Juggling the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender

Feminist literary scholars working in the field of Renaissance culture and trained mostly in US and Canadian universities have until recently defined their analytic focus more often with reference to problems of gender and class than with reference to race. ¹ With some notable exceptions such as Karen Newman's recent essay on Othello, Laura Brown's study of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Ania Loomba's Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, and the essays in the present volume, I know of little recent work by feminist students of early modern literature which directly attempts to theorize the relation between either historical or contemporary critical concepts of gender, race, and class. ² Without claiming to untangle the various knots signaled by the conjunction of these terms in my title, I do want to reflect briefly on some of the questions that conjunction raises for feminist critical thinking now, before turning to Aphra Behn.