Foster 2000

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

"The gendered bodies in the work of Isabella Whitney enact the contradictory intentions of a nexus of discourses anchored in rules of conduct of the historical period, the politics of gender, and the ambivalence of female authorship." (34)

"Isabella Whitney rpesents the male body on display, subjct to the female gaze of authority." (34)

"In the case of the Renaissance female writer, the body is not a given in terms of ownerships, nor is language a given. The female writer must take language, take her body and use whatever rhetorical skill an talent she has to rework the male Word in a female tradition. She must reclaim the female body, which is confiscated from her ontologically from a tradition of misogynist debate and a misogynist physical world." (39)

"Whitney is important as an example of an early feminist reformer who understood the political implications of the female underclass." (43)

"Isabella Whitney's role as social arbiter or moralist should be connected to that of the woman prophet." (43)

"Intersecting in Whitney's every utterance is the web of a feminist heteroglossia." (45)