According to conventional love lyrics, we are accountable for our desires because how we feel reveals who we are.  The monogamous lover is also a sovereign, integral subject who is virtuous because reasonable, predictable, and intelligible to him or herself.  By the same logic, to refuse a demand for exclusive and permanent love is not only to injure another, but also to reveal a fault in oneself.  Accordingly, eroticism cannot be understood as exclusively private; rather, it is part of a larger structure of social and ethical norms that, as numerous queer and feminist theorists have detailed, reward sexual restraint and monogamous coupledom with a range of material and immaterial privileges. In resisting conventional views of erotic accountability, Donne’s verse incorporates into the secular sphere a Calvinist ethics of humility, a habit of thought that reveals early modern theology to be a vital, if counterintuitive, resource for modern queer studies. 

For more information about this lecture, please visit the IPRH calendar at

http://illinois.edu/calendar/detail/4639?eventId=32911161&calMin=201602&cal=20140201&skinId=10050.               

Melissa E. Sanchez is Associate Professor of English and a Core Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  Professor Sanchez's first book, “Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature,” examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers used scenarios of erotic violence and cross-gender identification to explore the origins and limits of political allegiance (Oxford University Press, 2011).  She is currently writing a book, tentatively entitled "Promiscuous Love: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Sexualities," which examines the relationship between ethics and promiscuity in early modern lyric.  Professor Sanchez has also recently completed editing three volumes of essays:  “Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality” (with Ania Loomba); a special volume of “Spenser Studies” on "Spenser and 'the Human'" (with Ayesha Ramachandran); and a special volume of the “Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies” (JEMCS) entitled "Desiring History and Historicizing Desire" (with Ari Friedlander and Will Stockton). 

Thanks to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for this information item.

**********