Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays addresses a conspicuous absence in queer readings of Shakespeare’s work: the pregnant body. Early modern scholars who explore homoerotic desire have attended to queer attractions, cohabitations, and alliances in Shakespeare’s plays. To date, however, scholars interested in LGBTQ+ lives tend to read representations of pregnancy in early modern literature as commensurate with heterosexual sex, desire, and partnership. And while feminist scholars have illuminated Shakespeare’s images of pregnancy in innovative ways, these readings usually conflate pregnancy with maternity and rarely address the relationship between pregnancy and lesbian-like intimacies and communities. 

The project’s most distinctive contribution to Shakespeare studies is that it dismantles the heteronormative frameworks through which pregnancy continues to be read, challenging the assumptions that only straight women get pregnant; that every pregnancy ends in the birth of a healthy, legitimate child; and that pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form. These frameworks dull the transgressive force of pregnancy in Shakespeare’s work and the expansive ways in which early moderns thought about the pregnant body. In addition, these frameworks contribute to the erasure of so many lived experiences of pregnancy in our current, cultural imagination—lesbian and bisexual women’s and trans and nonbinary people’s respective experiences of pregnancy, in particular, as well as the many pregnant people that do not end up as parents. In short, the concept of “queer pregnancy” not only reorients scholars to pregnancy in Shakespeare’s plays and beyond; it outlines how high the stakes are for pregnant people who continue to be read and treated through perspectives that do not take queer bodies and identities into account. Through queer methodologies, as well as an explication of my own archival research into early modern gynecological texts, receipt books, botanicals, conduct books, and documents such as letters, diaries, and broadside ballads, Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays offers new possibilities for how Shakespeare might have encountered and understood pregnancy.