Early Modern Money Shots

[print edition page number: 189]

In The Color of Kink, Ariane Cruz writes of the tension between the so-called money shot and bareback sex, asking, “If the money shot depends on visual proof of pleasure in the projection of semen on the body and the practice of bareback sex is contingent upon ejaculate deposited inside the body, how can bareback porn reconcile this representational quandary — rendering visible what is invisible while remaining a kind of authentic ‘visual archive’ of bareback sex itelf?”^[1] Cruz is glossing and responding to Tim Dean’s analysis of “raw sex” in Unlimited Intimacy, where he writes that in bareback porn “non-normative sex comes up against the norms of representation.”^[2] As Cruz notes, Dean offers [190] several “solutions” to this “representational quandary” — bareback sex’s dependency on internal ejaculation and a cultural fixation on visibility — with solutions often involving the displacement of ejaculate and its storage for later consumption or the use of subtitles and verbal remarks to signal ejaculation.^[3] Dean’s final example of such a substitution is a scene of urination during the end credits of a film.^[4] His focus, and that of Cruz in her close reading of his work, is not just the pornographic but specifically pornographic cinema: both theorists follow the groundbreaking work of Linda Williams in their collective attention to the “maximum visibility” inherent to hard-core movies as opposed to other erotic representations.^[5] Dean’s slippage, however, between semen and urine demonstrates how easily hard core spills into other genres, with scenes of urination or the flaccid penis acceptable in mainstream cinema where the money shot is not.^[6] Dean’s emphasis on bareback porn as “constitut[ing] a mode of [191] thinking about bodily limits, about intimacy, about power, and of course, about sex” because of its very “problems of representation” certainly resonates outside of hard core.^[7] That is, these problems of fluidic representation are located as points of tension in other media as well, including, as is my focus here, the literary.

Quandaries

In the following chapter, I chart this “representational quandary” in early modern contexts with a renewed attention to the role of witnessing, to the erotics of an interior made hypervisible, and to the multiple locations and dislocations of pleasure in fluidic projection and exchange. I examine three representations of the female body adorned with a liquid that vacillates between aestheticized droplets and amorphous muck: Acrasia in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, followed by William Shakespeare’s depictions in the long poem Venus and Adonis of Venus first in pursuit of Adonis and later anticipating his death. The fluids in question — I discuss for the most part sweat with a closing rumination on Venus’s [192] tears — are produced by the women themselves; there is no overt sex organ cited in the poetry. I am not suggesting that these scenes are literally semenic, with early modern authors wanting their readers to interpret the liquids as such.^[8] Nor am I looking to allegorize sexual activity by bringing contemporary theories of pornography into contact with early modern poetry: I recognize the value of studies that emphasize the literality or, to quote Christien Garcia, the “mereness” of sex acts, with Garcia asking scholars “to consider seriously the impulse not to think about sex as more than itself.”^[9] Rather, I argue across this chapter that the fluidic spectacle on display in late sixteenth-century poetry generates a representational tension between the visual (droplets of pearly ornamentation) and the tactile (melting sweaty bodies). The poetry organizes [19] its language of fluidic projection and exchange — the formal staging of ejaculate — with a set of terms and focal points that align its pleasures with contemporary porn’s use of the money shot.

