The Bernard and Gloria Beckerman Memorial Lecture has been rescheduled from last semester and will take place on April 29. Professor Melissa E. Sanchez will be giving a talk titled "The Shame of Conjugal Sex and the Reproduction of Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets."
Abstract:
This chapter traces the effects of Pauline and Augustinian soteriology on Protestant views of marriage. The Protestant Reformation is conventionally understood as elevating conjugal love above the lifelong celibacy privileged by the Catholic Church. But this redemptive vision of companionate marriage overlooks a key argument of leading reformers like Luther and Calvin: both deemed marriage superior to celibacy not because marriage sanctifies shameful creaturely desires, but because it publicly acknowledges them. This view of marriage as humbling confession of impurity runs counter to the ideals of contemporary white evangelical culture as well—and has been inscribed as law by the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which both the majority and the dissent agreed that that marriage is a unique expression of love and dignity. By contrast, Protestant anxiety that nuptial sex shares the excess and indignity of fornication structures the sexual and racial fantasies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. When Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets cast poetry as a reproductive technology free of the contamination of lust, they valorize not only same-sex desire but also the preservation of specifically “fair”—white—life. We thus find in these poems an early instance of the struggle to reconcile the Protestant conviction of the shame of conjugal sex with a secular valorization of the reproduction of whiteness.
This event will be held online via Zoom. You can access the meeting using this link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/4855059036. Please find the full Zoom invitation below.
The meeting will be held from 7-8:30pm EST, with announcements from 7-7:15pm, the talk 7:15-8:00pm and Q&A from 8-8:30pm. We will also host a casual social/cocktail half hour after the meeting. Since there won't be a dinner and we have no space constraints, an RSVP is not required. But I am still circulating the Evite for the sake of consistency and to preserve our sense of community. You can find announcements from our seminar members at the end of this email.
