#marjorie garber

[Beatrice is] an unmarried woman dependent upon the hospitality of her uncle. This is the same position that Rosalind in As You Like It occupies at the court of her uncle, Duke Frederick, but there marriage is not the constant topic of conversation—and, of course, Rosalind manages to make her escape, together with her cousin Celia. In Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice and Hero are the young women of the household, and it is expected that they will marry. [...] Beatrice is not an heiress [...and] her position is more precarious than Hero's. [...This] will return, more vividly and painfully, after the humiliation of Hero, when Beatrice longs to revenge her cousin and must instead enlist Benedick's aid to fight with Claudio: "O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place" (4.1.303-304). It is worth noting that in other Shakespearean comedies of this period the heroine does become a man, at least for a little while. Portia, Rosalind, and Viola all cross-dress, assuming male costumes and names in order to perform some act of rescue, release, or revenge. But Beatrice has this option only in the wishful form of a condition contrary to fact. Much Ado About Nothing is a play that engages topics like male bonding and female disempowerment, for all the powerful figures in Messina are men.

Philip Sidney wrote a Defence of Poesie in 1595. Percy Shelley wrote a Defence of Poetry in 1821. Why, we might ask, does literature have to defend itself?

Is bisexuality a 'third kind' of sexual identity, between or beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality? Or is it something that puts in question the very concept of sexual identity in the first place?

Queer chic is now so chic in metrosexual circles that the "straight queer" is everywhere to be found. GQ sketched out a "Spectrum of Gay Positivity" that ranged from "Active in Gay Causes" (Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor) to "Appropriating Gay Characteristics" (Markie Mark, Prince), "Professing One's Own Inner Gayness" (Kurt Cobain, Sharon Stone), and "Pretending to Be Gay" (Madonna, certain college students). "Fumbling disclosures of omnisexuality" were viewed as a necessary awkward stage through which the "cultural elite" was passing-part of the price of ultimate social acceptance and assimilation, "until gay culture becomes boringly familiar to Americans, like hip-hop in the suburbs and Protestant-Catholic intermarriage." This will not, it seems safe to say, happen tomorrow. But is what GQ dubbed the "queer-is-cool philosophy" a fashion or a sexuality? Or is there any difference?  "Queer" sounds quite different when used as a term for oneself than it does when it is shouted or sneered from the street corner. Its power as an aggressive generalization, a refusal to accept "a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation" in favor of a "resistance to regimes of the normal,"" makes the term a powerful theoretical tool for queer theorists. The word's in-your-face qualities, what lesbian playwright Holly Hughes called its "cringe factor,"93 have contributed to its popularization, against the theoretical grain, by people, especially young people, who are adamantly not interested in "theory." Yet as many participants in the new sexuality debates stress, "queer" has real drawbacks when specificity and representation are required. It is a postmodern label with roots in fashion and discourse, and an appealing omnipresence in early twentieth-century literary and cultural texts ("You're a queer one, Julie Jordan") that seems to validate the historical existence of "queer people" before the queer movement, and Queer Nation, took off. But despite its value as a political slogan, "queer" is not, finally and fundamentally, an easy political term. Lesbian and gay writers from Terry Castle to Eric Marcus have expressed doubts about its pertinence, since it erodes the very specificity they consider crucial. "The term queer has lately become popular in activist and progressive academic circles in part, it seems to me, precisely because it makes it easy to enfold female homosexuality back 'into' male homosexuality and disembody the lesbian once again," writes Castle. "To the extent that 'queer theory' still seems . . . to denote primarily the study of male homosexuality, I find myself at odds with both its language and its universalizing aspirations." "Queer performativity" has its own cultural power among those who know what "performativity" means. For the person in the street (or on the street corner), however, "queer" often remains, culturally and discursively speaking, a matter of style and rhetoric. It's popular with some young people and some academics, but its universalizing impulse is (designedly) at odds with its joyful claim of stigmatization. Precisely because of the ambivalently exclusive mantle of "chic," it's unlikely that "everybody's queer" will replace the cliche "everybody's bisexual" in the near future.