This chapter employs the term “ejaculate” to refer to a range of liquids produced by the body in a sexualized context. In doing so, I echo early modern usages of “ejaculate” to apply to all fluids, including but not exclusively semen, that are “eject[ed] from the body.”^[10] It is worth noting that contemporary scholarship’s analysis of the money shot has also expanded as porn grows more accessible and diverse, from Williams’s understanding of the money shot as definitively heteronormative to Dean’s analysis of the act in the context of sex between men at the height of the AIDS crisis to Cruz’s attention to Black female sexuality in performances that employ the Sybian and other “mechanized phallic devices” to stimulate ejaculation.^[11] Enduring debates around squirting — whether the liquid produced is urine or vaginal ejaculate — demonstrate how easily bodily fluids collapse into each other, not only in the humoral theory of the past but also today.^[12] Indeed, this indeterminacy is built into the appeal of fluidic projection and exchange. A camera lens’s close focus on the face, chest, or other body part — as with poetic presentation of the [194] liquid as stylized droplets — obfuscates, at least momentarily, both the source and the substance of the ejaculate. In early modern thought, John Donne illuminates a capacious interplay between fluids (sweat, semen, and menstrual blood) in his aptly titled poem “The Comparison,” which, like The Faerie Queene and Venus and Adonis, was likely written in the last decade of the sixteenth century.^[13] Donne’s speaker first compares “the sweat drops” on his “mistress’ breast” to “almighty balm” and “pearl carcanets,” before attacking his friend’s beloved for the “rank sweaty froth” on her “brow” that resembles, according to the poet, “the spèrm’tic issue of ripe menstr’ous boils.”^[14] The “breast” and “brow” are important loci in generating spectacle and indeed pleasure in visual media: Cruz’s definition of the “typical” money shot emphasizes the particularity of the site of ejaculate on “the face, mouth, buttocks, stomach, and/or breasts.”^[15] In “The Comparison,” the locations of “breast” and “brow” attach to Donne’s reference to “spermatic” — that is, “resembling sperm” — to produce a semenic substance that adorns both women, an early modern rendering of the contemporary sexual innuendo of the “pearl necklace.”^[16] These scenes of fluidic projection and exchange in late sixteenth-century poetry constitute sites of erotic pleasure that are largely disassociated from the specificity of the substance — my readings, not unlike Donne, perform an elision of sweat, semen, and tears — and detached from the acts that produce it, sexual or otherwise. [195]

My point in the above elision of fluids is that a lack of specificity is integral to many facets of erotic life, facets that not only include practices of kink that prioritize sensory overwhelm and/or disorientation but also the staging of the money shot itself. This is evident in Williams’s account of the money shot as “an obvious perversion — in the literal sense of the term, as a swerving away from more ‘direct’ forms of genital engagement — of the tactile sexual connection,” as well as in Dean’s description of the “multiple displaced money shot” that ritualizes the accumulation of ejaculate and “mak[es] apparent how sex involves persons who are not physically present — except as fragmentary, material traces.”^[17] As an example, Dean cites the “Devil’s Dick,” the “recipe” for which involves “collecting multiple loads of ejaculate in a single condom, freezing the contents, and then using as a dildo the super-sized cum popsicle that results.”^[18] Throughout this chapter, I attend to the “swerves” and “displacements” of early modern poetry — the “perversion” that makes the money shot such a rich area of exploration in conversations around kink — with the understanding that the act’s representation in contemporary hard-core cinema participates in, rather than pioneers, a long-standing tension in fluidic representation between visual appeal and sensory overwhelm.^[19] In doing so, I work to recuperate mislaid histories of erotic spaces, pleasures, and indeed fluids that reveal cracks in normative models of desire [196] and reciprocity, which so often focus on the genital and on exclusively penetrative sex.^[20]

Vocabularies

Consider the final reveal of Acrasia in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene. Guyon, the so-called Knight of Temperance and protagonist of the Book, travels across twelve cantos in search of the aforementioned enchantress. His objective, along with that of his companion in the quest (referred to textually as the Palmer), is to ensnare Acrasia and render her seductive powers ineffective. At long last, in the final canto, Guyon and the Palmer make their way into her lush and intoxicating habitat — the Bower of Bliss that will be destroyed by the Book’s end — and discover “the faire Witch” looming over her sleeping lover, Verdant.^[21] [197] Acrasia remains drowsily unaware of the intruders, who, in turn, gape at her. The text luxuriates in an aestheticized sweat that trickles down her body, highlighting her nudity and in fact magnifying her allure:

Her snowy brest was bare to ready spoyle

Of hungry eies, which n’ote therewith be fild,

And yet through languour of her late sweet toyle,

Few drops, more cleare then Nectar, forth distild,

That like pure Orient perles adowne it trild,

And her faire eyes sweet smyling in delight,

Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild

Fraile harts, yet quenched not; like starry light

Which sparckling on the silent waues, does seeme more bright.
(2.12.78)^[22]

Spenser is reworking Torquato Tasso here, transforming the Italian poet’s description of a generalized beautiful sweat (i bei sudor) in Jerusalem Delivered into a mode of ornamentation.^[23] Acrasia is first likened to stone [198] — her skin is described as “alablaster” in the preceding stanza (2.12.77) — but the “Few drops” that “trill” or flow down her body are not the gathered drops of condensation on a marblesque surface: the fluid is produced “through languour of her late sweet toyle,” excreted and “distild” (emphasis mine). The drops that decorate Acrasia’s “bare” chest at once construct an insistently exoticized white body — the “Orient perles,” sharing the language of Donne’s “pearl carcanets,” amplify the already over-determined whiteness of the enchantress’s “alablaster” skin and “snowy brest” — and shimmer “more cleare then Nectar.” These contrasting comparatives and shifting metaphorical resonances, from “Nectar” to “perles” to “silent waues,” together chart the impetuous course of desire as it moves from containment to overflow. The fluid streams down Acrasia’s body but also down the stanza, accumulating in the final line as no longer a “Few drops” but instead “silent” oceanic “waues.”

