Lithic Intimacies and Marmorization

Abstract

Abstract “Lithic Intimacies and Marmorization” studies how an embodied organ of masculine anatomy, the testes, or stones, animate lithic intimacies. It begins with anatomical manuals that represented the testes as a principal body part responsible for humankind’s propagation. The chapter argues—via the Mechanical’s play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—that such literal anatomical baseness provides the material grounding for gendered frictions. It next explores the Ovidian and Petrarchan donna petrosa tropes that eroticize “marmorization” (Patricia Philllippy). Fantasies of a stony beloved may appear to vivify masculine reproductive capacities at the expense of a petrified, marmoreal female figure. Yet, by analyzing Lot’s mineralized wife, the petrified heroines in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, and Shakespeare’s Hermione, preserved and reanimated as a miraculous statue, the chapter highlights the multivalences of the Latin root “dūrāre” of “perdure:” to harden but also to endure. Marmorization preserves human futurity in complex ways. It simultaneously fixes gender norms even as it renders them fluid and thus troubles normative taxonomies of human desire and queers sex practice.