding of how to address OSM’ health disparities.

A child is being aborted

What can Freud’s seminal paper on sadomasochistic masturbation fantasies—“A Child Is Being Beaten”—tell us about the fantasy behind anti-abortion politics? Would Freud be surprised by the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade? Ever attentive to the vicissitudes of the primal scene, sibling jealousy, misogynistic hatred directed towards women at the intersection of sexuality and motherhood, a return to Freud gives new perspective on an old dogma.

Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords. By Patricia Parker

Addressing a BBC radio audience in 1937, Virginia Woolf imagined words as “the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.” They live “variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together.”1 What Woolf celebrates about language—their strange lives and unpredictable movements, their unexpected and promiscuous relations—Patricia Parker has devoted her distinguished career to interrogating. By honing a feminist philological practice attuned to the intersections of language, class, gender, sexuality, and race, Parker illuminates how single words and their discursive networks firm up or challenge hierarchies of self and other in early modern English culture. This book requires and rewards slow reading. Throughout six chapters, it advances an “experiment in interconnection” (28) that offers literary and cultural critics a “strategy of reading” (29) the relations between words and their discursive networks. Working across historical periods, geographies, discourses, and languages, Parker traces how single words range far afield to mate, drawing other terms into the orbit of the self-same in subtle, queer, and preposterous ways. As one has come to expect from Parker, delight is in the details. Highly filigreed arguments organized around distinct Shakespeare plays—Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Othello, and Cymbeline—demonstrate how single words in multiple forms (verbs, nouns, prepositions, proper and place names), as well as the discursive networks in which they circulate, illuminate contexts, subtexts, and complexities that have been critically “marginalized or have gone unnoticed by [the plays’] editors and critics” (1). Parker’s word-hoard comprises an expansive range of unexpected terms: preposterous, awkward, (in)continence, supposition, construing, occupation, cambio, cashier(ing), Ganymede, Low Countries, Brabant, quince, breeches, part, and latter ends, among others. Tracing how such words—as well as phonemes, sounds, and orthographic variants—participate in the broader scope of an early modern English cultural semantics requires Parker to attend to plays as well as to dictionaries, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Protestant polemics, new theories of military science, eye-witness accounts of military campaigns, works on grammar and orthography, conduct books, marriage manuals, accounting and bookkeeping manuals, the visual and textual aspects of emblem books, non-Shakespearean drama, Histories, and more.