Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

our analytical focus. Which characteristics of their social formation actually recur? Which social forces foster an interest in bodily or expressive acts among women, and through which discursive domains and by means of which material technologies are such intelligibilities circulated?

      A focus on lesbian typologies, I have come to feel, enables only partial answers to these questions.⁴³ For instance, from one set of concerns, the female-oriented (although mixed-sex) “Society of Friendship” formed by seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips looks a lot like an avatar of late nineteenth-century Boston marriage; both social forms spiritualize female emotional bonds; both derive sustenance from women’s intellectual capacities; both arise from within the confines of feminine domesticity; both defer to class decorum in matters of the desiring body. But from another angle—say, the freedom to advocate for female intimacy as a political alternative to patriarchal marriage—the gulf between them is profound.

      Or consider the ways that the same-sex intimacies that occurred among certain women living in medieval and early modern convents appear to provide a prototype for the fervid romantic friendships of nineteenth-century women. In both cases, intimacies were authorized by a tight relation between spirituality and eroticism, and both were materially supported by gender segregation. Yet the erotic spirituality of the nun is very different from that professed by romantic friends, and the domesticity enforced on bourgeois women as they were shunted out of the public sphere was a wholly different matter from the (largely) voluntary rigors of monastic life. Whereas the “particular friend” of the medieval monastery was debarred by the rules of her religious order from embracing or even holding hands, her nineteenth-century counterpart was likely to be encouraged by family and kin to kiss and caress her “particular friend.”

      So too, the gender-bending common to the medieval virago, the early modern tribade, the female husband or the passing woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mannish invert of sexology, the 1950s bar dyke, the stone butch, and the transgender subject of today suggests one powerful line of historical and affective connection. Yet, several other lines—including concepts of bodily morphology, extent or desirability of gender passing, relations between secrecy and disclosure, economic imperatives, and claims to an erotic subjectivity—crosscut them in such a way as to disrupt the appearance of similitude.⁴⁴ In this respect, rhetorics, vocabularies, and conventions matter as much as do wide-scale changes in material conditions. Within the frame of a particular set of identifications, for instance, a lesbian drag king might claim as historical precursor the gender-bending passing woman of eighteenth-century narrative; but if she were to submit herself to the narrative conventions structuring earlier discourses of gender passing, she quickly would find that the gulf of history is wide.⁴⁵ For one thing, as Sally O’Driscoll has argued, the passing woman depicted in eighteenth-century ballads is associated almost exclusively with heterosexuality.⁴⁶

      The ideological utility of body parts to social discipline is another case in point. The metonymic logic that governed the representation of the early modern tribade’s enlarged clitoris can be seen in the determination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexologists to discover the reasons of behavioral aberrations in a particular bodily source. Like the tribade’s clitoris, the essentialized characteristics attributed to the invert attest to a will to discover in the body an explanatory mechanism for its own deviations. From this perspective, the quest, during our contemporary age of biogenetics and psychobiology, for a “gay gene” (supposedly manifest in a specific gene on the X chromosome or in the hypothalamus) and for hormonal sources of sexual orientation reiterates a desire to pin the mystery of sexuality onto a discrete physical essence. This twenty-first-century means of understanding the relation between desire and biology, psychology and the body echoes earlier cultural formations, as Siobhan Somerville has argued: “the current effort to re-biologize sexual orientation and to invoke the vocabulary of immutable difference” has its origins in the “historically coincident” yet “structurally interdependent” discourses of nineteenth-century sexology, comparative anatomy, and scientific racism.⁴⁷ Those nineteenth-century discourses, I would add, trace some of their structural components—for instance, their anatomical essentialism—back to early modern attempts to diagnose the tribade’s transgression as a function of bodily morphology and, at times, racial difference.⁴⁸

      At the same time, the material technologies by which gay genes can even be thought as such—much less investigated—are profoundly modern in orientation. Yet material technologies need not be particularly sophisticated or “scientific” to affect the range of available discourses. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, for example, tales of tribades would have remained a fairly elite knowledge had they not made their way through the new genre of travel literature and into vernacular medical advice books. So too, an even wider array of print media—newspapers, scandal sheets, published trial records, novels, and pornography—disseminated an epistemology of suspicion about alleged sapphists in the eighteenth century.⁴⁹

      Resemblances, then, shimmer unsteadily and unevenly, moving closer or receding, depending on the axes of definition that inform one’s perspective or capture one’s attention. Such attention may be the result of forces extrinsic to sexuality itself. Certain axes of social definition may become more pronounced during eras when social discourse about sexuality draws into its orbit concerns and signifiers external to it. Like the periodic moral panics first adduced by Gayle Rubin and Jeffrey Weeks,⁵⁰ cycles of salience may be linked temporally and conceptually to moments of social crisis which have their source in anxieties peripheral to eroticism, such as reactions to feminism and changing gender roles, reservations about redefinitions of the family, nationalist or racist fears of contamination, concerns about morality and social discipline, and violent upheavals in the political order.⁵¹ Conversely, a resurgence of salience for other axes of social definition may be more likely to occur precisely when such anxieties are absent.

      I do not propose that we create rubrics (e.g., a paradigm of bodily morphology or gender inversion or intimate friendship) under which all historical variants would be gathered, organized, and codified. To offer the tribade, the invert, and the romantic friend, for instance, as transhistorical figures of lesbian history would move us only a small step beyond models of a single, unified lesbianism. To do the history of sexuality is not to turn a blind eye to perennial features of the erotic system in the name of historical alterity. But neither is it to too quickly assume homology when not every facet repeats.

      As noted in Chapter 2, with the exception of Alan Bray’s The Friend, a history of homosexuality over the longue durée largely has been avoided since Faderman’s foundational survey. Such avoidance stems from the association of overarching historical narratives with the “gay ancestors” approach to history, as well as from a postmodern suspicion toward the explanatory power of metanarratives. There have, to be sure, been histories of sexuality more generally that traverse several centuries (such as John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s Intimate Matters and Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America; Anna Clark’s Desire: A History of European Sexuality; Leila Rupp’s introductory overviews, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America and Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women;⁵² Joseph Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism; as well as sourcebooks such as Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull’s The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970). There also have been temporally broad, theoretically inflected studies, such as Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence, Lee Edelman’s Homographesis, and Annamarie Jagose’s Inconsequence. With the exception of Boone, however, none of these has explicitly theorized the implications of connecting the strands of gay, lesbian, or queer history across multiple historical periods. To the extent that a longer vantage has been raised as a methodological or theoretical question, it largely has been framed within the context of the acts-versus-identity debate. Dominated by the impulse to create densely local and socially contextualized interpretations, the field’s center of gravity has resulted in some remarkable period-based studies that will inform our understanding