Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

into an already constituted object: as Laura Doan has put it, “identity history” as “a hunt for x.”⁶¹

      At the same time, the range and diversity of these themes enable us to see that social constructivist claims regarding the emergence of modern homosexuality—whatever the date proposed—have been founded on the basis of a relatively limited set of preoccupations (e.g., identity, subcultures, medical concepts, and legal codes), which have been used to stand in, metonymically, as evidence of homosexuality tout court. In the aggregate, these themes prod us to query whether the different dates that have been proposed for the “birth” of the modern homosexual may not result from their separate temporal arcs. Upsetting the premises of identity history by proliferating the range of relevant issues, they urge us to ask whether what is sometimes presented as whole-scale diachronic change (before and after sexuality, before and after identity, before and after modernity) might rather be a manifestation of ongoing synchronic tensions in conceptualizations about bodies and desires (and their relations to the gender system). As these tensions are confronted with the material realities of new social formations—attacks on monastic culture, the rise of empirical science, the emergence of print and media technologies, the public sphere, political satire and pornography, secularism, mandatory schooling, scientific racism, transnational gay and lesbian movements, the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms—they are played out, differently, yet again.

      This list of substantive themes is intended to bring more clarity to the principles of selection by which one figure might be made to correspond to another across time. It aims to bring more exactitude to the practice of genealogy within queer historicism by encouraging more precise definition of terms and setting of conceptual parameters. As should be clear to readers of Chapter 3, the proposal I am advocating runs counter to others’ efforts to confront the challenges posed by teleology, chronology, and periodization. Rather than “dispense with periodization” as Carolyn Dinshaw and Karma Lochrie suggest,⁶² I suggest we instead use the significant period-based studies published over the past twenty years in order to piece together the questions, concepts, and propositions that have emerged from them into a multilayered genealogy of sexuality. This involves a perspective that is simultaneously synchronic and diachronic: perennial axes of social definition are the synchronic materials out of which diachronic cycles of salience emerge. Poised between the nowin options of attempting to manufacture a coherent, seamless, successionist metanarrative or of eschewing chronological temporality altogether, the genealogy I envision would derive out of and retain the questions, issues, arguments, and contradictions of our fragmented, periodized, discontinuous research. This process of piecing together would encourage us to scrutinize multiple points of intersection, both temporal and spatial, forged from a variety of angles, among different erotic regimes, while also requiring analysis of the ways these linkages are disrupted or crosscut by other angles of vision. Viewed from a wide angle but with all the rough edges showing, this genealogy would necessitate a method of historiography that is literally dialogical; it would be motivated, in both form and content, by the question: how might we stage a dialogue between one queer past and another?⁶³

      It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine how such a multifaceted dialogue might happen or take place. Given the highly periodized institutional conditions within which we pursue our scholarly work, and given, as well, the mandate to examine such an enormous temporal and spatial expanse, its creation clearly is not the task of any one scholar. Such a complex act of creation would require a collective conversation, or, rather, many conversations imbued with multiple voices, each of them engaged in a proliferating and contestatory syntax of “and, but, and, but.” This collaboration, born of a common purpose, would not erase friction but embrace it. I imagine such voices and the histories they articulate coming together and falling apart, like the fractured and vacillating images of a rotating kaleidoscope: mimetic, repetitive, but changing, with each of its aspects reverberating off others, but nonetheless possessed of their own autonomy. Such a kaleidoscopic vision of historiography is, no doubt, a utopian dream. But like all dreams, it gestures toward a horizon of possibility, provocatively tilting our angle of vision and providing us with new questions and, perhaps, new ways of answering them.

      Moving toward this horizon is not the sole direction for lesbian historiography; our approaches need not, indeed should not, be mutually exclusive. Not all questions related to the writing of queer history would be resolved by joining in this effort. Gaps in our knowledge remain and may never be filled; archives remain to be investigated in even greater abundance than we were aware prior to digitization; different racial, national, geographic, and linguistic traditions call out for specification and comparison (including comparisons made available by historicism).⁶⁴ Significant methodological problems require more analysis, including the complex role of emotional affect in our construction of the past.⁶⁵ Perhaps the largest questions of the moment concern how to continue to hone methods appropriate to investigating homoerotic desires and experiences specific to various ethnic and racial groups in the past⁶⁶ (especially the construction of female-female desire in non-Western cultures),⁶⁷ as well as how to best situate the history of sexuality in a transnational and comparative frame.⁶⁸ Just as the historical object of study is implicated in the temporal issues addressed above, so too it is framed by spatial configurations. To the extent that teleological history has positioned non-Western sexualities as anterior, primitive, and inevitably progressing toward Western models, resistance to that paradigm must involve a decolonization that is not only archival but methodological.⁶⁹

      It is my hope that the identification of perennial axes of social definition and the metalogics they reflect will help scholars investigating different racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, and religious traditions to further develop methodological tools appropriate to their own questions and contexts. Which of these axes of definition function across cultural as well as historical boundaries? Which are culturally specific to Europe and North America? What do such differential presences and absences tell us about indigenous modes of comprehending and organizing sexuality, and how does recognition of them promote alternative genealogies of sexual modernity?

      The implication of lesbian historiography in both space and time thus raises additional questions regarding its present future. Most pertinent to the dialogue I have advocated: Would its aim be to create a single lesbian historiography which produces multiple histories that intersect at different points? Or would its goal be to create multiple lesbian historiographies which refract and bounce off of one another in continual oscillation? Finally, how might a reconceived lesbian historiography pressure the development of a global history of sexuality? Whatever our answers to these questions, the future of lesbian historiography will require a more ambitious and capacious response to our growing historical knowledge. The past deserves no less than this; the future demands this and more.

      PART II

      Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts

      CHAPTER 5

      The Joys of Martha Joyless

      Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge

      I want to inspire queers to be more articulate about the world they have already made, with all its variations from the norm, with its ethical understanding of the importance of those variations, with its ethical refusal of shame or implicitly shaming standards of dignity, with its refusal of the tactful silences that preserve hetero privilege, and with the full range of play and waste and public activity that goes into making a world.

      —Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal

      Teachers and writers might better serve the claims of knowledge if we were to resist not sex but the impulse to split off sex from knowledge.

      —Jane Gallop,