Kim F. Hall demonstrates the relevance of these theories to early modern culture in Things of Darkness, her study of racialized and gendered constructions. In the early modern period as today, masculinity and femininity were intrinsically intertwined with other categories, including religion, social status, ability, and emerging ideas of race. Scholars of the period have long established the centrality of gender to understanding early modern texts across language traditions and regions (e.g. Stanton, among many others). Researchers have become increasingly attentive to early constructions of race, deeply rooted in ideas of difference that far predate modern “biological” race (e.g. Loomba and Burton). In recent years, scholars have begun to turn their attention to dis/ability and bodily normativity in the early modern period (e.g. Wood and Hobgood, Stagg). And yet, the connections among these and other categories remain understudied.

Given the topic's diversity, this session aims to foster maximum exchange among the panelists and the audience. This is particularly important considering the range of material covered by the panelists: not only French, English, and Ottoman texts, but also Mediterranean and Atlantic networks of exchange. As such, I am proposing a non-traditional format: four 10-minute paper presentations to be followed by extensive unstructured discussion. As detailed below, presenters will each put forth a central argument illustrated through a key example. These concise overviews will provide a series of specific “case studies” to guide a broader discussion of reading method, source material, and historical context, as well as connections to present-day intersectionalities.

Arvas’ “African Slavery and Racial and Gender crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean” will open the panel with a focus on blackness and femininity. His comparative study of Ottoman African slaves queries how racial and gender discourses in the Mediterranean are intricately interlinked with the imperial slave trade. Ottoman accounts (e.g. Mustafa Ali of Gallipoli) deploy a strong anti-black language in the depiction of black African courtiers, presenting complex intersections of gender and race (as well as sexuality and class) by linking blackness to femininity and servitude. Likewise, English accounts of these servants (e.g. Paul Rycaut, George Sandys) attribute “deformity” and “ugliness” as well as inferiority to them, elucidating a gendered, skin color-based racial language in the English imaginary. His paper stresses the importance of an intersectional approach to recognize the ways in which African figures were associated with power and slavery, beauty and disgust, and with crossing lines of both gender and racial fixity.

Khansari’s “Gynecocracy and Inconstancy: Sycorax and Female Leadership in The Tempest” analyzes overlapping representations of religion, gender, and political power. She studies texts that equate Turks, Jews, and pagans as heretics, whose minds and bodies were associated with devilish behaviors. Gynecocracy, unless by a Protestant woman, became affiliated with inconstancy, transgression, and corruption. Specifically, this paper investigates the extent to which the inconstancy of Sycorax as a pagan/Muslim figure, shown in her ruling the island before the arrival of Prospero, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611-1623). She examines the ways in which gynecocracy becomes a racialized practice restricted to white Protestant women, rather than non-Christian women, thus highlighting how multiple identity categories contributed to early modern racecraft.

Wilson’s “Shakespeare’s Invention of Stigma: Richard’s Deformity, Aaron’s Race, Faulconbridge’s Bastardy, and Beyond” analyzes multiple conceptions of physical, social, and racial difference as central to understanding Shakespeare. He argues that stigma (e.g. Richard III’s bodily form, Aaron the Moor’s skin color, Philip Faulconbridge’s birth out of wedlock) became the system for many of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters. The author variously employed, adapted, and resisted the figure over the course of his career. In other words, during the period of roughly 1589-96, Shakespeare invented the notion of stigma the sociologist Erving Goffman later theorized in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). It was inchoate, not programmatic, and artistic rather than argumentative, but Shakespeare suggested that different kinds of differentness encounter similar situations in life. He thus shifted the locus of meaning from the earlier emphasis on the physical body of the stigmatized person to a new consideration of the structure of social interaction between “normals” and “abnormals.”

In another approach to bodily normativity, Rutler’s “Emilie du Châtelet and the Physics of Happiness” considers intertwining notions of dis/ability and femininity in French physicist Emilie du Châtelet’s writing. In Discourse on Happiness, as Judith Zinsser has pointed out, du Châtelet breaks with the tradition of her male peers, offering a much more personal account of how she has worked toward a state of happiness throughout her life. She names a number of factors contributing to one’s happiness, but one of the common refrains of her work links happiness to health. However, health is never defined and its meaning remains elusive throughout the essay. In an examination of the essay Foundations of Physics, Rutler examines how forces and matter constitute individual health more broadly to demonstrate the inextricable ways that health and ability intersect with expressions of gender in du Châtelet’s work.

Although these case studies by no means cover all possible contexts, they provide a starting point for a crucial conversation. I expect the panel will attract scholars from a range of fields, from post-colonial to gender studies, critical race to Latinx studies, whose insights will contribute still further to the session. Intersectional analyses of early modern texts expose structures of oppression essential to understanding our world today.