Undoing Desdemona: Gender, Fetish, and Erotic Materiality in Othello

(U N)DOING D ESDEMONA: GENDER, FETISH, AND EROTIC MATERIALTY IN OTHELLO A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English and Ame...

(U N)DOING D ESDEMONA: GENDER, FETISH, AND EROTIC MATERIALTY IN OTHELLO A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English and American Literature By Perry D. Guevara, B.A. Washington, DC May 1, 2009 ii Dedicated to Cecilia (and Francisco, in memoriam) iii Acknowledgements ( Un)Doing Desdemona: Gender, Fe tish, and Erotic Materiality in Othello began as a suspicion—a mere twinkl e of an idea—while reading Othello for Mimi Yiu's graduate seminar Shakespeare's Exotic Romances . I am indebted to Dr. Yiu for serving as my thesis advisor and for seei ng this project through to its conclusion. I am also thankful to Ricardo Ortiz for serving on my oral ex am committee and for ensuring that my ideas are carefully thought through. Thanks also to Lena Orlin, Dana Luciano, Patrick O'Malley, and M. Lindsay Kaplan for their co ntinued instruction and encouragement. The feedback I received from Jonathan Goldberg (Emory University) and Mario DiGangi (City University University of New York—G raduate Center) proved particularly helpful during the final phases of writing. Furthermore, my thesis owes its life to my peers, not only for their generous feedback, but also for their invaluable friends hip, especially Roya Biggie, Olga Tsyganova, Renata Marchione, Mich ael Ferrier, and Anna Kruse. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Donna and Je ss Guevara, for their unconditional love and support even though they think my work is “over their heads.” Table of Contents Introduction .........................................................................................................................1 Desdemona's Dildo............................................................................................................18 Coda ..................................................................................................................................68 iv 1 I. Introduction “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” -Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” While reading Judith Butler's Precarious Life , I was struck by her assertion that the human subject is politic ally constituted by and through the corporeal and social vulnerabilities of our collective bodies. Expos ure to violence and our shared experience of loss initiates a kind of community, a social “we” that understands wh at it means to lose somebody and to lose one’s self in the process of grieving. I am par ticularly intrigued by her idea of mutual undoing—the ways in which we are di spossessed from one another when our relational ties are exploited. Th e human condition is predicated on this precarious interdependence: we live for each ot her at the risk of lo sing each other. Butler writes, “Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.” 1 1 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004) 23. 2 Butler's notion of undoing is the impetus for what follows. I take up many of her primary, conceptual questions such as: “W hose lives count as lives?” and “Who counts as human?” 2 We are both interested in how the human is socially constituted and how some lives, particularly those which do not meet predetermined criter ia of humanness and intelligibility, are cast as inferior and subhuman. While Butler contextualizes her analysis in light of recent global violence, I situate my inquiry in the early modern period. I am interested in looking at repr esentations of early modern qu eer desire, particularly in Shakespearean drama, and how non-normativ e desire elicits physical, psychic, and discursive violence. My goal is to show how violence enacted upon queer bodies in the early modern period—however historically distant—can be correla ted to (although not necessarily equated to) contemporary viol ence committed against queer identified persons today. My point of access into this mode of i nquiry is through the early modern female body, especially the body which is seen as masculine, disobedient, and ontologically aberrant. Medical, juridical, and theologi cal discourses attempt to categorize and moralize these socially and co rporeally queer bodies, but fa il to give them voice. The voices of queer women are virtua lly absent from these historical records. Searching for them within early modern historical documents, we are continually confounded by silence. Limiting our discussion to these type s of texts would deprive us of understanding how queer women lived— how they exercised their agency within a normalizing, patriarchally regulated culture. Such is the reason we must listen for their echoes in the 2 Butler, Precarious Life , 20. 3 nooks and crannies of other di scourses. I would argue that the Renaissance theatre gives us access into the early modern cultural psyc he, mimicking societal anxieties and how these tensions were culturally staged and played out. Stage plays provide us with representations of both the material and be havioral codes which governed early modern models of sociality. As my primary literary text for analysis, I have chosen William Shakespeare's Othello. Written for the London theatre, Othello stages many of the time's most pressing cultural anxieties: female disobedience, mis cegenation, and cuckoldry. In the first scene of the play, Brabantio, Desdemona's aristocrat ic father, is fraught with worry that his well-bred daughter has eloped with a Black Moor. Iago connivingly heightens his anxiety by suggesting that they could be “making the beast with two backs,” (1.1.115) a gross act of miscegenation. 