Much scholarly attention has been devoted to exploring the politics of sexuality, and with a pivot at once innovative and invigorating, Sanchez offers a thorough and captivating examination of the sexual dimensions of politics. Engaging the recent theoretical findings of queer theory (particularly its insights into the vicissitudes of identification and desire, of which the gender of the person involved is but one element), Sanchez sets out to explore what she describes as “the affective component of authority” and “the complex spectrum of shifting political configurations and investments” of its subjects (26). To this end, she investigates the sixteenth-century truism that political obligation is driven by love. As she unravels the tight interweave of eros, pain, and power in early modern depictions of relations between subjects and sovereigns, Sanchez generates bracing insights into the vexed relationship among gender, sexuality, and power, which elucidate modern understandings of the enticement of martyrdom. Sanchez centers her argument on the pervasive influence of Protestant hagiographic and Petrarchan courtship discourses, both of which feature love's sacrificial dimensions, and in so doing, skillfully illuminates the masochistic and narcissistic structures underlying representations of subjection and dominance by politically active writers such as Sidney, Spenser, Worth, Cavendish, and Milton. As she moves across several genres, modes of political order, and historical moments, ranging from the late Elizabethan period through to the era of English republicanism, Sanchez overturns standard readings of classical Renaissance texts by casting their concern with coercion and consent in a startling new perspective. As each chapter examines how particular authors use scenarios of erotic subjugation and suffering to ponder questions about sovereignty peculiar to their own moments in English history, Sanchez makes a convincing case that these writers consistently turn to the figure of erotic violence to explore the vicissitudes of political power.
Chapter 1 provides a historical and theoretical framework for the analogy of conjugal and political bonds used by writers as early as the fourteenth century seeking to describe the often uneasy balance of power among royal authority, common law, and parliamentary counsel. The next two chapters focus on Sidney's Arcadia and Spenser's Faerie Queene, respectively, the two texts that for Sanchez shape literary forms and political discourse for the century to come. By casting the problem of political obedience in terms of steadfast passion, the hagiographic structure of Arcadia understands fantasies of pain and subjugation as a source for the redefinition rather than the rejection of power. Sidney, Sanchez shows, posits feminized suffering as central to political negotiation, since it is by inhabiting a powerless position, traditionally associated with femininity, that male political subjects can resist monarchical authority without raising the threat of rebellion. As in Arcadia, in which characters accept physical torment and gain moral authority, The Faerie Queene too understands submission as a form of power insofar as passive resistance forces sovereigns to choose between violence and compromise. Yet Spenser, Sanchez argues, is more pessimistic than Sidney since his primary concern is the collapse of spiritual resolve. Mobilizing a Petrarchan erotics of subjection that blurs the distinction between seduction and rape, and consequentially between beloved sovereign and sadistic tyrant, The Faerie Queene demonstrates that political and sexual subjects never fully comprehend their darker impulses and thus can never be sure that they are resisting them. In chapter 4, Sanchez delves deeper into the problem of the virtuous subject's inability—or unwillingness—to resist tyranny in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and Pericles. Here she considers how the female body may be contaminated against its will. In chapter 5, Sanchez examines Mary Worth's Urania as a romance that considers the limitations and contradictions of constitutionalist ideas of counsel and prerogative through its exploration of erotic desire and political obedience as based in irrational fantasies that offer the possibility of perverse pleasure in abjection. In making erotic choice so ambiguous, Worth suggests it may be impossible to resist tyranny. Sanchez analyzes several Caroline masques of the 1630s in chapter 6, where she overturns standard readings of these court spectacles by revealing how representations of erotic enslavement functioned as a form of counsel to rather than affirmation of Charles I's authority. Chapter 7 proposes a new reading of Margaret Cavendish's fiction that emphasizes its awareness that the allure of power for sovereign and subject alike means that those who should restore justice may imperil it. In her final chapter, Sanchez casts Milton's conception of republican virtue in a new light as she interprets Paradise Lost as promoting feminine humility as a model for political subjects that is equally desirable and difficult to achieve.
A study that is consistently rigorous in its historical method, exemplary in its close readings of literary texts, and trenchant in its deployment of psychoanalytic theory, Erotic Subjects stands as a major contribution to Renaissance and sexuality studies. In keeping with the recent work of Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, and Wendy Brown, Sanchez pointedly acknowledges the centrality of queer theory for overturning a view of politics as based upon rational and deliberate participation. For this reason, Sanchez's book stands to make a significant impact on studies of early modern political thought. Literature, as she shows, constitutes an alternate tradition of political theory, one that by imagining political subjection in sexual terms exposes the perverse component of sovereignty. Moreover, by offering a complex account of political and erotic allegiance and agency, Sanchez exposes the limits of classical ideas of consent. Her focus on enduring rather than inflicting pain challenges conventional ideas of dominance and submission. This is an important book, and dare I say an urgent one for those wanting to know more about the ways—then and now—political subjects accept or even enjoy their own abuse by perverse authorities.
