Floating Borders: (Dis)-locating otherness in the female body and the question of miscegenation in Titus Andronicus

Within the recent debates in Postcolonial and Gender Studies, Titus Andronicus has been re-considered as one of t he first Shakespearean plays in which the dramatist deals with the question of race and the fear of ancient taboos concerning contamination and miscegenation. In this Roman play anxiety about the permeability of race is not only depicted by the violent assimilation and integration of the so-called barbarians within the Roman culture and vice-versa, but also by the identification of the barbarous and the primitive/savage with the female. Within this prespective, my analysis will investigate the savage female body of Tamora as a complex site of debatable questions, as the place where Shakespeare literally locates the encounter between different races: the extremely white Gothes with the Romans, who are supposed to inhabit the centre of the empire and the oikumene, and the extremely white Goths and the Romans with the blacks, who lived on the opposite border of the Roman empire, the extreme and partly penetreted South. Tamora's body, which is incorporated in Rome through her marriage with the Roman emperor Saturninus, becomes a site of performed contradictions, the female body being itself a liminal space where the Renaissance culture of display could project ancient desire and taboos, but also dislocate the result of subversive unions, since to the Romans the queen of the Goths herself represented and embodied otherness.