Homepage of Thomas A. King, Associate Professor, Brandeis University

Thomas A. King, Associate Professor

Department of English and American Literature, MS 023

Brandeis University

PO Box 9110

Waltham, MA 02454-9110

USA

781-736-2149 (O)

Current Semester Courses and Book Lists

Student Resources and Course Tools

Links to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Resources

The Mapping Brandeis Project

COURSES OFFERED:

English 4A, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1660-1800: The age of reason and contradiction, enlightenment and xenophobia. Surveys literary, critical, philosophical, political, and life writing, investigating the emergence of a literary public sphere, a national canon, and the first professional women writers.

English 11A, Literary Method. (Core requirement for majors in English and American Literature.)

English 23A (Theatre 112A), Domains of Seventeenth-Century Performance. Seventeenth-century London performance investigated through the domains of its production—the court, the city, and the emerging "Town," the center of a new leisure class. Drama, masques, and music drama studied as modes of representation negotiating class mobility, changing concepts of state authority and personal identity, and shifts in gender and erotic relations.

English 28B, Queer Readings: Before Stonewall. (Women=s and Gender Studies elective.) How do literary texts and other representations help us understand historical beliefs, desires, and anxieties about sexed bodies and their pleasures prior to the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City (generally taken as jumpstarting the contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movements)? Readings may include Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Rosetti, Wilde, Freud, Woolf, Barnes, Stein, Larsen, Forster, Genet, Baldwin, O'Hara, Ginsberg, and Foucault.

English 64B, From Libertinism to Sensibility: Pleasure and the Theatre 1660-1800. (WRITING INTENSIVE COURSE. ACTIVE LEARNING. Theater Arts elective. Music elective, track in cultural studies.) Investigates the exchange between performance texts and contemporaneous discussions of class, nationality, and political party. Emphasizes the emergence of modern gender and sexual roles and the impact of the first professional women actors. Using active learning techniques, students in English 64b conduct team research (using both primary and secondary sources) on one of the various modes of pleasure relevant to the theatre and opera of the period--for example, the appearance of the first woman actors in England, the use of castrati in opera, the social functions of pleasure gardens and masquerades, the social understanding of sex in the period, the social understanding of emotions, the expansion of consumption, and the ways in which male and female actors were trained in the period.

English 87B, Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall. (ORAL COMMUNICATION course. Women=s and Gender Studies elective.) How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film.

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English 144B, The Body as Text. (WRITING INTENSIVE course. Women=s and Gender Studies elective; Theater Arts elective; Music elective, track in cultural studies; M.A. in Cultural Production elective.) How are our bodies the material for our presentations of self and our interactions with others? Examines contemporary theories and histories of the body against literary, philosophical, political, and performance texts of the 16th through the 18th centuries.

English 151A, Queer Studies. (EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING course. Women=s and Gender Studies elective.) Recommended preparation: an introductory course in gender/sexuality/feminism and/or a course in critical theory. Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Combining theory with practice, English 151a offers students the opportunity to explore a range of relevant actions from site-specific and online performances to activism, from the theorization and documentation of praxis to creative writing.

English 151B, Theatre/Theory: Investigating Performance. (EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING course. WRITING INTENSIVE course. Theatre Arts Elective; M.A. in Cultural Production elective.) See The Mapping Brandeis Project. Recommended preparation: A course in dramatic literature and familiarity with theatrical production. The theater, etymologically, is a place for viewing. Theory, etymologically, begins with a spectator and a viewing. Reading theories of theater and performance alongside paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance, we will consider the power, politics, and poetics of spectacle and spectatorship. Combining theory with practice, we will explore and make site-specific and online performances.

English 181A, Making Sex, Performing Gender. (EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING course. Women=s and Gender Studies elective; Theatre Arts elective; M.A. in Cultural Production elective; Music elective, track in cultural studies.) Recommended preparation: an introductory course in gender/sexuality/feminism and/or a course in critical theory. Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Combining theory with practice, English 181a offers students the opportunity to explore a range of relevant actions from site-specific and online performances to activism, from the theorization and documentation of praxis to creative writing.

