Queer Methods Research Articles

Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research

Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research

Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (review)

Reviewed by: Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley Melissa E. Sanchez (bio) Mario DiGangi . Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 296. $65.00. In his smart and innovative new book, Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley, Mario DiGangi expands the boundaries of the history of sexuality even as he shows how that history is intricately connected to social and political history. DiGangi defines the "sexual type" as a figure who reveals the ideological tensions inherent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of character in its social, psychological, and literary registers. On the one hand, the sexual type is an easily recognizable figure (one might even say caricature) of deviant or deformed expressions of gendered or erotic identity. On the other hand, the sexual type participates substantially in familiar and normative social relations and thereby exposes the tenuous and fictional nature of the boundaries between perversity and normality, outsiders and insiders. Moreover, the sexual type is not just "sexual" in a narrow sense. ather, representations of the sexual type reveal the intricate connections between gender and sexual identity and social, economic, and political ideals and loyalties. Focusing on six sexual types—the sodomite, the tribade, the narcissistic courtier, the bawd, the citizen wife, and the monstrous favorite—DiGangi shows how "signifiers of gender and (more subtly) of sexuality serve to convey arguments about political loyalty, military ethics, and aristocratic comportment" (3). The sexual is not merely a metaphor for sociopolitical anxieties but a symptom of the contradictions that informed early modern attempts to align various forms of agency and embodiment into stable and recognizable categories. Accordingly, the types that DiGangi analyzes "unsettle the taxonomical thinking that produces them" (9). DiGangi's study of sexual types also promises to unsettle several modern scholarly taxonomies. For while his project is clearly informed by work in queer studies, DiGangi challenges many of the implicit boundaries that tend to shape scholarship in that field. Most prominently, rather than focus exclusively on early modern representations of same-sex eroticism, Sexual Types includes figures of indeterminate (or "bi-") sexuality (the narcissistic courtier, the monstrous favorite) and figures that fit modern definitions of "heterosexuality" (the citizen wife, the bawd) as well as those that appear to conform to the modern definition of "homosexuality" (the sodomite, the tribade). By examining a range of gendered and sexual behaviors, DiGangi reminds us of the power of early modern studies to destabilize both past and present identitarian categories of male and female, homo- and heterosexual. In addition, Sexual Types gracefully combines formalist, historicist, feminist, and queer methods of reading. By showing how sexual taxonomies are inseparable from social, economic, and political ideologies, [End Page 247] DiGangi reveals the importance of private, affective, embodied experience to these public structures of identification. Finally, DiGangi examines a wide range of early modern writing. In addition to a number of plays by Shakespeare, Sexual Types includes careful analysis of less commonly read work by Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, Massinger, Killigrew, and Shirley. These plays are, moreover, set in conversation with legal tracts, political pamphlets, crime narratives, character studies, travel writing, and medical texts. The effect is quietly to remind us of the artificiality of both modern hierarchies of literary value and modern distinctions between aesthetic and sociopolitical realms of thought. Sexual Types is divided into three parts, each of which examines a pair of types, one male and one female, that foregrounds a particular set of ideological issues. Part 1 includes chapters on representations of the sodomite and the tribade in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Winter's Tale, each of which unsettles categories of masculinity and femininity, perversity and familiarity. In chapter one, DiGangi argues that the sodomite should be conceived as neither an alien figure (as Alan Bray and Paul Hammond have argued) nor as a purely fictional subject constructed through discourse (as Gregory Bredbeck and Jonathan Goldberg would have it), nor yet as a familiar figure with whom playgoers might pleasurably identify (as in Bruce Smith's and Mary Bly's accounts...

IMAGINED, DESIRED

In this review I introduce readers to three exemplary ethnographies. All three contribute not only to anthropological and queer studies literatures but also to discourses and critiques of globalization, transnationalism, and neoliberalism. Further, these works destabilize notions of what constitutes ethnography in the general field of queer studies and demonstrate that queer anthropology is imperative to consider in present and future developments in queer theory, methods, and analyses. These texts argue that it is time to move beyond the search for that which is “queer” as emerging from “tradition.” They demonstrate that social constructions of queer subjectivities are ever-changing and emerging in contemporary historical contexts, often in relation to the nation-state and against hegemonic Euro-American notions of what is considered “queer.”

Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy

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Queer London, Method Acting, and Time Travel

Queer London, Method Acting, and Time Travel

Therapy from the Fence

ABSTRACT Bisexuality is virtually invisible in therapy literature. Little has been written on what factors influence choice of therapeutic approach. The perceptions of therapists who self-identify as bisexual, and their approach to therapy, are explored in a reflexive phenomenological study informed by queer and feminist methods. The design was non-dichot-omous in an effort to explore data that disappears in comparative enquiry. Nine co-researchers participated in telephone interviews, contributed to both structure and content, and reviewed analysis. The findings provide an authentic description of their experience across six experiential levels: still centre; intra personal; inter personal; community; culture; world-view. They reveal dynamic inter-relationships between ‘Bisexual Identity and Experience,’ ‘Therapy and Mental Health,’ and ‘Being and Becoming a Therapist.’ Transferability is evident in the resonance findings have for their readership. The findings concur with sparse literature on integrative and queer approaches to mental health inequalities and therapy, bisexual identities, and multi-dimensional models of mutable sexuality. They have implications for the absence of sexuality and queer identities in therapy training, and for sensitivity to cultural diversity in therapy practice.