3 Later in the play, Iago deviously plants Desdemona's handkerchief in Cassio's quarters, and Othello is frightened that he has been cuc kolded by his fair and potentially disobedient wife. Yet, I am mostly interested in how these desirous anxieties are resolved through violence. I want to know what Desdemona means when she says, “Alas, he is betrayed and I undone,” mere moments before her death (5.2.96). How is her body undone by violence? What happens to her body once it is undone? And what exactly does it mean to be “undone” in the first place? Perhaps unfastened? Or unfinished? The capaciousness of Butler's idea of undoneness su rrounds a multiplicity of possibilities for signification, each navigating particular tenor s and nuanced meanings within the play. Furthermore, I am curious as to how De sdemona's handkerchief participates in her 3 William Shakespeare, Othello , 3 rd ed., Ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (London: Arden, 2006) 4 undoing. Its series of exchanges, transactions , thefts, and losses signify the seemingly apparent “truths” of her desires. The handkerc hief, as both a materi al object and stage prop, signals her supposed infidelity, consequently triggering dire choices with lethal repercussions. Moreover, not only does the handkerchief sublimina lly organize desires and identities in Othello , but it also configures the ways in which we, as a modern audience, interact with the play as a prem odern text. Even afte r hundreds of years, spanning the paradigmatic shift from the premode rn to the modern era, audiences are still able to psychically and emotionally connect with Othello and its characters. Our ability to engage with a premodern text calls into que stion our relationship to history. Just how modern are we? Are we really so different from our ea rly modern predecessors? When you think about it, how different can their desires be from ours? Are we never jealous like Othello? Devious as Iago? Vulnerable as Desdemona? The Question of History When discussing premodern desires, one automatically summons the specter of history and inevitably conjures the empirical demands of historic ity. My approach to history is a queer one in which I conceptu alize Desdemona's handke rchief as undoing empirical histories that sternly marshal pr oper teleology. There exists an ambivalent connection between materiality and temporality. Yet, before proceeding, I feel obliged to define my use of the word “queer.” The multivalence of the term itself makes it useful in a variety of situations. “Queer” simultaneously functions as identity, non-identity, and a critique of identity itself. As a mode rn category delimiting bounds of non-normative 5 sexual orientation, “queer” typi cally designates lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexed persons. However, a hipper, tr endier generation of American young people appropriate “queer” in a way which resist s the limitations of pre-prescribed sexual identities. For them, “queer” signifies a re sistance to bourgeois social norms and a rebellion against culturally dictated sexua l edicts. Furthermore, in contemporary academic circles, “queer” works as a mode of critique, challenging structures and apparatuses of power which code and natu ralize bodies and their respective identities under the auspices of heteronormativity. “Q ueer” scholarship dislodges these seemingly fixed signifiers from their cu lturally inscribed foundations a nd exposes deviant bodies in relation to the mechanisms of power which pr oduce them as such. Finally, I hope that in this analysis “queer” maintains its se nse of strangeness. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term emerged in the early modern period from the German “quer,” which signified something that is oblique or out of alignment. This usage coincides with modern theoretical uses of “qu eer” which primarily aim to knock normative modes of signification out of alignment. Therefore, a qu eer approach to early modern desire means questioning and critiquing operations of patriarchal power in order to uncover the out of line, the strange, and the sexually peculiar. Taking my cue from theories of queer te mporality, I seek to defer, disrupt, and possibly even destroy longer standing empiri cal histories in favor of instantiating narratives of alterity, those which represent a nd even valorize the fi gure of the violently undone, premodern other . In their introduction to Premodern Sexualities, Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero conduct a close reading of Michel Foucault's The History 6 of Sexuality to argue that queer scholarship can disr upt historical linearity by privileging histories of alterity. They write, “Foucault argued instead for the pos sibility of radical discontinuities between epochs and 'epistemes.' Foucault's accompanying destabilization of 'truth'—means, of course, that histor iography can never tell a truth that is not contingent. Foucault's work disturbs the very normativity of historical narrative.” 4 These contingencies are relational and permit for the insertion of new narratives of alterity into the shifts and slippages of the historico-di scursive matrix. To this end, Fradenburg and Freccero propose a new “project of dislodging and indeed queering the truth-effects of certain historicist practices. Especially in question are those historicist practices that repudiate roles of fantasy and pleasure in the produc tion of historiography. 5 In this way, the fabric of Desdemona's handkerchief f unctions as a metaphor for the historico- discursive matrix—time possessing the narrat ives of history—and its cloth-like pliancy, the capacity to fold and unfold, is the very quality which can disr upt proper teleology. In a series of discussions with fellow French philosopher Bruno Latour, Michel Serres conceptualizes time as polychronic—pa st, present, and future convergent yet simultaneously disjunctive. He rejects the idea of time as linear, sequential, or evolutive in favor of a temporality which is multiple, er ratic, and, at times, even paradoxical. Serres imagines time as twisted, wrinkled, and pleated—constantly in the process of folding and unfolding. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), he uses a handkerchief to metaphorize his theory: 4 Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, “Caxto n, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Frecce ro (New York: Routledge, 1996) xvi. 5 Ibid, xvii. 7 If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proxim ities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points a nd measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two point s that were close can become very distant. 