It was very important to me that my students pay close attention to the specifics and particularities of the identities they were examining, so as not to conflate under the rubric of \u201cwoman\u201d all racial and classed positions. Beginning our inquiry with Titus Andronicus helped us do that because the cultural, racial, and classed locations of the play\u2019s two important women, Lavinia and Tamora uncovered the two poles informing the work: the world of Rome and that of the one outside of its so-called civilized and civilizing boundary. Pairing this play with Francesca T. Royster\u2019s brilliant article, \u201cWhite-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Titus Andronicus,\u201d<\/em><\/a> showed my students very clearly how whiteness gets constructed and articulated in this play. Indeed, the genius of Royster\u2019s analysis lies in her critical attention to the hyper-whiteness of Tamora and the contrast is character and civility this instantiates with Lavinia and Rome. Rather than limiting her focus to the \u201cobvious\u201d Other in the play, Aaron the Moor, Royster shows us how to see race in whiteness, making a necessary intervention in early modern critical race studies by disturbing the apparent unmarked, unremarkable, and therefore unraced nature of whiteness. Introducing my students to Royster\u2019s work and the work of Black feminist scholars early in the semester, allowed their exporation of these text to be inflected by a critical consciousness attuned to the ways in which whiteness works in Shakespeare\u2019s texts, especially when it is yoked to women and virtue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attention to the complex ways in which identity is formed in Shakespeare\u2019s plays is important to my pedagogy and was especially important in this course where all but one of our plays was a comedy, a genre that culminates in marriages that secure social class, heterosexual relations, and patriarchal power. Race is a particularly insidious discourse in the genre, its mobilization supports power structures governing the plays, exposing the ways in which both whiteness and non-whiteness are structured. As we moved to A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, <\/em>near the middle of the semester, my students had become more adept at identifying how even minor instances of racial Othering, seemingly unimportant racial references, exerted power in rendering women suitable or unsuitable for marriage. Their reading of Kim F. Hall\u2019s Things of Darkness<\/em><\/a> informed their astute observations. This text, of which I only assigned the introduction, exposed them to the racial regime undergirding early modern notions of beauty, particularly as it manifested in the discourse of fairness and its primacy of place in securing appropriate dynastic alliances through marriage. In her introduction, Hall points out that scholars have been reluctant to investigate the operations of race when Lysander spurns Hermia with the epithets of \u201cEthiope\u201d and \u201ctawny Tartar,\u201d and then proceeds to expose how these moments perform the work of white, racist, imperialist, enslaving, hetero-sexist, patriarchy. Because, as Hall argues \u201cblack women\u2013real or rhetorical\u2013are coded as the ultimate in undesirablity and thus are not suitable objects of societal exchange [\u2026] [n]one of the women marked with the language of blackness are at that moment desired partners in marriage\u201d (22).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using Hall\u2019s powerful insights to structure our own inquiry into this and other plays, my students found that in Much Ado,<\/em> when Hero is rejected by Claudio, her father, Leonato uses the language of inking or blackening to racialize and render her not only unchaste but also unsuitable for marriage. These moments demand our critical attention because they speak to the hierarchies and forms of cultural dominance established by racist and patriarchal systems and of the hierarchies and dominance within the oppressed category of woman. All women are not the same nor are all forms of oppression. Keeping that in mind was necessary for us to think about which women are supported when they publicize the harm done to them and which are not, who can be an \u201cappropriate\u201d victim and who cannot, who can \u201cwe\u201d identify with and who can or do we not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Poster](\"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/hsa\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2020\/01\/img_0292-me-too-poster-196x300.jpg\")
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