This thesis examines the expression of female same-sex relations and desire, or queer in union, in early modern England by considering the poetry of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn each other. To...Show moreThis thesis examines the expression of female same-sex relations and desire, or queer in union, in early modern England by considering the poetry of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn each other. To achieve this, this thesis first establishes the cultural categories within which, or outside of which, early modern women could formulate and define their relations with one another and develop a sexual subjectivity by examining various literary and non-literary texts available to early modern women. From these texts, the two contrasting figures of the ‘chaste’ female friend and the ‘monstrous’ tribade emerge. Building on Valerie Traub’s argument, who has shown that these two figures came to be combined during the development of the later perception of ‘lesbian’ identities in the eighteenth century, this thesis illustrates the earlier confluence of these two figures in the poetry of Philips and Behn. While Philips draws on the figure of the ‘chaste’ female friend and Behn on the tribadic or hermaphroditic body, both women writers can be seen to use the same adaptation and reclamation strategies. Going against the early modern perception of female same-sex relation, desire, and sexual acts as impossible, unnatural, and monstrous, Philips and Behn create a preferable, alternative pastoral space in which (sexual) relations can be expressed free from arbitrary, gendered constraints.Show less