6 It is my hope that Serres' understanding of tim e as a handkerchief can inform my inquiry into early modern materialisms—the ways in which material obj ects not only possess memory and bear ghostly traces of the past, but also the ways in which they configure our relationship to time itself. Jonathan Goldberg points out that Serres' “way of doing the history of science speaks to the history of sexuality” and converges with queer theory's imperative to dismantle normative conceptions of linear time. 7 To assume that there exists some paradigmatic divide between m odernity and premodernity is to declare that premodern subjectivity is somehow incongr uent with modern subjectivity—that our desires are somehow formed, experienced, and contextualized differently than those of our predecessors. However, if the past can be folded onto the present—superimposed, if you will—and if modern sexualities can collapse into premodern desires, then the threads of the handkerchief can weave us into a fabric of past, present, and future. Serres argues that the object itself is “multitemporal, and reve als a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats.” 8 The handkerchief folds us together—the fabric of the present superimposed onto that of the past. 6 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995) 60. 7 Jonathan Goldberg, “After Thoughts,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (2007) 504. 8 Serres, 60. 8 Queer Historiography If we are to read the handkerchief as c onfiguring time itself, then this project demands reading and writing practices that ar e attentive to the possibilities of queer temporality. In her recent book In a Queer Time and Place, Judith Halberstam asserts that queer temporality destabilizes linear time and challenges the prescribed heterosexual narrative defined by “an obvious transition out of childish dependency through marriage and into adult responsib ility through reproduction.” 9 The normative heterosexual subject experiences a cyclical cohere nce in the ritualized move ment from birth to childhood, from adolescence to adulthood, and from repr oduction to death and ev entual rebirth. On the contrary, the queer subject might refuse to adhere to this timeline. Halberstam recalls thinking as a child, “[F]uck family, fuck marriag e ... this is not my life, that will not be my timeline. Queer time for me is ... the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence.” 10 This refusal of linear temporality e xposes possibilities for thinking about time in new and multiple ways and conse quently creates the potential for re- conceptualizing history and its subs equent relationship to time. In Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities , Pre- and Postmodern, Carolyn Dinshaw proposes a queer methodology which privileges histories of alte rity. She joins Homi Bhaba in identifying new histories for historically disenfranchised groups. While Bhaba is primarily concerned with locating new narrative spaces for colonially marginalized persons, Dinshaw is interested in exposing how medieval queer desire has been rendered unintelligible in 9 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York UP, 2005) 152-153. 10 Carolyn Dinshaw, et. al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2007) 182. 9 premodern textuality. She aims to construct a new intelligible hist ory by making partial connections, or what she calls “touches ,” across time through pre and postmodern juxtapositions—bodies, objects, and texts, both past and present, simultaneously disjointed yet conjoined in cro ss-temporal, affective “touches.” 11 These touches are analogous to Serres' folds in a handkerchief—discrete moments in time superimposed onto one another, the past brought to b ear upon the present. Dinshaw disregards normalized straight time and relishes in a queer anachrony which disturbs proper teleology, yet, at the same time, manages to make a seemingly di stant history somehow proximal, accessible, and relevant. The recent proliferation of scholarship in premodern queer historiography speaks to the modern desire for queer histories—the urgent need to form alliances with a past that can yield sociopolitical utility in the present. Many queer histories of the early modern period remain undone, especially those of queer women. In her discussion of the seemingly deliberate silencing of lesbian desire in early modern textuality, Valerie Traub points out that our task is “to keep alive our historical difference from early modern women and at the same time to show how hist orically distant representations of female desire can be correlated, though not in any simple or linear fashion, to modern systems of intelligibility and political efficacy.” 12 Yet how can a queer past be useful to us if it is filled with gaps and silences? How can we recover these lost queer lives if they never penned their voices into text? For the historio grapher, these silences become open spaces 11 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke, 1999) 12 Valerie Traub, “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” Queering the Renaissance ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke UP, 1994) 62. 10 for excavation and inquiry. Restructuring the lo st lives of these miscreant personae relies on theorizing and speculating about the gaps w ithin the scant narratives provided in court inquests, legal depositions, didactic pamphl ets, and medical trea tises. These texts, offering slight glimpses into 16 th and 17 th Century England’s criminally queer lives, are primarily concerned with the discipline and regulation of society's transgressive bodies, those which challenge implicitly heteronorma tive limits inscribed as seemingly fixed cultural norms. I am interested in resurrecti ng the voices of these si lenced souls rendered inaudible by a monolithic empirical history and attributing to them authentically self- determining subjectivities. Early Modern Materialisms This writing and re-writing of the past can be likened to the historical materialist impulse to uncover history as a lost object (Desdemona's lost handkerchief) which, when found, can illuminate past histories of oppres sion. Michel de Certeau tells us, “The violence of the body reaches the wr itten page only through absence.” 13 Historiography is the endeavor to write the always alrea dy missing object or body into being. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin suggests, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our ta sk to bring about a real state of emergency.” 