Per un’ermeneutica queer del testo letterario

Almost thirty years after Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemol- ogy of the Closet, queer studies are now recognized as a vital and productive component of the humanities and social sciences. A number of the chief proponents of queer studies (from Sedgwick to Edelman) were trained as literary scholars, and their work often deals with the analysis of literary texts; however, to this day there has been no discussion of what a queer hermeneutics of literary texts might look like. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to offer a systematic presentation of a theoretical model of a possible queer hermeneutics of literary texts; second, to test out this method on a canonical literary text, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.