Bromley, James M. Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama will be of interest to scholars studying not only gender and sexuality but also disability, material culture, and temporality.The book examines depictions of sartorial extravagance primarily within city comedies, examining the performance of identity through clothing during a time of economic transformation.Instances of dramatized flamboyance offer case studies through which Bromley explores the notion of what he calls "queer style, " which involves "forms of masculinity that were grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body" (5).The author incisively shows how clothing is both used to construct the appearance of a normative gender identity and can be examined to show how gender itself is a construction based in theatricality.While such an approach might sound like a mainstay of contemporary gender and sexuality studies, Bromley charts new territory for the implications of such a claim in the realm of early modern theatre.The book draws examples from scenes of costuming on stage.That is, the study examines those scenes where characters themselves use fashionoften outlandish fashion-as a way to perform a mimetic presentation of the self.Rather than simply dismissing over-the-top clothing as satire, the author looks at these material presentations as signalling unusual forms of pleasure that trouble "distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality" (6).Markers of personal "style" become markers for the intersection between social trends, personal choice, and larger questions of ontology.The book thus masterfully interweaves critical theory with analysis grounded in historical context.Importantly, early modern London was changing quickly during the rise of city comedy, as the population increased, economic activity diversified, and foreign goods became more available.Such expansion collided with sumptuary laws and advice manuals that attempted to regulate how individuals should dress, and the theatre was a site that could reinforce or undermine such codifications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".