To add to the pile, felt that Quilligan’s argument puts major emphasis on female writers (women who produce their own signs) and didn’t fully acknowledge how this emphasis has its limits. On page 19, Quilligan writes on Sedgwick:

Because she uses only the male-oriented understanding of the “traffic in women:’ Eve Sedgwick’s understanding of the homosocial space in which Shakespeare’s sonnets circulated among men in the early modern period makes female agency in that genre impossible to articulate. Lorna Hutson, for example, examines the difficulties facing the Renaissance poet Aemila Lanyer, who attempted to use sonnet discourse to female patrons.

The problem I see here is that Aemilia Lanyer does not have a body of work anywhere as close to as large as Shakespeare’s; that no female Renaissance writer has a body of work that compares to that of the male Renaissance writers; that eventually, a scholar is going to run out of works written by women fast. Quilligan paints it as a 1:1 ” Segdwick uses Shakespeare and Hutson uses Lanyer.” But there just are not that many Aemelia Lanyers. This isn’t to say that I think this is an unfair critique of Segdwick — we should make as much use of the works written by women as we can, especially when formulating theories that are about the subjugation of women. But perhaps Quilligan needed to acknowledge that, at some point, there is a scholarly necessity to read women through men, as unfortunate as it may be.