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Zender, Karl. “The Humiliation of Iago.” SEL: Studies in English Literature. Spring, 1994. 39
Notes 1 In this section of her book, Lenker discusses the major historians of the family in the early modern period: “The most extensive works to date on gender and family dynamics are Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977), Alan Macfarlane’s Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (1986); and David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997) 2 For a full discussion of early modern views of interracial eroticism, particularly those pertaining to white women with black men, see Daileader’s Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth. 3 Food for Thought: How much of the audience’s sympathy for Desdemona would dissipate if we did not have the benefit of knowing that the ocular proof is misleading? How much would the audience’s sympathy for Iago grow if we had some ocular proof that Othello had, in fact, been intimate with Emilia? Daileader demonstrates that the idea of bloody revenge for the sexual transgression of a woman is still prevalent and deemed natural today “in a single comment by one of my undergraduate students: ‘If my wife cheated on me, I’d kill her.’” P 2. 4 This use of “paper” and “book” is interesting in light of Desdemona’s many transgressive speech acts, as it is words that appear most often on paper and in books, and it is words that are a large part of Desdemona’s transgression. 5 Kahn coins this phrase as part of her explication of Madelon Gohlke feminist-psychoanalytic reading of Shakespeare, “ ‘I wooed thee with my sword’ Shakespeare’s Tragic Paradigms”. (Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn. Baltimore; The John Hopkins University Press. 1980.): “Madelon Gohlke outlines a paradigm of masculine identity in Shakespeare that illuminates this aspect of cuckoldry. For a Shakespearean hero, to be betrayed by a woman, she argues, is to be humiliated or dishonored, and thus placed in a position of vulnerability that makes him psychologically like a castrated man, and thus womanish. […] To be betrayed by a woman thus threatens a man’s very masculinity—his identity as a man” (emphasis mine) 6 This confluence of occupation and manhood can also be seen in Othello’s “Farewell! Othello’s occupations gone.” III.iii.273 7 “Othellophilia, the critical and cultural fixation on Shakespeare’s tragedy of inter-racial marriage to the exclusion of broader definitions, and more positive visions, of inter-racial eroticism. […] in Anglo-American culture from the Renaissance onward, the most widely read, canonical narratives of inter-racial sex have involved black men and white women, and not black women and white men, […]Whatever Shakespeare’s point in telling the story, it has served well as cautionary tale for white women. 40
Page 1 and 2: THE TROUBLE WITH GENDER IN OTHELLO:
Page 3 and 4: THE TROUBLE WITH GENDER IN OTHELLO:
Page 5 and 6: Acknowledgments In Honor of Fred Fe
Page 7 and 8: TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE
Page 9 and 10: If, as Butler writes, there is no p
Page 11 and 12: Another benefit of this type of rea
Page 13 and 14: and Juliet show what happens after
Page 15 and 16: legitimacy of the authority, […]
Page 17 and 18: For Butler, the distinction between
Page 19 and 20: further understand the subversion i
Page 21 and 22: (i.e., fitting her gender, race, cu
Page 23 and 24: Therefore, the fact of Desdemona’
Page 25 and 26: her husband. However, there can be
Page 27 and 28: Section Two: Othello in the Matrix
Page 29 and 30: nearly verbatim, “look to your wi
Page 31 and 32: Nor to comply with heat, the young
Page 33 and 34: and leave her home in Venice for a
Page 35 and 36: is the threat to his gender perform
Page 37 and 38: fictive revenge schemes in the west
Page 39 and 40: Desdemona’s exposure of “a limi
Page 41 and 42: Conclusion The Matrix Restored By r
Page 43 and 44: of a possible agenda of enforcement
Page 45: Lenker, Lagretta Tallent. Fathers a

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