Queer Theory, Historicism, and Early Modern Sexualities

Queer/Early/Modern (Carla Freccero) Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Daniel Juan Gil) Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (Maureen Quilligan) Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (Denise A. Walen

Sexual Slander and Working Women in The Roaring Girl

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker\u27s The Roaring Girl, the play\u27s other female characters are also of interest. The citizen wives of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An analysis of the citizen wives of The Roaring Girl demonstrates that the imputation of sexual transgression to urban working women served to discipline an economic and erotic agency that could be perceived as threatening to orderly household management

Sibling Affection and Domestic Heterosexuality in Lodovick Carlell’s The Deserving Favorite

Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers and sisters can model loving intimacy between men and women, yet siblings are too close in blood to be married. Female-female and brother-sister relationships thus constitute complementary yet socially unsustainable models of consensual marital union

Asses and Wits: The Homoerotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson\u27s Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman\u27s The Gentleman Usher. Whereas sodomy always signifies social disorder, homoerotic useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become sodomitical only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of sodomy is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the unnatural Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against marriage, inheritance, and (once Mosca publicly cross dresses above his station) hierarchical authority. In Chapman\u27s The Gentleman Usher, Prince Vincentio achieves his goals by establishing a homoerotic friendship with a foolish gentleman; like Volpone, however, he is finally unable to control the ambitious servant he has sodomitically empowered. As the ambiguous figure of the gentleman usher suggests, the social and economic transformations destabilizing personal service during this period inform the anxious recognition that homoerotic power structures could be profitably manipulated by servants as well as masters

Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality through Race

When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in ELR appeared in 1992 with Joseph Pequigney’s essay on Shakespeare’s two Antonios, followed by my own essay on non-Shakespearean satiric comedy in 1995

Development and Preliminary Tests of an Open-Path Airborne Diode Laser Absorption Instrument for Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is well known for its importance as an atmospheric greenhouse gas, with many sources and sinks around the globe. Understanding the fluxes of carbon into and out of the atmosphere is a complex and daunting challenge. One tool applied by scientists to measure the vertical flux of CO2 near the surface uses the eddy covariance technique, most often from towers but also from aircraft flying specific patterns over the study area. In this technique, variations of constituents of interest are correlated with fluctuations in the local vertical wind velocity. Measurement requirements are stringent, particularly with regard to precision, sensitivity to small changes, and temporal sampling rate. In addition, many aircraft have limited payload capability, so instrument size, weight, and power consumption are also important considerations. We report on the development and preliminary application of an airborne sensor for the measurement of atmospheric CO2. The instrument, modeled on the successful DLH (Diode Laser Hygrometer) series of instruments, has been tested in the laboratory and on the NASA DC-8 aircraft. Performance parameters such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and temporal response are discussed in the context of typical atmospheric variability and suitability for flux measurement applications. On-aircraft, in-flight data have been obtained and are discussed as well. Performance of the instrument has been promising, and continued flight testing is planned during 2016

Disciplines, Institutions—and Desires

Will Stockton: I would like to begin by asking you to consider the chiasmus under which we gather: “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” The chiasmus focuses our attention on the crossing of two terms, each with noun and verb forms their grammatical flexibility indexed, perhaps, to the methodological flexibility of the fields in which most of us work: early modern (here both Renaissance and late-medieval) queer and/or sexuality studies. Talk a bit about the definitions of desir/e/ing and histor/y/icizing, and the relation of these terms to the periodization and thematization of your and our work. Is defining these words more hazardous than fruitful? If these terms must remain both undefined and points of critical orientation, then how would you describe what does not qualify as historicizing, or what does not count as desire

Variability of Ice Supersaturation, Nucleation, and Cirrus in TTL Vertical Layers

No abstract availabl