Spenser at no point uses the word “sweat” nor does he provide a locus of origin; the fluid merely emanates “forth.”^[24] Upon sustained engagement with the text — the density of the language and its refusal to clarify locate the reader too as voyeur in the necessary close reading of the stanza — the references to “toyle” and its resulting exhaustion signal the fluid as perspiration. But whatever forms of erotic labor produced the moisture remain outside the scope of the narrative. The only mode of [199] exchange in the above stanza is that of visual pleasure: Acrasia’s “sweet smyling” eyes flash with “delight” — in line with premodern accounts of vision, her eyes emit “fierie beames” that reflect off her damp breast — and spectators’ “Fraile harts” are “thrild” in response.^[25] The pleasures of observing a sweating body are overwhelmingly familiar in contemporary culture. Think, for example, of Britney Spears in the “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video; the slicked bodies of fitness magazines; or even a Gatorade commercial where tantalizing beads of moisture whet the thirst.^[26] These pleasures, however, are predominantly one-sided. Sweat does not explicitly signify the satisfaction of desire as does the expulsion of other bodily fluids. Yet in the Bower of Bliss, Acrasia’s sweat does just that. The substance is visual proof of the enchantress’s pleasure projected on her body, the liquid magnifying her “sweet smyling … delight” that is itself a residue from a similarly “sweet” labor now past.

Despite the stanza’s prioritization of the visual, there is something tantalizingly edible about the pronounced “sweetness” of the Bower. The language of “Nectar” extends beyond its insistent visual register — the poem underscores the liquid’s exceptional clarity as it is “more cleare then Nectar” — to incorporate the suggested taste of bodily fluids. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries define “nectar” as a rarefied beverage, that which is ingested with great pleasure: “excellent [200] wine” or, more frequently, “the drink of the gods.”^[27] Erotic poetry of the same period associates the delicacy with the kiss, where lovers taste “nectar” on each other’s lips. For example, Thomas Stanley writes in his mid-seventeenth-century poem “The Enjoyment” of his desire for his love object:

To cool my fervent Thirst, I sip
Delicious Nectar from her lip.^[28]

Later, an anonymous author similarly uses such language in a 1685 poetry collection, where the speaker describes ostensibly his lover’s mouth — referred to as a cavity, “the lovely odiferous Cell” — as “fill[ed]” with “delicious Nectar.”^[29] Even a didactic text, the 1740 A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid, which seems to operate simultaneously as an instructional to those persons new to sexual activity and as erotica for a larger audience, employs “Nectar” as a term to mediate its explicit content. The young maid in question, Octavia, details an encounter between herself and her new husband where she directly refers to her own ejaculate as “delicious Nectar”:

putting his Finger into my C–t, and stirring gently up and down, towards the upper Part of it, he made me spend so pleasantly, such a Quantity of the delicious Nectar, that it flew about his Hand, and all wetted him … I was struck with a mighty Confusion at my own Lust, [201] and blushing, and hiding my Face, I said, that if he felt any Moisture, it was that which he put into me, and not any that I had send out.^[30]

After the relative opacity of “nectar” in earlier writings, the direct approach of the above passage is refreshing (to draw on the language of thirst and liquidity throughout this chapter) in that there is little doubt as to what the speaker refers. This is not to say, however, that the dialogue retrospectively locates Acrasia’s “Nectar” as vaginal or, for that matter, semenic. I am invested in maintaining the Spenserian refusal to name any particular fluid, as I read the stanza’s lack of specificity as integral to its understanding of pleasure. Instead, I wish to emphasize that, for one, “nectar” is actively employed in a vocabulary of sexualized fluids — a vocabulary with a long history, vacillating degrees of particularity, and a fixation on ingestion. Secondly, I read the choreographed disorientation of the above passage as reminiscent of the mood in the Bower. Octavia’s own “Confusion” at her body’s arousal prompts her to trouble the fluid’s source of origin altogether. Despite the fact it is evident that she, like Acrasia, is the source of the “Moisture,” Octavia attempts to ascribe its production to her husband (“that which he put into me”), as opposed to that which she herself expelled (“not any I had send out”). In the Bower of Bliss, the liquid’s stylized presentation — replete with metaphorical language such as “Nectar” — similarly blurs distinctions between Acrasia’s own excretions and those that might be deposited by others. “Hungry eies” lurk in potentia as active participants in this scene of fluidic display.

