Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

Chapter 3 engages with literary critics who position their projects against disciplinary history, Chapter 4 offers my own proposal for “how to do” the history of sexuality at the intersection of these disciplines by focusing on the particular problems of lesbian history. Together these chapters suggest ways to balance historical sameness and difference, continuism and alterity, queer theory and the history of sexuality, and they bring clarity to the principles of selection by which one idea, figure, or trope is made to correspond to another.

      Part II, “Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts,” builds on Part I’s historiographic inquiries, while also querying what it means to assert historical knowledge. Postulating that the scrutiny of sex acts enables special access to the obscured substrate of sexual historiography, I comprehensively survey the state of our knowledge about early modern sexual practices and offer a framework for how to productively work the constitutive contradictions first adduced in the scholarship of Bray. If Part I focuses on sex as represented in history, Part II begins to make a case for construing sex not only as the effect of historical processes or as a precise set of practices, but as an agent of history—that is, an agent in historical processes of knowledge production. But in order to apprehend this agency, we need to consider whether what “presents” as a historiographic problem is in fact an epistemological one. To consider this issue by means of specific examples, Part II focuses on what we still do not know about early modern sex, asking what this “lack” might tell us. It closely reads early modern language and texts and scrutinizes literary and historical scholarship, attending in particular to the role of presumptive knowledge in the making of sexual knowledge. Advocating the import of what we don’t know as well as what we can’t know, Part II explores the meanings of sexual acts, sexual language, sexual publics, and sex education both in the early modern period and today. In addition, by modeling cross-gender identification as a critical practice on behalf of women, and by managing the gap between treatments of sex as representation and sex as material practice, Part II puts into critical practice some of the methods introduced in Part I.

      Part III, “The Stakes of Gender,” pairs two chapters that might seem to have nothing to do with one another, insofar as one is about the relationship between male homoerotic and heteroerotic desire in an early modern sonnet sequence and the other is about lesbianism in contemporary critical discourse. This counterintuitive pairing, however, allows me to capitalize on the methodological payoff of the previous sections, bringing into explicit theorization the diacritical relationships between gender and sexuality, and both to history. These chapters build methodologically on Annamarie Jagose’s proposition in Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence that sexuality “is culturally produced as a sequential fiction.”¹²⁵ Viewed from the perspective of sequence, all sexual identifications are “always secondary, always back formations, always belated.”¹²⁶ This belatedness is projected specifically onto the representation of lesbianism, which typically is viewed as inconsequential and imitative, thereby masking a “disavowal of precisely that derivativeness which … is the heart of sexuality itself.”¹²⁷ Whereas Jagose’s consideration of sequence hinges its critique of the terms of lesbian visibility on the precedential ordering of first and second, origin and derivation, I have repurposed her deconstructive analytic. Splitting the terms of her analysis apart, Chapter 8 focuses on the import of sequence in Shakespeare’s sonnets, while Chapter 9 focuses on the secondariness of lesbianism in current critical dispensations. My reading of the difficulties involved in diacritically reading Shakespeare’s sonnets no less than “the sign of the lesbian” demonstrates that both, in fact, function as exquisite metonymies of the problem of sexual opacity to which this book is dedicated.

      “Sex Ed; or, Teach Me Tonight” concludes the book by meditating on the opacity of sexual knowledge in the current moment. An extempore rejoinder at a sexuality studies conference provides an occasion to consider the impossible pedagogical imperatives involved in queer studies as well as in a more capaciously conceived “sex education.” While collating and distilling the argumentative energies of the preceding chapters, this chapter ties the analysis of history to the larger stakes—of pedagogy, ethics, and futurity—that motivate the book as a whole. It returns us to the intellectual, historiographic, and pedagogical disposition that would recognize in what we don’t know, as well as what we can’t know, not only the partiality of our methods and a spur to future inquiry but an intractability that has been constitutive of the history of sex and that continues to inform our relations to that history and to each other.

      By attempting to think sex with the early moderns, this book aims to show that the obstacles we face in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality and that both impediments can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography, pedagogy, and ethics. It is not just that the truth of sex is not fully attainable or representable in words or images, as the contingencies of sexual signification manifest. Nor is it just that sexuality is socially constructed or a product of manifold historical processes. From the second chapter dedicated to the scholarship of Alan Bray to the tenth chapter dedicated to sexual pedogogy, I hope to persuade that the projects of knowing sex, thinking sex, and making sexual knowledge are situated within the space of an irresolvable contradiction. Other queer studies scholars have asserted and analyzed the “the unknowability of the sexual,”¹²⁸ sexuality’s “epistemic uncertainty,”¹²⁹ and the “unfathomable nature of the erotic.”¹³⁰ They have provocatively raised “the question of sexuality as a question,”¹³¹ noting the radical incommensurability between self-knowledge, erotic desire, and the social shapes desire assumes.¹³² It is one task of those of us in historical sexuality and queer studies to work this contradiction, to render its constitutive irony resonant and productive. Rather than deploy the apprehension of uncertainty and inscrutability to defend psychoanalysis as a method, to situate theory and literature against history, to extract an archival ethics of eroticism out of Foucault, or to separate feminism from queer studies, I use the opacity of sex to draw queer and psychoanalytic theory, history and literature, feminist and queer interests, closer together.

      This book represents my effort to think my way not out but by means of a series of epistemological dead ends. As critics, many of us are a lot better at critique than in collaboratively envisioning, much less creating, structures that would stimulate analysis of the recalcitrant knowledge relations considered in these pages.¹³³ To the extent that this book engages in critique,¹³⁴ I have been motivated by the belief that energy is gained not only when scholars enthusiastically agree about the animating force of a new concept or a renewed method, but when we disagree, when we are not all intent on the same general project, and when pressure is put on existing as well as emerging concepts and methods. If some of this book takes the form of critique, however, most of it gambles on envisioning a different scholarly horizon, where ignorance is productive, inarticulacy is treasured, and bewilderment beckons us toward different questions to ask of the relationship between sex and bodies in time. In recasting the issues as ones of epistemology and pedagogy rather than subjectivity and identity, of knowledge and ignorance rather than norms and their transgression, of erotic dissatisfaction as much as erotic pleasure, of sequence and syntax alongside semiotic content, and of how we know as much as what we know, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns strives to enact an ethical relation, finally, to sex, that is worthy of and accountable to its ongoing history.