14 13 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, Trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 3. 14 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, Ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: 11 He argues for an urgent and in sistent attentiveness to history which revives the oppressed while concurrently exploding linear conception s of temporality. His model of history recaptures the past as an image, or perhaps as an object, available to us in our present historical moment. Illustrating this theory, Benjamin provides us with a picture of an angel looking upon history as a pi le of ruins accruing toward the sky. He writes, “Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” 15 Benjamin's vision of history as a crystallized yet ruined form, instead of as a linear sequence of events, allows us to retain history as a constellatory object in the present. He conte nds, “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of now.” 16 Reconfiguring history as a discoverable object casts the queer historiographer as an archeologist who sifts through the ruins in s earch of new narratives and new possibilities for understanding the past. Benjamin's disavowal of linear temporality and his rejection of historical empiricism in favor of historical materialism a ssures us that “[n]othing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” 17 History as a recoverable object is met onymic with the Freudian lost object. Sigmund Freud's theory of mourning and mela ncholia is predicated on loss. Mourning and melancholia are similar in that the subj ect grieves a lost objec t. However, mourning differs from melancholia in that the lost object is resolved within the subject's Schocken, 1968) 257. 15 Benjamin, 257 16 Ibid, 261. 17 Ibid, 254. 12 consciousness through a gradual process of cat hexis, or “letting go.” The melancholic subject, on the other hand, retains the lost object as scattered fragments within the unconscious because he or she cannot comprehend exactly what it is that has been lost. 18 In the introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning, David Eng and David Kazanjian explore the creative and producti ve potential of the melancho lic retainment of the lost object. They write: In this regard, we find in Freud's c onception of melancholia's persistent struggle with its lost obj ects not simply a 'grasping' or 'holding' on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as reimagining of the future. While mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest, melancholia's continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and ne w understandings of lost objects. 19 This continued and potentia lly useful engagement with the Freudian lost object resembles Benjamin's insistent attentiveness to a history of catastrophic piles of ruins. Freud's lost object and Benjam in's historical ruins are an alogous in the sense that both involve a connection to a past which has been fragmented into bits of rubble, each broken piece possessing a partial yet somewhat r ecognizable memory. Eng and Kazanjian point out that “loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained.” 20 Although history is broken, its ruins store memo ries which can be pieced together. Desdemona's handkerchief operates as a lo st object not just within the drama of 18 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, V ol. 14, Trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957) 19 Loss: The Politics of Mourning , Ed. David Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: UC Press, 2003) 4. 20 Ibid, 2. 13 the play but also within particular histor ical and theoretical contexts—a stage prop functioning as both historical artifact and historical absence. In the introduction to Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama , Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda argue that stage props bears inscriptions of historically signifi cant cultural relations, “When props are regarded as properties , they may no longer seem to be so trifling: as objects owned by acting companies, impresario s, and players, as objects belonging to— proper to—the institution of the theatre, stag e properties encode ne tworks of materials relations that are the stuff of drama and society alike.” 21 If props, like the handkerchief, carry the code to interpreting dramatic texts and recovering cultural histories, then a materialist approach to read ing and textual analysis can help excavate queer memories and illuminate the contexts in which they are retained. Critically Queer Before restructuring the queer lives of the Renaissance, I feel obliged to address certain criticisms aimed at early modern queer historiography. Queer theory, in its insistent effort to resist canonicity, has aligned itself with pos t-structuralist and psychoanalytic modes of thought, primarily as a symptom of its adoption and appropriation of particular strategies born out of French fe minist theory and eventually gay and lesbian studies. Rather than arguing for a queer canon, I will instead suggest that there exist a number of key theo retical texts which form the intellectual contours of queer 21 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, “Intro duction: towards a materialist account of stage properties,” Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama , ed. Jonathan Gil Garris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 1. 14 scholarship. Some scholars, such as Stephen Greenblatt 22, argue that applying psychoanalytically inflected theo ries onto pre or early modern textuality is anachronistic in that the modern subject, who is scrutinize d and interrogated by queer theory, has, in fact, been formed in part by early modern cultural and political economies. This rationale subscribes to an understanding of historicity wh ich is linear via a cau sal, evolutive logic and which consequently denies the circuit ous “going back” necessary in applying 20 th century theories to Renaissa nce texts. In her recent book Queer/Early/Modern , Freccero responds to Greenblatt stati ng that “early modern Europ ean textuality proleptically anticipates queer theory and queer modernity” an d that “the spirit of queer analysis in its willful perversion of notions of temporal propriety” disrupts the heteronormalizing imperative of linear historiography. 