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Gender Formation and Queer Love in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20”
The young man, the subject of Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets, is an ambiguous presence. Despite being written about extensively, he is never described in full. His gender, interestingly, is neither easily identifiable nor stable. In sonnet 20, the young man’s gender is confusingly put into focus and blurred. Either as a means of correcting Nature’s queer feelings or as a mistake, the young man ends up with a penis. By hypercorrecting—I adopt this linguistics term to mean mistakenly correcting something to avoid the nonstandard—her queer love, Nature ultimately perpetuates it and reveals the insignificance of gender as it relates to love. The young man is immediately a gender-bending force.…
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A Comment on How Lists Shape the Mind
I love lists. Lists are important; they tell you exactly what you need to get done, and then maybe you’ll pat yourself on the back after checking off a task. They help you out when you’re grocery shopping or when you’re idly skimming through your newsfeed. Tables of contents, glossaries, and indexes wouldn’t exist without them. And like everything else, lists can be used to promote, deliberately or not, certain ideas and attitudes. Growing up loving books, I’ve always wanted to finish a “100 books to read before you die” list (still pending), for a variety of reasons that range from fueling my consumption for words, to wanting to be…
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Interview with Laura Bitterlich – Author of Shapeshifters Part 2
I sat down to have an interview with Shapeshifters author Laura Bitterlich, who is an accomplished writer in Germany. At just nineteen, she is a published author and an intelligent thinker of various social issues including gender and sexuality. Her writing is mature, well-thought out and gripping. Focusing her energies on the genre of fantasy, she pays keen attention to her readership and uses her big imagination to transport us all to the universe of Shapeshifters. In this part of the interview, she relays her in-depth views about her ideas on relevant social issues. You use your writing to address social issues as well. An example would be Leara serving…
