Beard Fetish in Early Modern England

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Seller: 1798books ✉️ (147) 99.2%, Location: Didcot, United Kingdom, GB, Ships to: GB, Item: 374515147738 Beard Fetish in Early Modern England. Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value uniquely focuses on representations of facial hair for early modern culture and analyzes the role fetish plays in naturalizing categories like sex and gender. Author Johnston explores how beards in all their variety-including beardlessness and female beards-are freighted with cultural and psychic significance, materializing complex and contradictory value in multiple registers. > Focusing on representations of beards in English Renaissance culture, this study elucidates how fetish objects validate ideological systems of power by materializing complex value in multiple registers. Providing detailed discussions of not only bearded men but also beardless boys, bearded women, and half-bearded hermaphrodites, author Mark Albert Johnston argues that attending closely to early modern English culture's treatment of the beard as a fetish object ultimately exposes the contingency of categories like sex, gender, age, race, and sexuality. Johnston mines a diverse cross-section of contemporary discourses -- adult and children’s drama, narrative verse and prose, popular ballads, epigrams and proverbs, historical accounts, pamphlet literature, diaries, letters, wills, court records and legal documents, medical and surgical manuals, lectures, sermons, almanacs, and calendars -- in order to provide proof for his cultural claims. Johnston’s evidence invokes some of the period’s most famous voices -- William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, Phillip Stubbes, John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Samuel Pepys, for example -- but Johnston also introduces us to an array of lesser-known Renaissance authors and playwrights whose works support the notion that the beard was a palimpsestic site of contested meaning at which complex and contradictory values clash and converge. Johnston’s reading of Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological theories of the fetish phenomenon acknowledges their divergent emphases -- erotic, economic, racial and religious -- while suggesting that the imbrication of diverse registers that fetish accomplishes facilitates its cultural and psychic naturalizing function. > Introduction; 1: Fetish and Value; 2: Beard Value and Manhood; 3: The Functional Value of Beardless Boys; 4: Re-evaluating Bearded Women; 5: Devaluing the Beard: Half Beards and Hermaphrodites; Epilogue: Transcending Value >

"Mark Johnston’s exploration of the beard as a fetish object is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the gender implications of the adornment and embellishment of the body in early modern English culture...the work is particularly valuable for its depictions of beards in English literature, and it contributes to our understanding of the cultural production of meaning, the complex and contradictory meanings of the fetish object, and the associated implications for gender, sex, and power in early modern England." --Judith Bonzol, The University of Sydney, Parergon

  • Condition: New
  • Brand: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 9781409405429
  • Publication Year: 2011
  • Type: Textbook
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Language: English
  • Publication Name: Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value
  • Item Height: 234mm
  • Author: Mark Albert Johnston
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis LTD
  • Item Width: 156mm
  • Subject: Zoology, History
  • Item Weight: 567g
  • Number of Pages: 312 Pages

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