In Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepheard (1594), the identity of the aptly-named Ganymede, who is gendered as a “boy,” appears to be labile in the eye of the poetic persona: “If thou wilt be my Boy, or else my Bride.” Such indefiniteness surrounding gender identity is typical of early modern English pastoral, which relies on classical precedents to idealise the life of enamoured shepherds in idyllic landscapes. Indefiniteness is also noticeable in the figure of the “amorous girl-boy” Ganymede in Thomas Lodge’s romance Rosalynde (1592), as well as in that of their Shakespearean counterpart in the pastoral comedy As You Like It (c. 1599). The few examples mentioned demonstrate that pastoral is a multifaceted mode, which authors resort to in such various genres as poetry, prose, and drama. In addition, these texts show that when they idealise life in woods and meadows, Elizabethan and Jacobean authors also tend to unsettle the cisgender norm. If such destabilisation has long been described as a potentially comical dramatic device – connected especially with the period’s commonplace recourse to crossdressing –, it can also become the site where non-binary, gender non-conforming, and ““trans or ‘trans-like’” (Chess et al., pp.7-8) characters emerge – John Lyly’s Galatea being a case in point. The latest developments in queer and transgender studies, as well as recent productions of Elizabethan pastoral comedies, prompt scholars to reconsider early modern texts in this light.

This panel encourages comparisons of the different strategies at play in the various literary genres and subgenres where pastoral disturbs the cisgender norm, with the overarching aim of considering what makes this literary mode so propitious to gender trouble. Speakers are invited to reexamine the borrowing of pastoral tropes, features, and motifs in early modern English writings of various genres through the lens of recent queer and transgender criticism.

Resumes and 200-word proposals must be sent to johann.paccou[at]sorbonne-nouvelle.fr and aurelie.griffin[at]sorbonne-nouvelle.fr by Wednesday, 10 July 2024. Papers will be given at the RSA annual conference in Boston in 2025. Down the line, we hope to assemble a collection of essays for publication.

Bibliography:

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York; London: Routledge, 1999.

Chess, Simone, Colby Gordon, and Will Fisher. ‘Introduction: Early Modern Trans Studies’. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019): 1–25.

Fisher, Will. Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Guy-Bray, Stephen. Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Masten, Jeffrey. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Smith, Bruce R. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1991.