23 Freccero utilizes the rhet orical flexibility of prolepsis in order to disjoint time and proj ect backward to early modernity. The anachrony is not an error or academic mi sstep. Her use of queer time purposefully perverts the progression of naturalized time in order demonstrat e the useful tension between the deconstructive and psychoanalytic tendencies of queer theory and historicity. She argues that this “gesture—turning belatedness into avant la lettre— is a kind of historical corrective, but it doe s not necessarily take seriousl y the pieties of the discipline that would require the solemn, even dour, mars haling of empirical ev idence to prove its point.” 24 22 Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts , ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP) 1986. 23 Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham: Duke UP, 2006) 2-3. 24 Freccero, 3. 15 Another debate surrounding queer historiogr aphy stems from th e appropriation of modern terms such as hetero and homo within an early modern context. While scholars such as Foucault 25 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 26 locate the emergence of homo/hetero- sexualities near the end of the 19 th Century, a specific kind of queer/non-queer definition, formulated through scientific, religious, a nd political discourses of power, occurred during the early modern period. A proto-compul sory heterosexuality defined itself against non-normative gender practices and consequently institutionalized itself as the inscribed norm. The authors of scientific medical text s were obsessed with determining the proper limits of biological sex. Intersexed bodies were anathemized yet simultaneously sensationalized as Renaissance scientists scrambled to determine whether a body in question was more anatomically male or female. Moreover, puritanical pamphlets and sermons preached against cross-dressing and tried to define appropriate apparel and gendered behaviors for men but especially women, who were thought to be extremely susceptible to immoral behaviors. These efforts attempted to implant fixed and impermeable gender categories but instead created the demand for policing the boundaries between “man” and “woman.” What follows will be focused on the body of the early modern woman. Although the voices of early modern sexual deviants are virtually absent from textual record, defiant women, cross-dressing actors, and unsee mly fetishists, who would be scorned for walking the streets of London, walk freely amon g the pages and stages of Shakespeare’s 25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) 26 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: UC Press, 1990) 16 plays. They grant us access into a historical mo de of queer critique which lets us look at the past through their performa nce. I wonder if Shakespear e’s transgressive characters can stand in and speak for the voices absent from empirical histories. Perhaps Rosalind disguised as Ganymede in As You Like It or Viola appareled as Cesario in Twelfth Night could speak for the societally scorned Hic Mulier. Or maybe the cross-dressing practices of male actors playing female characters on the Shakespearean stage can illuminate the precarious situation of the Haec Vir. Traub suggests that early modern drama provides us with “a discourse of desires a nd acts that not only can be ar ticulated but correlated with our modern understanding of divers e erotic practices among women.” 27 She recognizes that this discourse “is not authored by wome n” and “is highly mediated by the protocols of patriarchal control” yet nevertheless “dra matizes particular conventions according to which such desire was culturally ‘staged’.” 28 My discussion will pay special attenti on to the figure of Desdemona and the possibilities of performance and embodiment in Othello . Working against the vast amount of scholarship claiming Desdemona’s undeniable femininity as a “maiden never bold,” (1.3.95) I re-imagine Desdemona as a qu eer fetishist, a criminally queer character who transgresses patriarchal protocols of womanliness and is disciplined through violence—her murder. I am interested in unraveling the restrictions placed upon the early modern female body, thus exposing possibili ties of the queer body becoming new: above, 27 Traub, “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England, 64. 28 Ibid, 64-65. 17 below, and perhaps even beyond the normativ ely constituted huma n. What does it mean when Desdemona says she is undone? What becomes of her undone body? 18 II. Desdemona's Dildo “She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished That heaven had made her such a man.” -Othello (1.3.129-163) In the pilot episode of the 1970s British sitcom Are You Being Served? , the first scene opens in a large department store in which the women's clothing department is in the process of relocating into the same space as the men's clothing department, an area which both must share. 29 Much of the sitcom's humor relies on the conflict arising in this hybrid, curiously gendered space. The once sepa rate feminine and masculine spaces are displaced by the collision of both—a ne w queer space—which engenders dysfunction and, consequently, elicits comedic results. In the same episode but in a subsequent scene, the floor supervisor, Captain Peacock, teaches a new employee, Mr. Lucas, how to properly flute a handkerchief and insert it into his coat pocket. With dexterity and ease, Mr. Peacock flutes his handkerchief into an obviously erect phallic shape and deftly stuffs 29 Are You Being Served ? is a BBC television sitcom, written by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, which aired during the 1970s and 1980s. The show was set in a men's and women's department store in London. (“Pilot Episode,” Are You Being Served? , BBC, Hertfordshire and London, UK. 8 Sept. 1972.) 19 it into his pocket. However, when the inexpe rienced Mr. Lucas attempts to do so, his handkerchief clumsily flops over like a flaccid pe nis. In the likening of skill to the erect phallus and inability to penile flaccidity, th is moment displays both the handkerchief's semiological phallic nature and its culturally meaningful uses. For critics, readers, and audience member s alike, Desdemona ha s historically been a problematic character vacillating between virtue and vice, morality and transgression, purity and prurience. Emily Bartels, like many fr ustrated scholars, confronts the fact that Desdemona has “continually eluded our critical grasp.” 