At Will: The Queer Possibility of Jen Bervin's Nets

Exploring Jen Bervin's 2004 revision of the Shakespearean sonnets, this essay situates her project Nets within a visual and verbal tradition of erasure art past and contemporary and underscores her work's queer potential. Through Bervin's creative-critical intervention, Nets reorients the spatio-temporal boundaries of the Bard's infamous sequence, unsettling its most entrenched assumptions of subjectivity and form. Her erasure not only unearths disparate meanings in but imagines alternative possibilities for Shakespeare's sonnets, cultivating new pleasures and beauties therein. Doing so, Nets begins to reveal how erasure can function as a powerful poetic mode for those whose subjectivities and voices have long been excluded from official literary and cultural histories: how erasure becomes a bold act of will.