Undoing Whoredom

Abstract The epilogues argues that the full potential of ‘undoing whoredom’ lies not simply in harnessing that category’s capacity to undo itself but to reveal and animate the undoing of other conceptual categories and systems of meaning-making in early modern England. Through a focused reading of John Taylor’s A Common Whore (1622), the Epilogue demonstrates how an epistemology of the early modern whore is also and concurrently an epistemology of the language(s) and textualities through which it is constructed and materialized. In so doing, it argues that what is ultimately is at stake in the making of English whoredom is not simply a reckoning with the instabilities that attend and animate a particular socio-sexual category, or an emergent lexicographic project, or strategies of gendered embodiment, or acts of conversion, or interpretive logics of sex, or theories of sexual time, or depictions of English sexual history and memory on the London stage, but with the making of what passes for knowledge itself, as well as the unique capacities of literary and dramatic texts to disclose this epistemological work, the knowledge relations that it incorporates, and the material processes through which it is puzzled out.