ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the discontinuous history of the beard elaborates the continuous history of fetish. It reviews the early modern beard in all its considerable variety in order to demonstrate how fetish negotiates among competitive and collusive ideologemes, materializing value in multiple registers in order to accommodate changes in the cultural meta-narrative. On the early modern English stage particularly given theatre's affinities with guild structure in an economy of pederasty the fantasy of androgenesis subtends the drama as it does the culture. Beards are also still regulated in strict hierarchical organizations such as police and military, while religious regulation of the beard is still widely observed. Fetish continues to supply authors desire for material validation of their own pleasant fictions about the detectability, categorical fixity, and legibility of sex, gender, sexuality, and so forth, with naturalized parts, qualities, and practices.