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English 200a, Methods of Literary Study. (Core course for M.A., Joint M.A., and Ph.D. students in English and American Literature.) In Eng 200A, we will engage ongoing and recent debates about the history and uses of literature and literary criticism, in relation to contemporary formulations of "culture," the "literary," and "modernity" (in particular, modern psychological subjectivity) as textual artifacts and residues of discursive practices. While our primary task will be to survey some important approaches to the critical study of literary and other texts, considering the kinds of readings opened up by each approach and its limitations, we may also use assigned readings to launch larger discussions of the relation of textuality, modernity, and subjectivity; the enabling conditions of literary pleasures; and the competing social and cultural situations of reading, writing, and interpretation. Students in English 200a develop a sense of themselves as members of a department and a profession, reflect on their critical interests and strengths, and gain skills in (1) oral presentation and discussion, (2) accurate paraphrasing and debating of critical arguments, (3) primary and secondary research, and (4) preparation of a critical paper appropriate for delivery at an academic conference or symposium.

English 201A, Gender Studies. Provides opportunities for graduate students, working from a variety of disciplines, to engage current scholarly debates about the social construction of sexual difference, gender, and sexuality. Reading foundational texts and recent publications in feminism and gender studies, and analyzing a variety of cultural artifacts including (but not limited to) film, visual, and performances texts, we will investigate sex assignment, sexual difference, gender, and sexuality as categories of social knowledge and modes of social production.

English 231A, Performing the Early Modern Self. (M.A. in Cultural Production elective.) Examines current theories and debates about social performance and the performative iteration of identity against everyday and formal performances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, focusing on possibilities for negotiation, improvisation, and transformation. We are interested in the many presentational or performance behaviors classified as the "conduct of life," such as manners and etiquette; gender decorum; intimacy, othering, and the management of spatial distances between social actors; the enactment of sexual, racial, and national differences; the arts of conversation and sociability; and the embodiment of status and class. At the same time we will be interested in the specificity of textuality. What kind of social performance is a printed text, understood as an ensemble of social practices, as the locus of acts of (re)writing and (re)reading? How might these two lenses--the textual and the performative--focus our analyses of social being? In Fall 2008 we will concentrate on aural performance, investigating relationships between sounding and listening and between speech and writing.

English 280A, Making it Real: The Tactics of Discourse. (M.A. in Cultural Production elective.) An investigation of the discursive realization of bodies and agents. English 280a queries representational practices as modes of agency, problematizing identity and differences and negotiating hegemony. Our lenses: performance and cultural studies, visual studies, literature and theory, and historiography.

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PUBLICATIONS:

Books (Published, Forthcoming, In Progress):

The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750. Volume One: The English Phallus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

Review by Michael McKeon, "Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century," SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Restoration and Eighteenth Century 45, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 707-71. Available to Brandeis users through Project Muse Standard Collection.

Additional description and reviews available at Amazon.com.

The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750. Volume Two: Queer Articulations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

The queer man's mode of embodiment--his gestural and vocal style, his posture and gait, his occupation of space--remembers a political history. To gesture with the elbow held close to the body, to affect a courtly lisp, or to set an arm akimbo with the hand turned back on the hip is to cite a history in which the sovereign body became the effeminate and sodomitical and, finally, the homosexual body. In Queer Articulations, Thomas A. King argues that the Anglo-American queer body publicizes a history of resistance to the gendered terms whereby liberal subjectivities were secured in early modern England.

In The English Phallus, the first volume of The Gendering of Men, King traced the emergence of gendered privacy, articulated in opposition to an earlier structure of super- and subordination that he called "residual pederasty." Arguing that queer agency preceded and enabled the formulation of queer subjectivities, Queer Articulations investigates theatricality and sodomy as performance practices foreclosed in the formation of gendered privacy and consequently available for resistant uses by male-bodied persons who have been positioned, or who have located themselves, outside the universalized public sphere of citizen-subjects. Represented as a failure of privacy, and not at first reducible to homosexuality, queerness indicated the return of earlier, courtly codes of male embodiment that had required men's display of subjection. Queerness implied residual publicness, while sodomy registered a man's abnegation of privacy, his desire for subjection rather than political and personal autonomy. By defining queerness as the lack or failure of private pleasures, rather than an alternative pleasure or substance in its own right, eighteenth-century discourses reconfigured publicness as the mark of difference from the naturalized, private bodies of liberal subjects.

In King's study, "queer" names not an essence but a historically enabled subject position restored or revised in everyday practices. Inviting a performance-centered, interdisciplinary approach to queer/male identities, King develops a model of queerness as processual activity, situated in time and place but irreducible to the individual subject's identifications, desires, and motivations.

