“Race / Queer / Queens” — A Book Edited by Mira ‘Assaf and Urvashi Chakravarty on Early Modern Gender, Race, and Power
The book examines early modern queenship through critical race studies and queer theory.
In September 2026, American academic publisher ACMRS Press (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press), distributed by the University of Chicago Press, published the scholarly collection Race / Queer / Queens in English. The volume was edited by early modern scholars Mira ‘Assaf (Mira Assaf Kafantaris) and Urvashi Chakravarty.
Mira ‘Assaf is an associate professor of English and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University in Indianapolis, specializing in premodern critical race studies, Shakespearean drama, and early modern queenship. Urvashi Chakravarty teaches English at the University of Toronto, focusing on early modern literature, the histories of slavery and domestic service, and race-making in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; her monograph Fictions of Consent explored ideologies of voluntary servitude and coerced labor. Together, they have brought together specialists in literary studies, history, and gender studies to offer a new intersectional reading of monarchy and early modern court culture.
At the heart of the collection lies the dual status of early modern queens. On the one hand, they embodied the summit of monarchical power, but on the other, they were subjects of gendered disenfranchisement and instruments of dynastic reproductive politics. The book’s title draws on the historical English homophonic play between queen (the monarch) and quean (a derogatory term for an unchaste, disorderly, or socially stigmatized woman), echoing modern queer resonances as well. The contributors show how the queen’s body, her marriage, pregnancy, foreign lineage, and public performance became crossroads where gender norms, racial formation, religion, and ideas of nationhood intersected.
Methodologically, the volume bridges premodern critical race studies (PCRS), queer theory, and trans studies. Its chapters engage a wide array of early modern literary and historical sources, including drama by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, poetry by Lady Hester Pulter, and prose by Lucy Hutchinson. The essays address diverse facets of queerness and race: the construction of whiteness and queer pregnancy in Jonson’s court masques, the racialized and queer performance of boy actors in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, anxieties surrounding foreign royal marriages and racial reprobation, and trans readings of sovereign authority and the “Bisley Boy” legend surrounding Elizabeth I.
The collection demonstrates that categories of race, sexuality, and gender in the early modern era did not operate in isolation, but were forged through institutions of governance and dynastic mechanisms. By approaching royal courts as ideological laboratories, the authors open vital new pathways for understanding how patriarchal monarchy produced normativity and social marginalization.
