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- Title
A LANTHORN IN THE CRYPT: WHITE EROTICS IN ROMEO AND JULIET.
- Authors
Bischoff, Sarah
- Abstract
Optimistic Shakespeareans have taken to going "a-queering" with his work, reading his poetry and plays for subversion of erotic expectations. This article looks at the racializing consequences of such reading, focusing particularly on the ways Romeo and Juliet has been read queerly not for the homoeroticism that inundates the play, but for the titular lovers' death-fixated deviation from the genealogical imperative of heteronormative time. This article does not dispute this reading; it instead looks at the ways that such a reading dovetails with racializing fixtures of how the bodies of the lovers, labeled white, become idealized, and are mourned by both the story's families and the audience. The eroticism laid out in Romeo and Juliet forms what Sharon Patricia Holland calls a "project of belonging": the process of making personal and community identity through an assumed erotic connection, even if that eroticism takes on unexpected forms.
- Subjects
ROMEO &; Juliet (Play : Shakespeare); EROTICISM in literature; RACIALIZATION; HOLLAND, Sharon Patricia; LGBTQ+ people
- Publication
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 2023, Vol 54, p123
- ISSN
0069-6412
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/cjm.2023.a912674