Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of ValueBy attending to the multiple values signalled by beards in early modern England, this study elucidates how fetish objects are the vehicles through which phenomena forms and informs ideological systems of power. Providing detailed discussions of not only male beards but also beardless boys, female beards, and half-bearded hermaprodites, "Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value" argues that attending to the Renaissance beard as a fetish object exposes the cultural production of meaning. Author Mark Albert 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 values converge. Johnston's reading of fetish engages Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological theories of the phenomenon and proposes a synthesis among them that would simultaneously acknowledge their divergent emphases - sexual, economic, racial - while suggesting that the synthesis of diverse registers that fetish accomplishes facilitates its cultural and psychic naturalizing function. |
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androgenesis Antonio Antonio's Revenge appears associated attributed audience Ballad barber beard signals bearded woman beardedness beardless boys body boy-actor boyhood bush beard castration catamite chin colour complex value confirms conflates connotations constitutes context contradictory culture Dauphine desire diegesis diminution Dionisius disavowal disguise doth drama early modern England early modern English economic Epicoene erotic Esau exposes face facial beard facial hair fantasy female beard fetish objects fetishist function golden beard hairy half beard haue heir Henry hermaphrodite humoural humoural theory ideal ideology illusion insubordination ironically John Jonson's King lack legibility London Macbeth male beard martial masculinity Midas multiple registers natural one-sex model patriarchal pederasty perpetually phallic phallus play possession practices privilege production prosthetic psychic qualities red beard reproductive Riverside Shakespeare Salmacis semiotic sex and gender sexual sexual differentiation shaving signified smooth boys social stage status subordination suggests symbol systems of power thereby Thersites threat virility widow witches women