Chaste Value
An edition of Chaste Value (2017)
Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage
By Katherine Gillen
Publish Date
2019
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Language
eng
Pages
256
Description:
Examines the way that theatrical representations of chastity inform broader concerns about the commoditisation of people in early capitalism. Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity-itself a quasi-commodity-to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange.