Feminisms, Past and Future

What does the study of past representations of women offer to contemporary feminist debates about gender, sexuality, agency, method, and the future of feminism itself? In the case of Kathryn Schwarz’s What You Will: Gender Contract and Shakespearean Social Space, quite a lot. At a moment when, as Madhavi Menon has observed, studies of early historical periods have become largely segregated from theoretical studies of gender and sexuality, Schwarz’s book demonstrates how much both fields of study have to lose from such a division.¹ Putting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts in conversation with recent feminist, queer, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theory, Schwarz presents a strikingly fresh, brilliantly counterintuitive model for understanding female agency within heterosocial relationships. In brief, Schwarz argues that women may be just as threatening to patriarchal order when they willingly, ostentatiously embrace it as when they actively resist it. Conceptually innovative and far-reaching, written in prose so concise and elegant that it is virtually aphoristic, What You Will points to ways of both revitalizing feminist work within early modern studies and of renewing a largely lost dialogue between early modern studies and contemporary feminist theory. It offers hope, in other words, for a renaissance of feminism.

As Schwarz states in her introduction, her central questions are historically specific, for she examines the particular forms that female agency and the performance of femininity take in early modern cultural discourse and practice. Yet her analysis is also deeply engaged with contemporary theoretical debates. What You Will must not only be read as drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault (to name just a few of her interlocutors). It should also be understood as offering a new framework through which to understand theoretical accounts of intimacy, ideology, and subjectivity—a framework as relevant to readers of differences and GLQ as to those of JEMCS and Shakespeare Quarterly. By attending to the connections between feminist theory and early modern representations of femininity, Schwarz returns us to a formative moment of feminist criticism when feminism had not yet become a standard methodology and when critics of early modern literature saw their work as more closely linked to institutional and political debates than we do today. Looking back at the feminist criticism of the 1980s and early 1990s, one cannot help but be struck by the urgency with which they treat their work, seeing it as directly implicated in wider questions about the possibilities of political change and resistance; the effect of reading protocols on feminist theory (and vice-versa); the relationship between pleasure and ideology; and, at bottom, what constituted feminism as such.²

As feminism became established as a central method of literary study, this sense of urgency decreased. For well over a decade now, feminist theory has been shadowed by a sense of decline and crisis, even as many of its insights and methods have become an intrinsic part of literary study more generally. Indeed, Sharon Marcus has proposed that the very fact that feminism has become so “solidly entrenched” means that its “success is the very sign of its failure, an indication that it has lost the renegade dynamism of its early days as an upstart outsider in the academy and declined into yet another stale paradigm on the verge of obsolescence” (1722).³ Within early modern studies, Phyllis Rackin has similarly seen the increasing prestige of feminist criticism as a cause for its disengagement with feminist theory and activism: when writing about gender “started to look like a good career move,” Rackin argues, the result was that “feminist studies were adopted as a conceptual tool by women and men without a serious political commitment to feminist political agendas” (54–55). Around the same time, the dominance of New Historicism, which advanced a terror of anachronism and a skepticism about the possibilities of resistance, further encouraged the general shift in early modern studies away from larger debates within feminist theory and politics...