Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature: Desire, Status, Biopolitics

The rogue, a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace and seductive appeal emerged from their social marginality and supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. It posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of socio-sexual identity and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, the book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. It also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the state's focus on exercising power over life.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 23 June 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The rogue, a term encompassing a wide range of individuals such as criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, held a prominent place in early modern popular crime literature. However, Rogue Sexuality takes a fresh perspective by shifting the focus from the rogue's social marginalization alone to their supposedly excessive sexuality and remarkable sexual reproduction. By examining both well-known and lesser-known works by renowned authors like William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the pioneer of modern demography John Graunt, this volume proposes the sexualized rogue as the embodiment of a new socio-sexual identity. It also traces a surprising social transformation, where socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracing the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the conventional distinctions between orderly and disorderly sexuality. Moreover, Rogue Sexuality offers a novel framework for understanding Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, which centers on the state's exertion of power over life. Through a close analysis of legal, administrative, and scientific documents from the early modern period, this book demonstrates that early modern writers grappled with the popular pamphlets that portrayed the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. By offering a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population, Rogue Sexuality sheds light on the significance of aggregate sexual life and reproduction in shaping the political imagination of that era.

Weight: 496g
Dimension: 240 x 164 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192863171