“Killed a Fly”: Gender, Blackness, and the Failure of Empathy in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

This paper investigates how the politics of gender and race intersect with questions of empathy and interpretation in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus through a close reading of critical moments in the play. I bring the text in conversation with Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler's contrasting theorizations of the position of the female body in phallogocentric discourse by delineating how Lavinia's raped and mutilated body is read, interpreted, instrumentalized, and appropriated by the masculine gaze under the guise of empathy. I proceed to argue that the hegemonic subsumption of Lavinia's violated body is inseparable from racial tensions and attempted interpretations of blackness in the play. The paper engages contemporary scholarship on race in Early Modern literary texts to demonstrate how Aaron in Titus Andronicus navigates and subverts racializing discourses, exposing the mutually constitutive anxieties that structure the black/white and animal/human boundaries in the perpetually unfinished project of Renaissance humanism. In conclusion, I contend that the survival of two mixed-raced children at the end of the play posits blackness as dynamic, persistent, and fluid, dismantling the dominant system's endeavors to construct and manage race.