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Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare's Plays addresses a conspicuous absence in queer readings of Shakespeare's work: the pregnant body. Through discussions of
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus, All's Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, and
The Winter's Tale, this book dismantles the heteronormative frameworks through which pregnancy continues to be read.
Its chapters challenge the assumptions in queer theory that only straight women get pregnant, that every pregnancy ends in the birth of a healthy, legitimate child, and that pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form. These frameworks not only dull the transgressive force of pregnancy in Shakespeare's work and the expansive ways in which early moderns thought about the pregnant body, but contribute to the erasure of so many lived experiences of pregnancy in our current, cultural imagination. The concept of "queer pregnancy" not only reorients scholars to pregnancy in Shakespeare's plays and beyond - it illuminates how high the stakes are for pregnant people who continue to be read and treated through perspectives that do not take queer bodies and identities into account.
Through queer methodologies, as well as an explication of early modern gynecological texts, receipt books, and botanicals, this book offers new possibilities for how Shakespeare might have encountered and understood pregnancy, making it a valuable resource to students, scholars and anyone interested in Shakespeare, queer and feminist studies, and early modern culture.
List of contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsForeword: Flowering Women Introduction: Queer Pregnancy
Chapter One. Generation: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Chapter Two. Conception: Titus Andronicus
Chapter Three. Intention: All's Well That Ends Well
Chapter Four. Abortion: Hamlet
Chapter Five. Fruition: The Winter's Tale
Coda: The Then and There of Trans Pregnancy
Works CitedIndex
About the author
Alicia Andrzejewski is an assistant professor in the English department at the College of William & Mary. She is a scholar of cultural and Shakespeare studies, queer, feminist, and critical race theory, and the medical humanities. Her scholarly work appears in peer-reviewed journals such as
Shakespeare Studies,
Shakespeare Bulletin, and
The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and her public-facing work has been published in venues such as
The Chronicle,
The Boston Globe, American Theatre, The Huffington Post,
LA Review of Books,
Electric Literature, and others.
