Valerie Traub, 'Becoming Converted: Sex, Knowledge and the Religious Body Politic'

Valerie Traub is the Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor and Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a specialist in the study of gender and sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and the author of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge, 1992). This paper, ‘Becoming Converted: Sex, Knowledge and the Religious Body Politic’ was delivered at a symposium on ‘Shakespeare and the Body Politic’ at The University of Queensland on 28 November 2016. In the paper, she advances a queer and intersectional analysis to expand our notion of the body politic from one of state formation to one that is dynamic and takes account of embodiment.