30 Why is Desdemona such a problematic character? What constitutes her elusiveness? I will propose that Desdemona is queer, gendered by both feminine and masc uline qualities; she occupies a space that escapes stable categorization, for she consta ntly displaces her ge ndered self. She is simultaneously a literal transvestite on the stage and a figurative hermaphrodite within the real drama of the play. This queerness, Desdemona's gender liminality, disrupts the compulsory heteronormative system of 16 th Century patriarchal Venetian society and threatens to castrate (albeit symbolically) the paternal apparatus of power operating within Othello. I recognize that Desdemona's sexual queerne ss is dubious. It is evident that she embraces her heterosexual desire for Othello an d certainly appears to be nothing more or less than a biological female; however, queer ness, especially as elaborated by queer theory, works beyond these typical conceptions of sexual preference and biological sex. It 30 Emily C. Bartels, “Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of Desire,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36 (1996): 423. 20 operates in a space outside and around the heteronormative system, constantly pushing inward and threatening that system's collapse. Furthermore, I am in no way disregarding or disputing the fact that Desdemona (as a dr amatic character as oppos ed to a male actor portraying a woman) possesses an authenti c and presumably functioning vagina. 31 I am more concerned here with how gender is as sembled and just as easily disassembled. While the ramifications of compulsory gender constructions can be and often are crucial to the functionality of the essentialized sex/ gender binary system, we have to remember that their significan ce and consequently insignificance lies in their negativity as gender markers figured through a fetishized materialit y located in what is ultimately an empty sign. Therefore, what marks Desdemona as tran svestic and/or hermaphroditic? What sign names her as such? I will argue th at it is her phallic handkerchief. The handkerchief as the material locu s for the deployment of phallic and masculine power is another controversial conjecture. In Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture , Will Fisher agrees that “handkerchiefs in early Modern England ... played in th e formation of gender identity.” 32 However, most scholars will contend that handkerchiefs specifica lly aided in the construction of the female gender. 33 Fisher tells us that they “helped to pr oduce notions of femininity and the female body.” 34 A masculinized reading of handkerchiefs may seem incongruous with these 31 This assertion functions on the assumption that a fictional character can possess genitalia whether literalized by text or embodied by a performer. 32 Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 40. 33 For example, in “The Tragedy of the Handkerc hief: Female Paraphernalia and the Properties of Jealousy in Othello,” Natasha Korda correlates the handkerchief with notions of female extravagance. 34 Ibid, 40. 21 historical notions of femininity, but I will try to assemble a concept of material masculinity by positioning the ha ndkerchief as a fe tishistic object in the early modern period as well as within modern sexual and psychoanalytic discourse. First, we must turn to the origin of fetish. The Origin of Fetish What comes to mind when you hear the wo rd “fetish”? Leather boots, dildos, and nipple clamps? Cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, or other forms of erotic role playing? Perhaps intercourse with a horse, swine, or some other non-human species? These days, fetish seems to be caught up in ideas of sexual paraphilia—diagnosable deviancies categorized by sexual attraction to inanimate objects or ritualistic behaviors. To be a fetishist is to participate in these sexually extreme acts—to maintain an excessive attraction to the object or ritual of desire. However, this was not always the case. Prior to the twentieth century, fetish was not so sexy. The sexualization of fetish can be attributed to the psychoanalytic endeavors of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, whose theories linked psychic human experience to universal izing phallic symbolism. Fetish, as we know it today, has a less sexy lineage dating back to the late mediev al and early modern periods. To be a fetishist duri ng the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant participating in and with the objects and rituals of Afri can religion. Moreover, such a practitioner was not a “fetishist” but a fetissero. William Pietz tells us that the word “fetish” originates from the “the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ... with in a novel social formation during this period through the 22 development of the pidgin word Fetisso .”35 The notion of fetish was tied up in an abstract semiological apparatus indicative of a comp lex social triangulat ion “among Christian feudal, African lineage, and mercha nt capitalist social systems.” 36 Early modern fetish intersects with issues of race, religion, and gender in premodern discourses, and the exchange of the fetish object negot iates relationships among European Christians, Africans, and women. Because Renaissance drama stages the cultural anxieties and social politics of the period, I tu rn to Shakespearean tragedy to illuminate the precarious plight of non- Christian, non-European, non-heteronormative alterity in early modern England. Shakespeare's Othello presents us with characters who inhabit these tenuous roles of otherness: the black Moor, the disobedient woman, the sodomite, and, of course, the fetishist. Halfway through the action of the play , Iago deviously schemes to place Desdemona's lost handkerchief in Cassio's qua rters in an effort to fool Othello into believing that his wife has been unfaithful: I will in Cassio's lodging lose this napkin And let him find it. Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmations strong As proofs of Holy Writ. (3.3.338-341) In likening the signifying virtue of the handke rchief to that of sacred scripture, Iago implies that material objects, like units of la nguage, are signs that possess the capacity to convey meaning. Language and material objects share an analogous relationship in that both participate in the fetishized materiality of objecthood yet ultimately collapse into a 35 William Pietz, “The Problem of Fetish,” Res 9 (1985): 5. 36 Ibid , 6. 23 semiological chain of empty signifiers. The sign is a fetish, an object invested with meaning that is not inherent to its materiality but rath er endowed upon it by external forces. Iago's description of the handkerchief as a “trifle light as air” signals its semiological negativity—the ability to functi on as a mere, commonplace trifle signifying “truths” not inherent to its materiality but rather placed upon it. However, the signifier's emptiness also can be interpreted as its cap aciousness—its capacity to be filled with a plethora of meanings that are operational w ithin a multitide of circumstances. Thus, the pliancy of Desdemona's handkerchief as a signifier allows it to possess competing “truths” of her erotic desire s. Iago invests the handkerchief with a lie about Desdemona's infidelity. Othello takes Iago's word to be as true as “Holy Writ.” Desdemona dies an undeserved death in the grips of this fals ehood. Yet the handkerchief remains just a handkerchief. The fetish's ability to signify some sacr ed or supernatural truth beyond its own objecthood derives from its association with pr emodern African religions. During the late medieval period, the Portuguese were the fi rst to encounter African cultures along the coast of West Africa. Pietz te ll us, “The first black societ ies actually encountered were ruled by Islamicized groups, and the first reli gious [fetish] objects described were little leather packets worn about the neck.” 37 The Portuguese used the terms feitico, feiticeiro, and feiticaria to refer to, respectively, the objects, pe rsons, and rituals of witchcraft, all of which were explicitly forbidden by medi eval Theodosian laws and national anti- witchcraft laws. Non-coincidentally, an allega tion of witchcraft is treated as a crime in 37 Pietz, 37. 24 the first act of Othello . Brabantio fears the enchantment of Desdemona by the spellbinding charms of Ot hello, the “Black Moor”: She is abused By spells and medicine bought mountebank For nature preposterously to err Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense Sans witchcraft could not. (1.3.60-65) Brabantio's assumption that Othello, as “a practicer of arts inhi bited,” (1.3.79-80) used witchcraft to seduce Desdemona connects Othe llo to colonial descriptions of Muslim feiticeros, tribal priests who practiced witchery. The fact that most characters in the play refer to Othello as “the Moor” emphasizes his non-Christian, non-European alterity. While the term Moor most likely describes persons of Moroccan origin, Kim Hall points out that in early modern England, Moor was “an extremely malleable term used to mark geographic and religious differences ... the word Moor represents Christian Europe's most profound 'other'.” 38 In “From Ogun to Othello: (R e)Acquainting Yoruba Myth and Shakespeare's Moor,” Diana Mafe explores the parallels between Othello and Yoruba mythology to argue that the term Moor could potentially refer to the natives living along the coast of West Africa. 39 Yet, whether the word Moor is site specific or open to geographic interpretation, Brabantio's invective casts Othello as irreducibly other— someone whose native customs are consider ed taboo and so foreign that they are fundamentally inconceivable. The other operates outside of proper modes of signification. Brabantio can only make se nse of his daughter's transgression through 38 “Introduction,” William Shakespeare, Othello , Ed. Kim Hall (New York: Bedford, 2007) 3. 39 Diana Adesola Mafe, “From Ogun to Othello: (Re)Ac quainting Yoruba Myth an d Shakespeare's Moor,” Research in African Literatures 35 (2004) 46-61. 25 appeals to witchcraft—rendering her devi ancy as supernatural and ultimately unintelligible. As soon as Othello, the racia lized embodiment of African alterity, comes into proximity of the Christian patriarcha l apparatus of power through his criminal elopement with Desdemona, he is treated with fear and hostility. As other imperialist nations, including Sp ain, the Netherlands, and Shakespeare's England, began to participate in the trade of ivory and other exotic commodities along the Cote d' Ivoire, the Portuguese term feitiço evolved into the pidgin word Fetisso, which can be found in various Renaissan ce travel narratives including Purchas his pilgrim .40 In the chapter “What Custome the Merchants pay to their Kings. Their Measures, Weights, Scales, and Markets: Also their Sabbath, Fe tissos and [S]upersti tions” included in the book Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the Sea-Coasts and In-Land Regions of Africa, Which is Generally Called Ae thiopia: By English Men and Others , Fetisso signifies (although ambiguously) material objects n early transcended to the status of deity within the collective tribal consciousness. Hegel writes in The Philosophy of History that Africans spiritually animate “the first thing that comes their way. [...] They exalt to the dignity of a 'Genius': it may be an anim al, a tree, a stone, or a wooden figure.” 41 Buttressing this primitivizing, Hegelian notion, Purchas describes an African king consecrating a tree, “When the King receiuet h not cutsome enough ... he goeth to a tree which he esteemeth to be his Fetisso, and sacrificeth vnto it, carrying it meat and 40 Purchas his pilgrim is a multivolume work published in 1625 and compiled by Samuel Purchas. It includes accounts of early modern travel in Africa and India. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrim, Georgetown University, Lauinger Lib., 7 December 2008 <http://eebo.chadwyck.com> 41 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History , trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956) 94. 26 drink.” 