Romeo and Juliet (Vol. 51) | Robert Appelbaum (essay date 1997)
Robert Appelbaum (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: "'standing to the Wall': The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet", in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 251-72.
[In the following essay, Appelbaum investigates the tragic limitations of masculinity in Romeo and Juliet, discussing its socially-constituted relationship to symbolic order and rejection of the female.]
What is masculinity? In a brief essay that rings true for me with respect to my own experience as a man, Homi K. Bhabha warns us not to speak of "masculinity in general, sui generis." What we are talking about when we talk about masculinity, Bhabha writes, is a certain "prosthetic reality—a 'prefixing' of the rules of gender and sexuality" that is somehow removed from the subject, that "is strangely separating from me, turning into my shadow," even as it "supplements and suspends" the male subject, suspends the "lackin-being" that...
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