Making and Unmaking Whoredom

Abstract Where Chapter 3 argues that the animating tension between sexual narrativity and sexual time enables the development of new methods for reading early modern whore plots, Chapter 4 demonstrates what this looks like by analysing Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore (1604). Focusing the title character’s efforts to ‘turn chaste’, the chapter argues for a new understanding of the play as an active dramatization of the problems of knowing (honest) whoredom, the narrative and corporeal strategies through which such problems are mediated, and the manifold affects to which they give rise. Of particular importance here is the ‘chastising process’: a mode of sexual and gendered becoming whose performative requirements can be profitably leveraged to illuminate contemporary ideological structures of sex, gender, race, religion, and their complex intersections.