Events

Most early modern literary representations of men in extravagant apparel are satiric in tone. Yet if satirists are to expose their targets to their humiliating gaze, they do so by taking pains to represent the desires of and the desirability of the sartorially extravagant man. In so doing, they offer their readers a view of how the world might be reimagined that competes with their own satiric aims. Drawing on John Donne’s “Satire 1,” civic pageantry, and early modern portraiture, my talk explores how we might recuperate the utopian fantasies about queer modes of masculinity, sociability, and eroticism that attend upon early modern sartorial extravagance.