The language’s movement from “more cleare then Nectar” to “pure Orient perles” generates its own representational tension not only in the confusion of the liquid’s source of origin but also in the contrasting [201] descriptive features that probe the bounds of metaphor. How can the substance be both exceptionally “cleare” and pearly white? What does it mean for Acrasia to be at once an emblem of “pure” whiteness and associated with materials of the “Orient”? If, as Amber Jamilla Musser argues, “liquidity … is something that emanates from flesh and is therefore inseparable from the processes of racialization,” the shifting and often contradictory resonances of the stanza’s language correspond with and indeed mobilize the construction of Acrasia’s indeterminate yet exoticized racial identity in the Bower.^[31] The ornamentation of the pearl is demonstrative of Kim F. Hall’s foundational work on the lyric and particularly Petrarchan emphasis on whiteness as constitutive of early modern beauty — the “pure” pearl reaffirms the fairness of the “faire Witch” — whereas the attachment of “Orient” destabilizes the normativity of said whiteness.^[32] As Arthur L. Little Jr. observes in the context of Tamora in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the exceptionalism of whiteness “isn’t always … a case of who has presumably the whitest skin,” and “hyperwhiteness,” especially when it corresponds with “hypersexuality,” [203] can itself be read as a perversion of the norm.^[33] Acrasia’s “Orient perles” make paradoxical claims to identity and also to race as a category. The descriptor at once insists on a fiction of racial essentialism so totalizing that even the pores produce a white fluid, while simultaneously parodying the very designation of “alablaster” skin: sweat is not really white but, of course, neither is flesh.^[34]

The stanza ends with a dazzling, overwhelming brightness. Acrasia’s “fair eyes” reflect off her glistening body

like starry light

Which sparckling on the silent waues does seem more bright.
(2.12.78)

This “sparckling” reinforces the pearlescence of the liquid, underscoring the stanza’s use of the term “Orient” to signal qualities that are, as Miriam Jacobson notes, both “lustrous and white.”^[35] The luster that “seem[s]” to radiate from the enchantress’s body is resonant with Anne Anlin Cheng’s reading of “shine” in the context of “orientalized femininity.”^[36] [204] In her analysis of Anna May Wong’s performance in the 1929 film Piccadilly — which features a scene in which Wong dons “an ornamental costume of glittering gold” and dances for an audience — Cheng identifies the refractive shine as functioning not only as a mode of allurement but also as “armor,” overwhelming the spectator with its glare.^[37] Through this staging, Cheng continues, “the ‘Oriental woman’ as objet d’art has been derealized. Shine offers less a description or quality of light than an active mode of relationality: a dynamic medium through which the organic and inorganic fuse, and through which the visual spills into the sensorial.”^[38] Cheng herself recognizes a long prehistory to her reading of the twentieth-century silent film as she acknowledges that “woman as ornament is an old trope” and later describes Wong’s performance as a “revision” of Botticelli’s fifteenth-century Birth of Venus.^[39] In Spenser, too, the “starry light” and “sparckling” liquidity of the passage facilitate that which shine “offers” Cheng: Acrasia’s own shine, both “thril[ling]” and self-protective in its capacity to arrest the spectator, functions as “an active mode of relationality” that brings the enchantress into a dynamic visual interplay with the attendant “Fraile harts” of the Bower.^[40] When, to quote Cheng, “the visual spills into the sensorial,” it navigates a representational tension not unlike that of Dean and Cruz. In fact, Cheng identifies “the exhilarating eruption of the visual into other realms” as precisely that which produces “the intense visual pleasure” of the film.^[41] [205]

Cheng’s language of “eruption” joins with “spills” to suggest just how climactic sensorial displacement can be. The pleasures of the Bower, pleasures organized around the visual, are generated in this stanza by the “eruptive” movement of the liquid down Acrasia’s body (“Nectar” to “perles” to “sparckling …  waues”), an erotic fluidity that is inextricable, as Cruz’s work unpacks in the contemporary, from the processes of racialization. An attention to the stylized representation of fluids in transtemporal and transmedial contexts thus asks readers to rethink how visibility functions in both poetic practice and hard-core cinema. In the following section, I suggest that early modern poetry offers an immediacy in this transition from visual splendor to immersive tactility that videography and particularly hard-core cinema is forever approximating yet unable to fully achieve.