The Subject at the End of the Voice

In progress. An investigation of modern subjectivity as an aural effect, through a study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatic verse; acting, oratory, and rhetorical manuals; conversational etiquette; the oral performance of letters; and collections of sayings, with a focus on the circle of James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Thomas Sheridan, and Hester Thrale Piozzi, and their encounters with central and peripheral Enlightenment figures. A genealogy of three domains of traffic across geographical, disciplinary, and epistemological boundaries which may complicate our understanding of early modern and modern subjectivity, and particularly the historical emergence of the subject of writing, reading, and speaking in English: (1) exchanges among residual, dominant, and emergent technologies of speaking, conversing, writing, printing, and reading; (2) the movement of statements across national borders; and (3) the difference, within the history of the Enlightenment, discovered by reintegrating into printed texts the conversations accompanying them, and in particular the pleasures and affective sensations of conversations organized in homo- and heterosocial domains: conversations between men, between men and women, and between women and women.

Gay Performances: Camp, Drag, Sexuality (with Moe Meyer)

In progress. Gay Performances explores everyday and formal performance by gay and queer men, of various embodiments, focusing on transformations and revisions of gay identity performance since the 1980s. King and Meyer address such questions as: What might be gained in remembering gay male practice and performance from previous decades and rereading it against/alongside current queer practice (and vice versa)? Given the critiques and revisions of sexual identity categories and their histories articulated by performers and scholars working from queer, postcolonial, transnational, transgender, and critical race perspectives, what is remembered when we remember "gay male practice and performance"? Might such categories as "gay male" and "queer/masculine identified" and such historically associated performance modes as "drag" and "camp"--already declared "dead" in the 1990s--offer any useful position for revising or specifying contemporary queer practice and performance?

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Articles (Published and Forthcoming):

"The Sound of Men in Love," in Queer People 3, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda.

"How (Not) to Queer Boswell," in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007).

"The Subject at the End of the Voice," in Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and Tracy C. Davis (Israel: Assaph Books, 2007).

"The Subject at the End of the Voice," Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, no. 21: Special Issue: Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Linda Ben-Zvi (2007).

"The Castrato=s Castration," SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Restoration and Eighteenth Century 46, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 563-84. Available to Brandeis users through Project Muse Standard Collection.

"Gender and Modernity: Male Looks and the Performance of Public Pleasures," in Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Writing the Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment, ed. Mita Choudhury and Laura J. Rosenthal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 25-44.

"The Fop, The Canting Queen, and the Deferral of Gender," in Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early Modern Culture, ed. Chris Mounsey (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 94-135.

"M/S, or Making the Scene: An Erotics of Space," Queen: A Journal of Rhetoric of Power, Special Issue: Sex and Power: Subjection and Subjugation 1, no. 1 (2000).

"Scenes From a Culture of Masochism," in Strategic Sex, ed. D. Travers Scott (New York: Harrington Park-Haworth, 1999), 63-73.

"Displacing Masculinity: Edward Kynaston and the Politics of Effeminacy," in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, ed. Andrew P. Williams, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, No. 95 (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood, 1999), 119-40.

"Performing 'Akimbo': Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice," in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Morris Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 23-50. Also available through Amazon.com.

"'As if (she) were made on purpose to put the whole world into good Humour': Reconstructing the First English Actresses," TDR (The Drama Review) 36, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 78-102. Available to Brandeis users through JSTOR Complete.

"Camp as the Dramaturgy of Alterity," Theatre Insight: A Journal of Contemporary Performance Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 16-20.

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Reviews:

"Laurence Senelick, Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894-1925 (Review)," Modern Drama 43, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 633-36. Available to Brandeis users through Expanded Academic ASAP.

"The Temperature of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Review of The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, by Terry Castle)," LGSN (Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter) 23, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 41-42.

"Nostalgia for Sodom (Review of The Book of Sodom, by Paul Hallam)," LGSN (Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter) 21, no. 2 (July 1994): 26-28.

"Recent Events: Response to Frinde Maher, 'Gender and Other Distinctions in the Classroom'," Women's Studies Program Newsletter, Brandeis University 2, no. 5 (April 1994): 3-4.

"Review: Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self, by Randy Martin," Theatre Studies 39 (1994): 71-73.

"Review: The Gradual Making of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," Theatre Journal 43, no. 3 (October 1991): 391-92. Available to Brandeis users through JSTOR Complete.

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