Between the Lines

I have decided to use this blog to track some of my research ideas and findings as I begin the process of writing my Masters dissertation. The following is the script of a presentation I delivered on the 25th of May 2017. The conference was a chance to explore our dissertation proposals, and I delivered my paper in a session chaired by Professor Phillip Schwyzer titled: Early Modern Discourses: Bodies, Politics, Performance. Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady': A Sexual Revolutionary? Hello, I am Antonio Hehir, and I have been conducting research into sex and sexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the Dark Lady of the sonnets and how we can seek to redefine her and to ask the question: Was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets a sexual revolutionary? When it comes to the sonnets, there has been a tendency among Shakespeare scholars to focus on the ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets (1-126) and much of that focus has orbited around a biographical...

The male and female signs that greet us at the toilet door offer us two very binary options, but in reality sex and gender is far more complicated than those signs suggest. Sex is never as simple as a binary choices, and it is this that queer theory wants you to understand; that all our pre-conceived ideas about gender roles and sexual identities are in fact unstable, and can be destabilized by simply picking them apart. Queer Theory is a relatively new cultural theory which emerged out of the 1990s, but very much has its origins in the work of Michel Foucault . It looked to establish sexual orientation as a fundamental category of analysis and understanding, and thus it has both a social and political aim. It is a criticism informed by a resistance to homophobia and heterosexism by exposing the ideological and institutional practices of heterosexual privilege. It was the feminist critics of the 70s that first began to explore and dissect gender, but the feminist outlook soon began ...