Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time by Jeffrey Masten (review)

Medieval and early modern scholars frequently reflect on their disciplinarity, yet only relatively recently have they begun to consider how various normative and powerful social systems have influenced the generation and fruition of their fields. Over the past two hundred years, these fields have operated under fairly homogenous and exclusive academic structures that value and uphold white, Eurocentric, and heteronormative systems of critical engagement and historical e/valuation. Contributing to a contemporary reckoning with just such an exclusionary pedigree, Jeffrey Masten considers the ways that exclusions have been enforced within philological considerations of early modern texts. In Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time, Masten explores the relationship between writing and sexuality, offering queer readings not only of particular philological practices and early modern modes of textual production, but, perhaps most notably, of letters themselves (the introductory material takes as a specific and convincing subject the letter Q). Masten argues that 'the study of sex and gender in historically distant cultures is necessarily a philological investigation' (p. 15), directly contributing to what he identifies as a re-emergence of scholastic engagement with premodern sexual identities. By coining the term 'queer philology', Masten necessarily aligns philology with 'sexual practices, the positioning of bodies and body parts, and "identities" that seem nonnormative, whether in their own time or, especially, from this historical distance' (p. 15), bringing welcome nuance to the established connection between language and identity. Masten's queer philology successfully attempts a self-reflection with the aim of highlighting how 'philology's manifold methods and rhetorics of investigation are often themselves thoroughly implicated in the languages of sex, gender, and the body' (p. 18), and how often writing about language is itself inflected with and reliant upon language of heteronormative reproduction and familial systems. This work then, is of particular interest and use to scholars working on kinship systems, queer or otherwise.

In addition to focusing on 'the implication of philological modes of analysis in discourses of sex/gender' (p. 32), the introduction and first chapter focus on early modern standardization practices that were only in their infancy in seventeenth-century Europe, and the various ways that compositors and editors hid or even erased instances of queerness, in premodern acts of straightwashing. The monograph's final section 'advocates explicitly for a more active engagement of editorial practice with philologies of sex, sexuality, and gender', but not before Masten's presentation of three lexicons in the body of the work (focused friendship, boy-desire, and sodomy) that concentrate on 'discourses that have become integral to historical analyses of especially male same-sex relations in early modern England' (p. 32). In these sections, Masten takes as his focus several works by and concerning Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, among others. While many scholarly texts that operate under the 'queer theory' academic umbrella acknowledge and engage the importance of language in the construction—or more often, deconstruction—of identity, Masten moves beyond a fleeting or cursory concession, engaging the professional practices and scholastic enterprises that determine so completely contemporary conceptions of history and historical texts.

Since its release in 2016, Queer Philologies has been overwhelmingly well reviewed, with most writers acknowledging its important contribution to new efforts in 'doing' early modern queer theory. The work's broader impact on the field of early modern drama studies was recognized in 2018 when Masten received the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award (Rice University). In 2021, Queer Philologies reminds of the continuing need to examine the often subtle but manifold ways that marginal experiences are embedded in language technologies and systemic culture more broadly. In this way, and although Masten primarily focuses on sexual identities, his study of queer philologies also illuminates the various ways that white, Western assumptions about language and culture dictate critical engagement with premodern history at large. Towards the end of the book, Masten specifically turns his attention to...