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Dirty Minds … Dirty Minds …
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Want to Know … Want to Know …
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What Counts … What Counts …
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As Sex … As Sex …
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Before … Before …
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… Sex … Sex
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Notes Notes
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Dirty Minds …
Anyone who has broached the question of sex in the undergraduate classroom cannot have escaped the accusation, “You are reading too much (sex) into this (text).” This is perhaps especially true of Renaissance courses, in which expectations of “great literature” written in the mists of time would seem to obviate any possibility of eroticism. Teachers generally take recourse in textual glosses to explain the bawdy, scatological, and downright filthy references that punctuate even the most canonical plays and poems. Sometimes we seek assistance from the many glossaries that codify sexual allusions or assign criticism that interprets dynamics of erotic love, homosexuality, or sexual violence. When we teach drama, we can screen recent films, particularly those capitalizing on the market value of Shakespeare, which increasingly adorn words with graphic depictions of flesh.
Despite this pedagogical state of the art, however, understandings of early modern sex remain circumscribed by a number of stubborn assumptions: that it is almost always heterosexual; that it ultimately tends toward the “consummation” of penis in vagina; that its apotheosis is to be found in the couple form; that, unless it is a matter of violent assault, it is inevitably a prelude to or sign of marriage. Often accompanying these calcified ideas are others: that heterosexuality, unlike homosexuality, is not subject to change; that sex is, in the main, a source of pleasure, ending in orgasm; that certain sexual “outlets,” like prostitution, exist mainly to preserve heterosexual marriage; that sex within marriage is banal and boring, subsumed ideologically under the imperative of reproduction. In other words, a presumptive knowledge overwrites what sex is, what it does, what it means, and why we should care about it. Sex before Sex aims to dismantle that knowingness, in the name of “a future critical practice that does not presume to know in advance what sex is and has been” (Varnado). It does so, paradoxically, by applying analytical pressure on what would seem to be the most self-evident of categories: sex acts.
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