Pericles (1608), one of Shakespeare’s and co-author George Wilkins’s romances, dramatizes the tumultuous life of Pericles, the Prince of Tyre. Over five acts, it stages his acquisition of love, its tragic loss, and its ultimate rediscovery. Strikingly, the play opens with incest—Antiochus, the king of Antioch, instructs Pericles to solve a riddle whose answer reveals that his daughter is “an...
At its root, the “Bury Your Gays” trope is simple: in a work with an overt or implied same-sex couple, by the end of the story at least one of the lovers “must die or otherwise be destroyed” (Hulan 17). Today, it is often used in film for shock value, as seen with Tara’s death on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2002 and Lexa’s death on The 100 in 2016, which drew mainstream attention to and backlash...
[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire, which she ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal...
What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate from the body. As...