Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology

Kristina Straub

Published by Princeton University Press 1992

Sexual Suspects

Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology

Kristina Straub

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691258898

Overview
Contents

About this book

How the suspect sexuality of actors and actresses shaped early modern debates about gender and sexual identity

From the Restoration through the eighteenth century, the sexuality of actors and actresses was written about in ways that stirred the public imagination. Actors were frequently suspected of heterosexual promiscuity or labeled effeminate or even as “sodomites,” and actresses were often viewed as prostitutes or sexually ambivalent victims of their profession. Kristina Straub argues that this depiction of players greatly shaped public debates about what made women feminine and men masculine. Considering a wide range of literature by or about players—pamphlets, newspaper reports, theatrical histories, and biographies as well as the public correspondence between Alexander Pope and the famed actor Colley Cibber—she examines the formation of gender roles and sexual identities during a period crucial to modern thinking on these issues.

Drawing from feminist-materialist and gay and lesbian theories and historiographies, Sexual Suspects analyzes the complex development of spectacle and spectatorship as gendered concepts. She reveals how national, racial, and class differences contributed to the subjection of players as professional spectacles and how images of race, class, and gender combined to create divisions between “normal” and “deviant” sexuality.

Author / Editor information

Kristina Straub is professor emerita of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her books include Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain and (with Nora Nachumi) Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Reviews

"Kristina Straub makes gender issues central to the history of drama in a way they have never really been before, and her book could not appear in the literary critical scene at a better time."

"Finalist for the 1993 Barnard Hewitt Award, American Society for Theatre Research"

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
I. Ocular Affairs: The Gendering of Eighteenth-Century Spectacle Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
II. Colley Cibber’s Butt: The Construction of Actors’ Masculinity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	24
III. Colley Cibber’s Fops: Actors and Homophobia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
IV. Men from Boys: Cibber, Pope, and the Schoolboy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
V. The Construction of Actresses’ Femininity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
VI. George Anne Bellamy: The Actress as Sentimental Victim Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109
VII. The Guilty Pleasures of Female Theatrical Cross-Dressing and the Autobiography of Charlotte Charke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
VIII. Bodies in Pain: The Subjection of Players Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191

Language: English
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 212

eBook

Published: November 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780691258898