Shakespeare, Race, and Queer Studies

Abstract

Abstract This chapter documents and promotes scholarship on the intersection of race and queer sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays. It provides a genealogy of the productive work that has been done at the intersection of these critical approaches and identifies ways in which the field might continue to grow. To illustrate that contemporary intersectional theory can still provide new insights even into the most familiar and frequently taught Shakespearean text ‘about’ race and sexuality, the chapter concludes with a reading of queer interracial eroticism in Othello. This reading argues that Iago uses racist language to inflame Othello with the desire to know his private thoughts, a process that involves both psychic identification and heightened intimacy between a black male body and a white male body. As such, Othello illustrates the insidious workings of what theorist Sharon Holland calls the ‘erotic life of racism’.