Gothic drama deals obsessively with the spectacle of pale, broken and effectively castrated masculinity. The scopic epistemology of gothic drama insists that the emaciated male form be fetishized as the lost paternal origin of the dramatic action and the source of psychological dread. These plays embrace ‘unnatural absurdity’ as a way of breaking through the complacency of bourgeois ideology and challenging sexual normativity with the spectacle of sexual excess. The resulting ‘sensationalism’ begins to suggest a revolution in the coding and decoding of sexual identities, just at the moment when such identities are being produced for the purposes of wholesale cultural labelling, as well as to articulate theatricalized resistance to the normative dictates that those identities presuppose.