Taking eroticism on the English Renaissance Stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, these essays examine the nature of sexual definition and desire in early modern culture. Recent studies of Renaissance sexuality have focused on the subversive potential of gender reversal: Erotic Politics widens the arena of debate to study the structure and cultural definition of erotic desire. The authors view the stage as a primary site for the display of eroticism and use it to decipher what may be radically different cultural codes and expectations: the Renaissance stage is seen as a decoder for erotic experience, which is used both to reinforce and subvert expected sexual behaviour. Any examination of Renaissance eroticism must acknowledge the profound shift in sexual sensibility which took place after the seventeenth century, a shift which introduced concepts of sexual dimorphism and homosexuality' as a category. Thus, for example, several essays in Erotic Politics view the theatrical convention of cross-dressing or transvestism, as a contribution to a distinctly erotic dynamics. Contributors argue that such a dynamics served to deconstruct gender itself, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. This volume also addresses a crucial theoretical problem in postmodern cultural criticism: how can subjective phenomena, such as Renaissance erotic experience, be examined without recourse to psychoanalytic theory? In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up a new and distinctive perspective in the cultural debate.