Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

method. Although it has become common to refer to the act of periodization as “not simply the drawing of an arbitrary line through time, but a complex practice of conceptualizing categories, which are posited as homogeneous and retroactively validated by the designation of a period divide,”⁷⁵ the identity that periodicity imposes need not be inevitably problematic—as long as it is understood to be contingent, manufactured, invested, and not produced by othering what came before. The wholesale characterization of periodization as a straightening of the past races over such issues while making light of historical contingency—that is, the ways in which practices, representations, and discourses happen to gather in particular places and times.

      Although certain problematic allegiances among sexuality, temporality, and historiography do exist—as when invocations of the future are enrolled in the service of reproductive generation⁷⁶—these links, far from being immanent in either sex or time, are historically and discursively produced. If temporality has been harnessed to reproductive futurity, this is due to an operation of ideology, not to the formal procedures of diachronic method (which, while not exempt from ideology, is not the same thing as ideology). However coimplicated, mutually reinforcing, and potentially recursive, the relations of sex to time are the effects of a historical process, not the preconditions to history. We thus need to ask: by which analytical and material processes do history and historiography become teleological, heterotemporal, or straight?

      History is polytemporal not only because each synchronic moment is riddled with multiple, and sometimes contradictory, asynchronicities, but because time, like language, operates simultaneously on synchronic and diachronic axes. Although it is true, as Menon argues, that “time does not necessarily move from past to future, backward to forward,”⁷⁷ it also is true that time moves on. Any ethics we might wish to derive from a consideration of temporality must contend with the irreducible force of time’s movement on our bodies, our species, and the planet.⁷⁸ Queer or not, we remain in many respects in time. Analytics dedicated to charting time’s cultural logics can be organized via lines, curves, mash-ups, juxtapositions. Nonetheless, writing the history of sexuality by means of asynchronicities located within a synchronic frame or by vaulting over huge expanses of time may bypass chronology, but it generally fails to break out of the binary of “then” and “now” that thus far has constituted queer studies’ engagement with the past.⁷⁹

      The sequential process that constitutes diachrony is, I would argue, a crucial and often tendentious element of sex, texts, and history. Sequence is a formal elaboration, made possible by a syntactical arrangement, the purpose of which is to imply connections, highlight or manage disconnections, and drive a temporal movement along. But sequence in one domain—for instance, narrative or poetic form—may or may not equate to, or even imply, sequence in another—such as that which structures erotic concepts like “foreplay” and “consummation.” What is the relationship between unconventional literary or cinematic form and queer eroticism? How and why might the operations of sexuality and form be coincident, and what is at stake in apprehending them as identical?⁸⁰ What mechanism or process—aesthetic, erotic, political, historical—enables their equation? Are all “points,” consummations, and closures (textual, erotic, political, historical) necessarily coimplicated, and do they all possess the same degree of inevitability?

      Absent investigation of these questions, the presumptive metonymies of sexuality, temporality, and historiography confuse chronology and consequence with teleological progress. In constructing this specter, the advocates of homohistory assert, ironically, a new essentialism. Chapter 8 of this book will address the relationships between sexuality and textuality by means of an alternative analytic of sequence. For now, suffice it to say that it may not be so very queer to bind such disparate phenomena into a single unitary ontology. To invoke Sedgwick once more: “What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?”⁸¹ That these conflations occur under the banner of queer should not go unnoticed. Queer’s freefloating, endlessly mobile, and infinitely subversive capacities may be one of its strengths—accomplishing strategic maneuvers that no other concept does—but its principled imprecision poses considerable analytic limitations. Simply at the level of politics, for instance, queer’s congeniality with neoliberalism has been well documented.⁸² However mutable as a horizon of possibility, queer is a position taken up in resistance to specific configurations of gender and sexuality. If queer, as is often said, is intelligible only in relation to social norms,⁸³ and if the concept of normality itself is of relatively recent vintage,⁸⁴ then queer needs to be defined and redefined in relation to those changing configurations.⁸⁵ To fail to specify these relations is to ignore desire’s emergence out of distinct cultural and material configurations of space and time, as well as what psychoanalysis calls libidinal predicates. It is to celebrate the instability of queer by means of a false universalization of the normal.

      The analytic capacity of queer can only be elevated to ontology if it is abstracted and dehistoricized.⁸⁶ One of the more dubious forms this abstraction takes is to insist that sexual identity is completely irrelevant to contemporary queer life. Opines Menon: “a homosexuality that is posited as chronologically and sexually identifiable adheres to the strictures of hetero-historicism and is therefore not, according to the logic of my argument, queer at all.”⁸⁷ Although Goldberg and Freccero have no doubt that sexual identities generate real effects, they tend to interpret them as exclusively pernicious. If, as Lee Edelman maintains, “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one,”⁸⁸ it remains the case that queerness today is imbricated with and tethered to a range of identities, in complex relations of support, tension, and contest.⁸⁹ However problematic, regulatory, and incoherent modern identity categories may be, this does not obviate their cogency as palpable discursive and social constructions. That we remain under modernity’s sway is clear from contemporary debates about the globalization of gay identity,⁹⁰ as well as by the pervasive institutionalization of sexual identities in laws, social policies, and clinical therapies. For this reason, a queer historicism that refuses, on principle, to countenance the existence of the category “modern homosexuality” invests too much descriptive accuracy in the transhistorical truth value of queer theory.⁹¹

      Rather than continue a zero-sum game of identity versus nonidentity, queer scholars might gain some analytical purchase by recognizing that the material, social, and psychic conditions of queer life might not always be served by the presumption of an exclusive queerness: perhaps at least some of us, and the worlds within which we live, are queer and gay, queer and bi, queer and trans, queer and lesbian, queer and heterosexual. This is not only a matter of recognizing the import of social emplacements and embodied desires—or even the contingency of queer theory itself—but the give-and-take of psychic processes. Identities may be fictions—or in Freccero’s term, phantasms—but they are weighty ones, and they still do important work. That they also break down, become unhinged, is understood in psychoanalysis as part of a lifelong process of formation and deformation, not an either-or proposition.

      To clarify this tension in less psychoanalytic terms, it may be useful to return to the theorist who has done more than anyone to render explicit the stakes of a queer hermeneutic. Following her description of the “open mesh of possibilities” with a long list of possible self-identifications that “queer” might compass, Sedgwick noted that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.”⁹² Sedgwick’s queer is positioned in relation to both universalizing and minoritizing axes; its radical potential is relative to the political work of identity, which is seen as simultaneously enabling and disabling, self-empowering and disciplinary. As is usual with her caveats, there is something important at stake here, and it has to do with politics and ethics. Intent on promoting the universalizing over the minoritizing aspects of eroticism, those who would celebrate “the homo in us all” seem unaware of, or perhaps untroubled by, the asymmetrical disposition of privileges and rights attached to sexual minority status. Furthermore,