Ari Friedlander is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature: Desire, Status and Biopolitics, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. For JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, he co-edited and wrote the introduction to a special issue called “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire.” Other publications on sexuality, gender, class, and disability, have appeared or are forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature, The Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Embodiment, and Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). His research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the Volkswagen Stiftung.

He is currently at work on a second book, entitled Inventing Impotence: Disability, Sex, and Labor in Early Modern England, which uses the early modern legal category of impotence, the statutory standard that qualified one for parish poor relief, to reevaluate contemporary accounts of the evolution of disabled identity. The project makes two related claims: First, that a strong legal and political category of disabled identity began earlier than generally acknowledged, based in the Elizabethan poor laws and their cultural reception. Second, I argue that this notion of classed disability is intimately tied to the history of sexuality, as the poor were disciplined to perform sexual and economic potency. The project contends that disabled identity was a key part of the development of the multi-faceted modern political subjectivity: the invention of self-disciplined citizens that desire the kind of work, bodies, and political and economic outcomes amenable to the burgeoning modern state. In chapters on early modern legal anthologies, popular ballads, Shakespeare’s King Lear and second tetralogy, colonial literature and Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, and Milton’s poetry, impotence provides fuel to imagine and promote structures of desire and identity in depictions of socioeconomic difference, nationalism, religious devotion, and colonialism.