Approximate Bodies Gender And Power In Early Modern Drama And Anatomy

The early modern period was an age of anatomical exploration and revelation, with new discoveries capturing the imagination not only of scientists but also of playwrights and poets. "Approximate Bodies" examines, in fascinating detail, the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period's anatomical and gynaecological treatises.
Maurizio Calbi traces a number of emblematic figurations of the body, which he sees as dramatized and rearticulated in the period's texts: the eroticized, deformed body of the outsider, for example, or the effeminate body of the desiring male and the disfigured body parts of the desiring female. Drawing on the theories of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan and working through close readings of key plays and treatises, the study examines the way in which social and psychic domains are involved in the early modern construction of the body. Crucially, Calbi argues that the early modern body is obsessively construed in terms of differentiating markers of power such as gender, race, status and eroticism. At the same time, bodies are presented as unstable and unfinished entities, uncannily proximate to one another.
Compelling and impeccably researched, this is a sophisticated account of the fantasies and anxieties that play a role in constructing the early modern body. "Approximate Bodies" makes a major contribution to the field of early modern studies and to debates around the body.