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Race / Queer / Queens

This expansive volume examines the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other formations of identity in early modern representations of queens.

Race/Queer/Queens is a new intervention into the well-established field of queenship and royalty studies. Queens/(queans) are at once the epitome of royal power and the exemplum of gendered disenfranchisement. The essays in this volume address the interlocking methodologies of premodern critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer and trans theory to shed light on how gendered negotiations of power, reproductive politics, and embodied performance are determined by and inscribed within a hierarchy of gender, race, class, religion, nationhood, and sexuality. Ranging across early modern drama, poetry, and prose by the likes of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lucy Hutchinson, and Hester Pulter, the essays in Race/Queer/Queens offer new intersectional approaches to studies of early modern history, genealogy, embodiment, and the nation, including model methodologies and directions for future scholarship.


160 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2026

Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies

Gender and Sexuality

History: History of Ideas

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory


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Table of Contents

Introduction by Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris and Urvashi Chakravarty
1. Visions of Queer Pregnancy and the Making of Whiteness in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness” by Anita Raychawdhuri
2. ‘“Not He; the Queen’: Boyed Blackness and Queer Race in Antony and Cleopatra” by Harry R. McCarthy
3. “Fair Isabella, Light Edward: Racial Formation in Early Modern Historiography” by Allison Machlis Meyer
4. “‘Matching with the accursèd Canaanites’: Reprobation and Race-Making in Lucy Hutchinson’s Critiques of Royal Marriage” by Emily Griffiths Jones
5. “The Queen of the Goths and the Reproduction of Race in Titus Andronicus: Play, Ballad, and History” by Elizabeth Steinway
6. “White Body Parts and Queer Racial Queenship in Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda,” by Jennifer Higginbotham
7. “Trans Elizabeth: The Bisley Boy Theory, Trans Expertise, and Trans Queenship,” by Simone Chess
Afterword by Margo Hendricks

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