Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality ed. by Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez (review)

Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez’s volume, Rethinking Feminism, affirms the sustained vitality of feminist criticism and theory in early modern studies. Similar to other salient edited volumes on early modern feminist criticism, such as The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1980) and Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1995), Rethinking Feminism reflects on the state of early modern feminist criticism at a particular moment in history. The Woman’s Part (1980) is the first anthology of early modern feminist criticism that emerged at a time when early modern scholars often accused feminist theory of being a politically charged and alienating perspective derived from the point of view of women. Contributors of The Women’s Part had to show that feminist criticism was not a threatening methodological practice. Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1995), was a collection of essays concerned with difference and implored early modern feminists to go beyond white feminist concerns. Conscious of these imperative works, Rethinking Feminism reflects on the genealogies that have informed the current state of feminist criticism while also working to influence its future progenitors with new questions and concerns. Aware of their inheritances from early feminism, the contributors of Rethinking Feminism regard the defense of feminist criticism as their collective responsibility. Loomba and Sanchez write in their introduction that this volume responds to the “current scholarly and political anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline and crisis” (1). Through their diverse scholarly interests, the contributors of this volume advocate that feminist methodological approaches are in constant conversation with larger theoretical and political debates.

This volume is comprised of twelve essays divided into four overarching rubrics: histories, methods, bodies, and agency. The first section contains three essays that delineate coherent trajectories of feminist debates from the 1980s onwards. In their opening essay, “Feminism and the Burdens of History,” Loomba and Sanchez aim to destabilize recent critiques that have proposed the collapse of feminist criticism. Aware of the initial concerns of early feminists on the study of gender, Loomba and Sanchez demonstrate the intersectionality of race, gender, queer, and sexuality studies in order to resist “the ideals of universality and coherence celebrated by multiculturalism” (20).

Returning to the early stages of her career as a feminist scholar, Coppélia Kahn shares an anecdotal essay on the evolution of early modern feminist critique, including her first book, Man’s Estate (1981). Kahn delineates how feminist criticism slowly incorporated deconstruction, new historicism, and cultural materialism as methodological approaches that added further complexity to feminist critic’s analysis of gender. In the nineties, queer theory critiqued the identarianism and heteronormative approach of feminist scholarship, ushering feminists to look at same-sex relationships as an avenue to explore outside of the patriarchal family. Kahn astutely explains the familial resemblances between feminist and queer critics, arguing that they can address the historical differences between gender and sexuality without needing to trace the genealogies of those categories. In her essay, Diana Henderson analyzes the disjunctions and continuities that continue to inform feminist criticism by recalling her experience at the 1984 conference on gender at Columbia University and at the 2014 interdisciplinary conference on “Seeing/Sounding/Sensing.” After acknowledging the progress and new interdisciplinary movement made between these conferences, Henderson relates more recent tendencies that have undermined the achievements and hardships of early feminists. In her final remarks, Henderson advocates for continued progress of feminist practices in academia.

The second section of this volume addresses questions related to methodological practices. In her contribution, Leah S. Marcus gracefully examines the significance of the material history of feminist studies through the editorial differences between the quarto and folio versions of Othello. Instead of complying with the universally accepted first folio...