Chaste Value by Katherine Gillen, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity - itself a quasi-commodity - to interrogate the relationship betweenpersonal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within earlyarticulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange. | Chaste Value by Katherine Gillen, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters