Just as Barak Obama’s administration was taken by conservatives as prove of the end of racial discrimination, the possibility of Hilary Clinton becoming the next president of the world’s first economy demonstrated the futility of the feminist struggle. This late cop-out of the demands of equalitarianism can be seen as the natural continuation of the conservative backlash of the 1980s, both embraced and expanded by the present commander in chief. However, Donald Trump’s sexist rhetoric and demeanour, together with recent cases of sexual harassment in the media have attracted a renewed interest in feminism which lately had been lurking mostly in activist and intellectual circles. The US mass media craze for feminism could be just a passing fad but, even when the dust settles, these debates will still be a part of a much larger context of local and global feminisms that have taken on the struggle of the first two waves spurred at the turn of the twentieth century and in the 1960 and 70s. Specifically, for the third wave of feminism of the twenty-first century gender violence has (re)emerged as a central concern, so it is in this light that certain early works by Shakespeare have assumed a special relevance. This seminar takes contemporary debates on feminism as the starting point for the discussion of The Taming of the Shrew, the poem “The Rape of Lucrece”, their afterlives and their current significations.
