#traub

Because the sonnets continually return to earlier topics and images, undo the precarious stabilities of ostensibly conclusive couplets, regress to emotions which cannot be assuaged and constantly need to be rewritten, they enact a kind of Mobius strip "chicken and egg simultaneity."

Joe Fineman's influential gender-bifurcated reading of the sonnets enlarges this insight through a Lacanian filter that sutures gender and sexuality to signification

To the extent that resistance to a literalizing hermeneutic corresponds to the construal of homoeroticism as a matter of social identity rather than particular erotic behaviors, insofar as it posits "love" as the sine qua non for social acceptance, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the limited political basis, at least within the United States, upon which it is now possible to advocate gay marriage."