7 - Feminist Queer Temporalities in Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
The multiple temporalities of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘The Description of Cookeham’ and Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder model a mutually galvanizing rather than antagonistic relationship between feminist and queer theory. Lanyer's and Hutchinson's texts return to long-standing feminist concerns: female communities, the foundational stories of patriarchy, and a focus on desire both procreative and emphatically not. But the theories the texts themselves manifest do the work of queering—not as an alternative to, but in concert with—these feminist concerns. For Lanyer, this involves not only a focus on the eroticism of all-female communities, but also a lingering in a kiss oddly material and suspended in time. For Hutchinson, it concerns the way that the impossibility of procreative sex shows the needlessness of female harm.
Keywords: feminism; queer; lesbian; temporality; Aemilia Lanyer; Lucy Hutchinson
Our title responds to an adversarial moment in the fields of feminist and queer early modern studies: the long-standing charges that feminism's focus on bodies and the patriarchal family promote essentialism and heteronormativity and that queer theory's lack of attention to gender and misogyny replicates masculinist norms. Of course, both feminism and queer theory offer more sophisticated theories than these condemnations allow: feminists have long understood both gender and the body as constructed, and queried any stable sense of identity; many queer scholars have undertaken thoroughgoing critiques of gendered systems that acknowledge the workings of gendered oppression. But the antagonism remains. Following Lee Edelman's 2004 rejection of futurity, feminist theory has sometimes seemed, ironically, like the past to the future of queer theory. The fraught theoretical debates around temporality and history (two distinct terms, as Valerie Traub notes) associate queerness with subversion and innovation, while feminism and its emphasis on women writers appear at least outdated if not outright reactionary.
In the wake of the 2016 election, though, we with feminist and queer commitments have antagonists enough. Accordingly, we join with other scholars in seeking ‘a strategic collectivity that remains conscious of difference and incommensurability’. How can we understand the relationship between feminism and queer theory as not adversarial, nor substitutive, but as coexisting and mutually galvanizing?
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- Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World , pp. 159 - 184Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018
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