Boundaries

Shakespeare seems to recognize in Spenser the erotic potential of perspiration. He reworks the image of a beautiful woman made more desirable by her sweat in Venus and Adonis, the 1593 long poem closely following the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene.^[42] In the epyllion, Shakespeare introduces touch to what in Spenser is a visual phenomenon. Venus and Adonis catalogs a proliferation of “solutions” to the “representational quandary” that I have been analyzing throughout this chapter. In the poem, the first interaction between the titular pair is when the goddess reaches out and grabs Adonis by his moist hand:

she seizeth on his sweating palm,

The precedent of pith and livelihood,
And trembling in her passion, calls it balm, [206]
Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good.
(25–28)^[43]

The boy’s wetness is cited as evidence of his fleshy vitality, with sweat demonstrating not only his “livelihood” — which is to say, liveliness — but also his “pith.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers the metaphoric definition of “pith” as the “spirit or essence” of a being, but here, coupled with the reference to “sweating,” the word also invokes its primary, material definition: the “soft internal tissue” of Adonis that is turned inside out by the end of the poem.^[44] Venus’s reaction to the boy’s perspiration is peculiar.^[45] She labels it a “balm” that can “do a goddess good,” despite the fact that, as an immortal being, she has no need for curatives nor somatic improvement. Venus fails to specify just what the fluid does, and the verb’s sexual implications echo.^[46] Her interpretation of Adonis’s moist [207] hand positions the substance as a contradictory signifier: rarefied and precious (“sovereign salve”) but also markedly human (“earthly”).

Later in the poem, Venus employs the boy’s sweat quite literally as “precedent,” “an example to be followed or copied,” when she again attempts to seduce the uninterested Adonis.^[47] She calls upon the allures of her own sweaty touch, announcing,

My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning;
My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt,
Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt.
(143–55)

Just as Adonis’s “sweating palm” evidences his “pith,” Venus’s “moist hand” makes sensible her own insides, her “marrow burning.” She modifies “marrow” — an exact synonym for “pith” — with “burning,” her desire permeating all inner recesses and bubbling to the surface, promising a sweat suggestive of more than just vitality.^[48]

Shakespeare’s emphasis on “melt[ing]” as facilitated by Venus’s “smooth moist hand” experiments with the ornamental function of sweat in the Bower and provides an alternative erotic representation of the same fluid. The goddess promises a dissolution of boundaries that “would” occur if Adonis would deem to grasp her hand in his, but this promise is cautioned with the counterfactual use of the subjunctive and the acknowledgment that their bodies would only “seem to melt” in joining. Sweaty palms generate, in Venus’s language, the sensory experience [208] of melting into another body that is in distinction from a literal dissolution of boundaries. It is easy to make comparisons with the money shot as theorized by contemporary scholars and the “Nectar” of Acrasia, the “Waues” she produces, and the “languour” that suffuses the Bower.^[49] But the mechanisms that make visible the seemingness of “melting” in sexual activity are also key to the displaced money shot. In his discussion of the “Devil’s Dick” — this denotes, as referenced earlier in the chapter, a frozen condom filled with the semen of multiple men to be used as a self-lubricating dildo — Dean writes of a performer, Dylan, who is penetrated with such an object, “As seventy-three loads of ejaculate melt into his orifices and over every surface, it becomes impossible to tell whose semen is inside him and whose is outside; he is pervaded by the erotic traces of others.”^[50] This confused pervasiveness is that which Venus promises in her language of “dissolve” and “melt,” with “seem” communicating the pleasures of an entanglement in which it is “impossible to tell” the internal from the external. Clasped moist hands make legible to the reader the fluidic exchange of sexual activity that is otherwise hidden, interior. In even the most explicit forms of pornography, fluidic exchange, as opposed to the projection of fluid, is almost always kept from sight, deposited rather than external.

