Scholarship and Biography
Thomas A. King (Ph.D. Northwestern University) is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University. With research and teaching interests in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature, drama and performance studies, and queer studies, King's courses in literature, culture, and theory range from Violence and the Body in Early Modern Drama, to Enlightenment of the Flesh: Reading and Writing Sex in the Eighteenth Century, The Orlando Project, and Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall.
King is author of The Gendering of Men 1660-1750, vol. 1: The English Phallus (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) and The Gendering of Men 1660-1750, vol. 2: Queer Articulations (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). In Volume One, King has argued that gendered and sexual subjectivities emerged in the early modern period as vehicles of resistance to a traditional economy of corporeal subjection, such that (cisgender) men's love for (cisgender) women (as distinct from their patriarchal mastery over and erotic subordination of women, children, and male servants, slaves, apprentices, and other dependents) became a vehicle for the articulation of a new social ethics of privacy. Men's struggles to claim an emergent and privatized masculinity against a residually public pederasty (the corporeal subjection of lower-ranked to higher-ranked persons, enacted through and/or figured as an erotics of pleasure and pain) produced gender and sexuality as the corporeal scene of contestation over the membership of the modern liberal public sphere. Queer Articulations, the second volume of The Gendering of Men, offers a performance-centered analysis of theatricality, effeminacy, and publicity as vehicles of queer agency. Queer Articulations investigates theatricality and sodomy as performance practices foreclosed in the formation of gendered privacy and consequently available for resistant uses by male-designated persons who have been positioned, or who have located themselves, outside the universalized public sphere of citizen-subjects. Inviting a performance-centered, interdisciplinary approach to queer/male identities, Queer Articulations develops a model of queerness as processual activity, situated in time and place but irreducible to the individual subject's identifications, desires, and motivations.
King is a faculty member of four interdisciplinary programs at Brandeis: Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST), Medieval and Renaissance Studies (MERS), Sexuality and Queer Studies (SQS), and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS).
King was a founding member of The Artists' Theater of Boston (Boston, MA), for which he has directed Caryl Churchill's _Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?_, co-directed William Shakespeare's _Much Ado about Nothing_, and worked as sound designer, props designer, and dramaturg.