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Madhavi Menon's Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (2008) was an important contribution to the queering of Shakespeare Studies. Building on that earlier work, Menon describes Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism as an effort "to rethink the line of predictability that gets drawn from the body to identity, and from desire to the self " (1). She demonstrates the perilous limits of identity politics within theater and other art forms. Even though Menon is here less focused on Shakespeare, her application of indifference theory suggests a way of moving beyond fixed readings that will be just as generative of new insights as her earlier work has been. Her approach here is, she writes, "attuned to a universality of difference in which specific differences cannot be used as the basis for stable signification" (14). Menon's project crosses geographical and disciplinary borders in order to enact a refreshing experience of queerness and indifference applied to a variety of identity experiences including those in Shakespeare, the subject of one of her four chapters.
Menon opens with an anecdote about her conversation with a customs official in which she identifies herself as an English professor from India: "When I said 'English literature,' his eyes lit up-it turned that he had studied English at university. He then asked if I specialized in authors like V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie" (1). She develops this anecdote into a series of questions: what does it mean to stand against the defined notions of identity and expectation that our bodies and lives impose upon us? How do moments like this enact indifference to the world's expectations and thereby experience a style of performative queerness divorced from sexual identities? Given the changes to border controls in the wake of recent political events in the US and UK, Menon's book seems even more timely and necessary now.
Shakespeare sits interestingly against this backdrop of...