24th March: "The Salvage Imaginary: Gender and Objects in The Taming of the Shrew."

24th March: "The Salvage Imaginary: Gender and Objects in The Taming of the Shrew."
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This is a past event

On March 24th, at 1pm Centre for Early Modern Studies will host Dr McKenna Rose (Georgia IT), via MS Teams. Please register for the meeting here

The Taming of the Shrew stages the ways that laying waste to domestic material commodities produces an idealized division of the sexes. The broken glasses and luxury commodities of the Induction, Petruccio’s monstrous apparel and “house-hold stuff” (3.2.231), and all the uneaten food that litters the stage though out the play, are just a few examples of ways seemingly natural gendered categories are created through an impress of artificial objects in Shrew. While the mass quantity of material objects required to produce the categories that divide men from women may seem to threaten to deplete the same natural resources they claim to preserve, I argue that the play’s theory of gender division depends at least as much on recycling salvage materials as it does on pre-modern, capitalist, mass consumerism.

 

Dr. McKenna Rose is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on Renaissance literature and the Environmental Humanities. Her articles have appeared in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture and in the edited collection, Watery Thinking (forthcoming). Her book project, Object Ecology on the Early Modern Stage, turns to the material history of the Renaissance theater to uncover the relationship between objects and the people they leave behind, while also exploring the environmental implications of a culture obsessed with expressing itself through the accumulation of reclaimed material commodities. Through its framing of the early theater as salvage operation, she argues that the constant cycling and recycling of both material substrates and rhetorical figures not only encodes the history of resource depletion, but also suggest methods to redress the dangers of anthropocentric climate change.

 

If you require help please contact zuzanna.muszynska@abdn.ac.uk

 

 

Speaker
Dr McKenna Rose