Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture.

Dugan, Holly

Will Fisher. Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture.

Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. viii + 224 pp. index. illus. bibl. $90. ISBN: 0-521-85851-8.

In this comprehensive study of gender identity in early modern English culture, Will Fisher argues that details matter. Specifically, handkerchiefs, codpieces, beards, and hair mattered in two important, interrelated ways: they were both the stuff of gender and that which rendered gender intelligible. While we might understand these differences as hierarchical (for example, as differences between primary or secondary sex characteristics), such distinctions were not so clear in early modern English art and culture. Utilizing recent critical work on both the history of the body and the role of clothing in shaping identity, Fisher argues that bodies were malleable, comprised of natural and sartorial parts. All of these parts together constituted, or materialized, gender identity in early modern English culture.

Though this is a study of gender identity in the past, Fisher's analysis provocatively reminds scholars to reexamine presumptions about gender identity in the present. His analysis of the materials of gender in the past interrogates the usefulness of rigid separations between biological sex and cultural constructions of gender, or, for that matter, between nature and culture in the present. Deftly contrasting early modern gender norms with modern ones, Fisher reveals a pernicious, and seductive, logic at the heart of both: a presumption that the body can be defined as idealized, whole, and complete.

Resisting this presumption, Fisher emphasizes that gender identity was prosthetic. Though beards and hair might seem like "natural" characteristics, and handkerchiefs and codpieces as synthetic or "cultural" signifiers of gender, Fisher argues that all operate as "prostheses." Prostheses are any objects that "can be removed from the body" and that shape its contours (31). Rather than merely adorning the body or extending its boundaries, a prosthesis is a "multivalent item that slides back and forth between many of the categories that we use to think about subjectivity" (32).

The addition, subtraction, or reconfiguration of these prostheses rendered gender intelligible in very different ways. Chapter 1 examines the material history of handkerchiefs and their association with women's hands and the effluvia of the humoral body. Chapter 2 inspects that most curious of bagged appendages--the codpiece--and traces the historic rise and fall of this object's association with early modern masculinity. Beards, as both theatrical props and constitutive markers of masculinity identity, are the focus of chapter 3. Bearded men were juxtaposed with their counterparts: bearded women and the beardless boys. Masculinity was defined in opposition to both femininity and boyhood. Chapter 4 argues that, in seventeenth-century England, tonsorial discourse was revolutionary discourse: treatises on long, "shagged-headed" Cavaliers, closely trimmed Roundheads, and "metamorphosized" men who "crisp," "curl," and "frounce" their hair reveal that gender and politics were often intertwined in one's hairstyle (34, 143, 147).

In his conclusion, Fisher analyzes how these "prostheses" became superfluous, replaced by atomic theories of matter. He argues that late seventeenth-century science increasingly defined the body, not through its sartorial parts, but through essential natural components: atoms. Atoms, conceived as fundamental, indivisible building blocks of bodily materiality, "served as an analog" for an indivisible body, housing an individual soul. Thus, Fisher leaves the reader not with the body in pieces or parts, but with a body reconfigured--and a self perhaps haunted--by missing prostheses.

This is the greatest strength of Materializing Gender, and it demonstrates the ways in which feminist methodologies can reinvigorate theoretical and historical inquiries of the body and the ways in which studies of the past can reinvigorate contemporary feminisms. The body, Fisher reminds us, is never an integral object but always a category of analysis. In doing so, Fisher's study demonstrates the critical value in understanding gender identity as a study of--and a study in--historical detail.

HOLLY DUGAN

The George Washington University