Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

genealogy, in the form that Foucault wrote it, is teleological runs against the grain of Foucault’s own project. Indeed, nothing could be further from teleology than Foucault’s own genealogies, which understand historical processes in full light of their conditionality.

      With Foucault’s own genealogical project in mind,⁴⁴ I now want to scrutinize how the unhistoricists build their indictment of teleological misprision, first by presenting their projects through their own words. Recognizing that an “altericist reaction” among pre- and early modernists “was undoubtedly necessary insofar as it sought to enable analyses of gender and sexuality rather than foreclose them through a presumption that ‘we know whereof we speak,’” Freccero nonetheless worries “that altericism is sometimes accompanied by an older, more familiar claim that periods—those confections of nineteenth-century disciplinarization in the West—are to be respected in their time- and context-bound specificity. This is the historicism I speak of, the one that, in the name of difference smuggles in historical periodization in the spirit of making ‘empirical’ claims about gender and sexuality in the European past.”⁴⁵

      Here Freccero forges a close correlation between a prior, apparently principled, commitment to alterity (thus, “altericism”) and periods (those time- and context-bound Western confections), while also suggesting that periodicity becomes the vehicle by which scholars make “empirical” claims. Freccero’s formulation “in the spirit of” leaves ambiguous whether periodization necessitates empiricism or empiricism necessitates periodization, but her point seems to be that altericists pass off periodization as something empirical, whereas it actually is something conceptual and metaphysical. Whichever way it works, empiricism and periodization are judged to be inimical to queer. I will return to the status of periods and empiricism later, but for now simply offer Freccero’s own description of her project in Queer/Early/Modern, which “set itself the task of critiquing historicisms and troubling periodization by rejecting a notion of empirical history and allowing fantasy and ideology an acknowledged place in the production of ‘fantasmatic’ historiography.”⁴⁶ Approaching historical affects as persistence and repetition, and situating subjects in a more “promiscuous” and asynchronic relationship to temporality, she fashions a historiographic method she calls “queer spectrality—ghostly returns suffused with affective materiality that work through the ways trauma, mourning, and event are registered on the level of subjectivity and history.”⁴⁷ As a historiographic method, queer spectrality is a flexible, alluring, and often moving hermeneutic. For instance, Freccero’s application of spectral (or as she also calls it, figural) historiography charts the “transspecies habitus” of dogs and humans through their manifestations of violence in colonialism and the contemporary prison-industrial complex; this reading implicates racism, transnational capital, virile masculinity, queer heterosexuality, and lesbian domestic relations in a complex affective network that is “comparatively queer relative to any progressive, ameliorative rational accounts of historical process.”⁴⁸ Rejecting progressive narratives as well as remedy and rationality, Freccero maintains that she is motivated by an ethical impulse to produce “queer time”⁴⁹ by means of “a suspension, a waiting, an attending to the world’s arrivals (through, in part, its returns), not as a guarantee or security for action in the present, but as the very force from the past that moves us into the future.”⁵⁰

      Less devoted to a psychoanalytic concept of fantasy but equally invested in nonidentitarian modes of thought, Goldberg, like Freccero, construes temporality as asynchronic, noncontinuous, and nonidentical. At least since his 1995 essay “The History That Will Be,” he has attempted to think beyond periodization, arguing that “historic possibilities must depend upon mobilizations that would be unthinkable if history were segmented across uncrossable divides.”⁵¹ Striving to keep “temporal multiplicity in play,” he objects that recent projects in the history of sexuality may “have shown that the present draws upon various incommensurate strands, [but] have tended nonetheless to divide these strands among previous discrete moments and to draw them in relationship to a consolidated present.”⁵² “Discrete moments”—that is, periods—are defined by Goldberg not only by their boundedness but by their relationship to a “consolidated present.” Periodization thereby is identified with “teleological similarity,” which “can imagine the past under the sign of difference, but not the present.” Extending “Sedgwick’s insistence that any time period is characterized by the ‘unrationalized coexistence of different models’” to the unrationalized coexistence of “different temporalities,” he maintains that “the relationship between queer theory and the history of sexuality still remains unresolved terrain. Or, rather, the resolutions, fastening either on the model of absolute alterity or on the model of ultimate identity, have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment.”⁵³ Rather than a spectral haunting that seeks a reciprocal relation with the past, Goldberg explores the multitemporality, nonidentity, and noncorrespondence of the early modern, the recognition of which can expose the “imbrication of alternative possibilities within normative sexualities.”⁵⁴ In his 2009 book The Seeds of Things, Goldberg seeks the queer within the hetero by exploring, as he puts it in a related essay, the “multiple materialisms to be found in early modernity,” extending the meaning of “queer” to a consideration of physics because “queer theory is not and never was just about sex in itself.”⁵⁵

      Menon makes many of the same theoretical and rhetorical moves as Freccero and Goldberg, but her special interest is in pressing against all forms of desire’s confinement, whether that of sexual identity, terminology, literary form, chronological boundaries, or historical method. Because desire, in her view, always exceeds identity and is “synonymous … with queerness,” she “insists that we refrain from identifying sexuality, and revel in pursuing the coils of a desire that cannot be contained in a binary temporal code.”⁵⁶ Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film begins by arguing that “our embrace of difference as the template for relating past and present produces a compulsory heterotemporality in which chronology determines identity.”⁵⁷ In other words, scholarly attention to historical difference produces a relationship to time in which sexual identity is causally related to chronological explanations; correlatively, queer studies scholars who do not suspend all chronology are not only normativizing but, in her words, “governed by dates.”⁵⁸ Subjection to the datelines of chronological time is then translated into teleology: “Defined as the doctrine of ends or final causes, teleology depends on a sequence leading to an end that can retrospectively be seen as having had a beginning.”⁵⁹ Disrupting this purported causal chain via “homohistory, in which desires always exceed identitarian categories and resist being corralled into hetero-temporal camps,”⁶⁰ Menon exploits what she sees as the tight congruence of literary form with historical and political structures, in order to access what she calls, in her book’s final sentence, “the homo in us all.”⁶¹ Her term “compulsory heterotemporality,” echoing Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality,” reactivates sexual normativity as the cause and effect of “straight” temporality and historiography. Adopting the rhetoric of postcolonial studies,⁶² Menon writes that “the temporal version of decolonization—what may be termed dechronolization—would involve taking anachronism seriously and defying difference as the underwriter of history.”⁶³ Under the banners of homohistory and unhistoricism, Menon rejects not only historical difference but what she sees as its theoretically suspect corollaries—facts, origins, authenticity, and citation or naming—to which she believes historicists naively adhere.

      Composing what increasingly seems a united front, these scholars resist historicism on the grounds that it exaggerates the self-identity of any given moment and therefore exaggerates the differences between any two moments. Against what they view as a compulsory regime of historical alterity, they elevate anachronism and similitude as the expression of queer insurgency. Their readings offer persuasive examples of how queerness animates and troubles ostensibly heterosexual literary texts and cultural discourses. Their strengths as critics reside in the ability to see beyond heterosexuality’s inscription on textual form as well as their attentiveness to the vicissitudes of desire and the failures of sexuality. Their contributions