If the ecstatic melting of clasped sweaty hands offers a “solution,” to paraphrase Dean, to representing the mechanics of internal ejaculation, this poetic practice nevertheless does not necessarily generate the “maximum visibility” that Williams and Dean identify as the appeal of the money shot. Williams describes the money shot as entailing a “shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of … orgasm,” whereas [209] Dean explores the temporary visibility of a “compromise shot” where “the guy pulls out immediately before cumming, so that the camera can record his climax, but then quickly reinserts his penis to finish ejaculating inside.”^[51] A successive shifting from the tactile to the visual (or vice versa) has largely been absent from this chapter: the representation of Acrasia is that of visual pleasure, which is markedly distinct from the tactility of sweaty hands in Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare’s poem, however, does ultimately provide such a shift between registers, right as Adonis’s death comes into focus. The goddess fears, correctly, that her love object has died, but she stirs herself to hope that a huntsman’s yell is that of the boy. In her frenzied state, Venus falters in her weeping, and Shakespeare describes her tears with a language that is now familiar to a reader of this chapter:

The stanza begins with an emphasis on the visual — the “pearls” and “orient drop” recall the liquid that adorns Acrasia in the Bower — only to shift into the tactile as the liquid “melts” on her cheek and then splatters onto the face of another. Shakespeare reverses the movement of Acrasia’s sweat from “Nectar” to “perles,” with Venus’s flushed cheek facilitating a transition from “pearls” to further liquidity. This is a near literalization of what contemporary readers would label a money shot: the copious fluid produced by Venus is projected in excess onto the visage of another, [210] “wash[ing] the foul face of the sluttish ground.”^[52] Although the language of “foul” and “sluttish” revels in degradation — even if just to emphasize the dirt of the earth’s floor — there is simultaneously the indication of pleasure, ecstasy.^[53] The feminized ground responds not with suffering (she merely “seemeth drowned”) but instead with a “drunken[ness]” suggestive of revelry or delight. The last line in fact itself offers a gloss of hard core where the seeming too-muchness of physical exploits, that is, of “taking it” or being overwhelmed in some capacity, is identified in the poem as both illusory (“seemeth” recalling Venus’s promise of her hand that would “seem to melt”) and the potential source of pleasure.^[54]

Conclusion

Whose pleasure is it? The problems of fluidic representation, from early modern poetry to contemporary hard-core movies, seem to consistently pose this question.^[55] It is significant that although Venus in the above [211] stanza weeps, her fluidic expulsion slows, “turn[ing]” its “tide” in “joy[ful]” response to the belief that Adonis is still alive (977). There is an aura of mutual delight here that is wholly absent from the goddess’s predatory interactions with Adonis himself. Venus’s tears are perhaps the most extreme, which is to say, the most overtly kinky representation of fluidic projection discussed in this chapter. The complex power play in the interspecific mixing of divinity with the personified earth; the affective cacophony of the goddess’s happy tears, the weighing doom of the narrative, and the “scorning” cheek; and finally, the dizzying pathways of the liquid as it falls to the ground all position the stanza as transgressive or at the very least surprising. How to code the money shot more generally is a real question.^[56] The act has become a commonplace in pornography across genres, that without which the movie cannot be fully seen to come to a satisfactory close, and thus is normative in porn if not in practice. My emphasis here is not so much whether scenes of fluidic projection and exchange were considered normative (or nonnormative) in early modern thought but rather how the problems of fluidic representation function to suggest not only climax — both in terms of narrative structure and as a physiological response — but also a displacement [212] of pleasure and control, eliding distinctions between characters who involuntarily produce the fluid and those who come into contact with it.^[57] These fluids are the “erotic traces of others” in their lingering presence, dazzling ornamentation, and capacity for dissolution: stylized representations of fluidic projection and exchange glimmer with potential, a tantalizing shattering of somatic boundaries promised yet restrained, “prisoned … like pearls in glass.”

I am grateful to Joseph Gamble and Gillian Knoll for their organization of the Shakespeare Association of America 2021 seminar “The Kinky Renaissance” and for their important suggestions and impeccable coordination in editing this collection. During the seminar, I received incisive feedback from participants, and I owe particular thanks to Stephen Spiess and Lisa Robinson, whose comments shaped not only the direction of this chapter but also my work more broadly. I also wish to thank Joshua Barsczewski, Ryan Campagna, Timothy Harrison, Sarah Kunjummen, Sarah-Gray Lesley, Jeffrey Masten, and Brandon Truett, who read this paper in various drafts and provided generous and transformative responses. Finally, Mario DiGangi as shepherd for ACMRS Press provided nuanced and detailed feedback that sharpened this chapter and its arguments; I am very grateful.