Becoming Otherwise: Virginity’s Historical Futures in Early Modern English Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My dissertation brings together the virginal female body and the history of the English Reformation via the conceptual structure of the hymen, a membrane whose irrevocable rupture makes it a powerful figure for the Dissolution of the nunneries. Putting the physiological space of the female body in dialogue with the architectural space of the convent, I explore the ways in which the Dissolution transformed the relationship between the virgin and the symbolic, material, and ideological structures by which she had formerly been legible. On the threshold of two economies—the monastic and the secular; the eternal and the temporal; the chaste and the sexual—the virgin in the Reformation imaginary was a contingent, indeterminate, and undecidable figure. My study departs from the existing body of scholarship on virginity in its queer theoretical approach to the hymen as a site of the counterfactual. This dissertation treats the hymen as a point of critical leverage, a figure through which the presumed fixities of the sexed body, sexual relations, and the sexual operations of history might be undone and rearticulated. Chapters on the erotic economies suppressed in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and recalled in the country-house poems of Andrew Marvell and Aemilia Lanyer explore how the memory of conventual virginity continues to animate the elaboration of alternate relationalities. The hymen likewise organizes the forging of futures unconstrained by generic convention in the dramatic comedies of Shakespeare and Margaret Cavendish and the erotic elegies of John Donne, William Herbert, and Mary Wroth, texts in which the hymen gets folded into literary form and structure. The virginity of Elizabeth I and the fecundity of Anna of Denmark, queen consort of James I—that is, the reproductive bodies of successive English queens—anchor two chapters on the vexed relationship between female sexual agency and national futurity. In each of these six chapters, this project marshals traditionally ancillary, marginal, or tangential texts, genres, and authors to demonstrate the ideological utility of hymenal morphology in the early modern imaginary. Virginity is a structure that simultaneously secures and opens to alteration cultural, political, and sexual hegemonies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".