Shakespeare and Gender: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Drama

Shakespeare and Gender guides students and teachers through the complexities of the representation of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s work. Informed by contemporary debates and insights into gender and sexuality, including intersectionality, feminist geography, queer and performance studies and fourth-wave feminism, this book provides a lucid and lively discussion of how gender and sexual identity are debated, contested and displayed in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Using close textual analysis hand-in-hand with verbal and visual contextual materials, the book offers an accessible and intelligent introduction to how gender debates are integral to the plays and poems, and why we continue to read and perform them with this in mind.
Topics and themes discussed include gendering madness, paternity and the patriarchy, sexuality, anxious masculinity, maternal bodies, gender transgression, and kingship and the male body politic.