“Use Me But as Your Spaniel”: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Sexualities

In this essay, I take A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene as case studies that show how critical commonplaces may become so entrenched that they limit the horizons of what we can see in a given text, genre, or period. The essay has two purposes. The first is theoretical. I aim to make explicit the often unspoken (perhaps even unconscious) theoretical subtexts that have shaped readings of female sexuality, and I propose some historical reasons for the dominance of certain strains of feminism—those best known as “subordination feminism” and “cultural feminism”—in criticism of early modern literature. The second purpose is hermeneutic. I explore the alternative readings that become available if we approach Shakespeare's and Spenser's work through the lens of one competing strand of feminist thought, described by its practitioners as “prosex” or “sex-radical” feminism. In this essay, my reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene limits its interpretive frameworks to those offered by sex-radical feminism and the strands of queer theory that emerged from it. Drawing on these often overlooked frameworks, I explore the tensions and hierarchies among women in the play and the poem to challenge the assumption that women's relationships are always egalitarian and nurturing; I propose that homo- and heteroerotic desires are not mutually exclusive but may coexist in these works; and I argue that female masochism is not always a pathology that enables patriarchy but can be a legitimate form of desire that challenges traditional ideas of normal and proper female behavior.