Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture)

Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays addresses a conspicuous absence in queer readings of Shakespeare’s work: the pregnant body.Through discussions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale, this book dismantles the heteronormative frameworks through which pregnancy continues to be read. Its chapters challenge the assumptions in queer theory that only straight women get pregnant, that every pregnancy ends in the birth of a healthy, legitimate child, and that pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form.These frameworks not only dull the transgressive force of pregnancy in Shakespeare’s work and the expansive ways in which early moderns thought about the pregnant body, but contribute to the erasure of so many lived experiences of pregnancy in our current, cultural imagination.The concept of “queer pregnancy” not only reorients scholars to pregnancy in Shakespeare’s plays and beyond - it illuminates how hig