42 Prosaic objects had the potential to transform into these godly, totemic Fetissos and, as a result, inherited a fetishized sp iritual significance within the theological architecture of tribal society. This is the concept of fetish with which Shakespeare would have been familiar, if at all. Thus, if early mode rn notions of fetish were constructed in and around these colonial perceptions of African spiritua lity, then the handkerchief is, in fact, a Renaissance fetish object. Othello reveal s its supernatural, African origin: The handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give, She was a charmer and could almost read The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it 'Twould make her amiable and subdue my father Entirely to her love: but if she lost it Or made a gift of it, my father's eye Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt After new fancies. She, dying gave it to me [...] 'Tis true, there's magic in the web of it. A sibyl that had numbered in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sewed the work: The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk And it was dyed in mummy which the skillful Conserved of maiden's hearts. (3.4.58-76) Sewn by an oracle and given to Othello's mother by a charmer, the handkerchief is undeniably imbued with a supernatural quality . Immersed in mythical descriptions, the handkerchief emerges as an African Fetisso , a seemingly mundane material object rendered supernatural and magical. In the context of this speech, Othello's mother harnesses the mystique of the handkerchief in order to charm and seduce her husband. 42 Purchas, 942. 27 Here, we witness an uncharacteristic reversal of early modern gender roles—the exertion of female power over that of the male and a disciplining of patriarchy through feminine artifice enabled by and through the fetishized power of the handkerchief. In Shakespeare's Domestic Economies, Natasha Korda argues, “Within the linguistic economy of Othello, we shall see women's and Africans' excessive and inappropriate attachments to material objects are woven together under the rubric of extravagance. ”43 I prefer to think of extravagance in terms of excess, as that which goes above or beyond the norm. As both an Af rican and a woman, Othello's mother experiences double modes of alterity, both spec ifically linked to notions of excess. The fetish, as an African charm, facilitates her sexual prowess—her magical power of seduction—thus correlating her cultural otherness to her sexuality. In Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Ania Loomba reminds us that Muslims and Africans were thought of as effeminate and “imagined as hyper-sexual.” 44 In this way, the dramatic text conflates femininity and Africanness under the sign of the handkerchief. Dyed with fluids drained from mummified bodies and pres erved out of maidens' hearts, the handkerchief, by virtue of this curious history, is undeniably a supern atural handicraft. As the recipient of the handkerchief, Desdemona is given access to this magical, female power—an erotic agency which must be forcibly contained by patriarchy. Prosthetically assuming the handkerchief, Desdemona's body, like that of the African, carries notions of excessiveness, a superfluous disposition whic h demands to be contained and disciplined. 43 Natasha Korda, “The Tragedy of the Handkerchief: Fe male Paraphernalia and the Properties of Jealousy in Othello,” Shakespeare's Domestic Economies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) 114. 44 Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (New York: Oxford UP) 31. 28 A Foucauldian Model of Female Discipline In his book, Fisher informs us of the baser uses of handkerchiefs in early modern English culture. They were (and still are, of course) used as receptacles for sweat and other bodily fluids. Furthermore, he points ou t that “the item itsel f might be seen as a 'disciplinary apparatus' (to use a term of Michel de Certeau) since it provides a means of keeping women's bodies 'dry' and within th e [implicitly masculine] limits set by a norm.” 45 Handkerchiefs discipline bodies by keep ing them dry, especially women's bodies which, according to common humoral theo ries of the time, were believed to be inconstant leaky vessels. Upon discovering that Desdemona has lost her handkerchief and may have violated their wedding vows, Othell o characterizes her as a “[h]ot, hot, and moist ... young and sweating devil,” whose corpor eal excesses must be contained though “[m]uch castigation, [and] ex ercise devout” (3.4.32-36). An ideology of female discipline was pe rvasive during the early modern period. In “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Encl osed,” Peter Stallybrass observes that the Renaissance woman's body was constructed of signs that marked her as male property; she represents “the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house” and her body is the site of male primacy. 46 Females were emblems of confinement. They had to be contained and forcibly conditione d to remain unaware that they too were agencial bodies like their male counterparts. By impounding them in domestic prisons, men could 45 Fisher, 41. 46 Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Differ ence in Early Modern Europe , ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986) 127. 29 guarantee that female agency could never be fully realized. This also required that women not be exposed to the potentially “corrupting” institutions of early modern English society, especially the theatre, Desd emona's dramaturgical home. The fear that women could not differentiate performance fr om reality and would consequently mimic what they saw on stage panicked patriarchy , “[T]hose Buxsome and Bountifull Lasses ... usually were enamoured on the persons of the younger sorts of Actors for the good cloaths they wore upon the Stage, believing th em realy to be the persons they did only represent.” 47 Timothy Murray points out in “ Othello' s Foul Generic Thoughts” that the “threat of mimesis, especially its threat to a particular woman, is the focus of the first act of Othello .”48 Hence, Desdemona's discipline takes center stage. Conceptualizing methods of disciplin e through compulsion and exchanges of power, Michel Foucault constructs the ar chitecture of the Pa nopticon, a model of regulation by means of surveyal. In his seminal work Discipline and Punish, he introduces us to the figure of the syndic, th e representative figure of power and social control. The syndic is charged with the task of patrolling a plague -stricken street and assessing the condition of its i nhabitants through a process of confession and report. He summ