Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

such ready-to-hand, transhistorical rubrics as “homoeroticism,” “heterosexuality,” “sodomy,” “masochism,” “sadism,” “reproduction,” “heteronormativity,” and “cruising.” Such vague referents function as placeholders for a sexual activity and set of relational practices everywhere assumed, but rarely actually described. The material, corporeal aspects of sexual activity—not merely the ecstasy, pain, or ennui it occasions, but the nitty-gritty bodily acts of which it consists—remain surprisingly underarticulated and often subject to a presumptive, tacit form of knowing.⁴⁵

      Although I believe that the more historical evidence we accrue of specific erotic acts the better, I do not think that a diligent compilation of sexual practices will resolve this issue. For the opacity of sex, while it certainly has an archival dimension, is not merely a matter of evidentiary lack. When it comes to sex, even I don’t know what I’ve done, much less what my friends or neighbors do. And despite sociological surveys that purport to present an accurate snapshot of sexual behaviors, what the larger population does is also a mystery. This is less because people lie (although of course they do) than because we don’t have much of a language, even now, to narrate our experiences in anything but the baldest possible terms—which is one reason why historical scholars resort to handy transhistorical placeholders in the first place.⁴⁶

      The use of such concepts has fostered important analytical work. But the time has come to demand more congruence between our theoretical concepts and the historical practices they are employed to name, and not just in pursuit of greater linguistic accuracy. Given the pervasive critical recourse to “heteronormativity,” for instance, we might well ask: what was normative about early modern cross-gender sex? Whatever it was, it was not belief in the self-evident naturalness of desire across the gendered categories of male and female. As literary critic Ben Saunders notes: “in the Renaissance, the love that dare not speak its name is not homosexuality but rather any love that dares to posit a woman as worthy of a man’s complete devotion.”⁴⁷ A number of pre- and early modernists have shown the extent to which the concept of “heterosexuality” fundamentally misidentifies the way in which sexual relations were understood, and thus leads scholars to misconstrue the societal norms aimed at regulating sexual behavior.⁴⁸ Similar pressure could be put on the concept of the “homoerotic,” which, as a critical term, serves to designate something, but in point of fact not too precisely. It thus simultaneously registers and deflects our confusion over the thorny problem of identifying what may look like homosexuality to us, but in certain respects isn’t. The resort to “queerness,” opportune as it has been, does not resolve this issue. A related problem is raised by invocations of terms derived from the discourse of sexology. To what does “masochism” refer? An interiorized desire for suffering? A form of bodily pleasure? An explicit erotic act, such as bondage? A sexual orientation and, by extension, a community of like-minded individuals? One impetus of this book is to suggest the payoff in coming clean about the extent to which these concepts are our categories, based on our projections of what the past was like. But no less a crucial impetus is to challenge the presumptive knowledge that these categories each, in their own way, sustain.

      This book’s commitment to history and historiography thus runs deeper than the dominant historicist mandate to infuse literary scholarship with cultural and temporal specificity. While not neglecting that mandate, I believe that a literary critic’s commitment to history can also involve matters of method central to and challenging of the discipline of history itself. Beginning with my second chapter on Alan Bray’s histories of male homosexuality and friendship, my engagement with modes of historical understanding as well as techniques of historical analysis provides a baseline for the anatomizing analyses of the ensuing chapters.⁴⁹ Indeed, the rest of this book attempts to make good on the invitation issuing from Bray’s historiographic legacy. By taking up several different historiographic problems, I aim to historicize sexuality, engage with historically contingent questions about sexuality, analyze and critique the methods used to historicize sexuality, and ask what it means to historicize sexuality. The precise opacities that appear by means of these questions may be distinctive to the early modern period, but figuring out how to leverage them is a task relevant to every historical scholar concerned with erotic desires and practices or gendered embodiment.

      It is no accident that questions about historiographic method have been central to the field of sexuality studies since its beginnings, with history, historicism, and historiography situated in complex tension with the hermeneutic priorities of literary studies. Debates about the relations between representation and “real life,” metaphors and materiality, texts and their mediation, signification and social practice have been central to how these disciplines and fields intersect, interpret, and misinterpret each other. One of the objectives of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is to affiliate the approach toward sex as a complex issue of representation and a remarkably malleable social metaphor (as typically practiced in literary studies and some versions of anthropology and history) with the view of sex as an empirically verifiable, material and social practice (as emphasized in sociology and psychology, as well as in history and anthropology). The ensuing pas de deux is simultaneously conceptual, historical, and interdisciplinary.

      In the face of an institutional climate of intense (and at times mindless) championing of interdisciplinarity,⁵⁰ it is perhaps unsurprising that influential literary critics have championed the separation of literary from historical study in the name of a “queerer” historicism. Parts I and II proffer ways of thinking sex that direct attention to the points of contact and divergence between these two disciplines. Cross-disciplinary affiliation as I practice it here does not presuppose harmony or paper over differences; indeed, I often dwell on differences, precisely to explore the unique affordances offered by each method. The historical questions addressed in these sections include the relation between eroticism and friendship; the relative salience of acts versus identities; the decision to privilege historical alterity or continuity; the assumption of a correlation between periodization and subjectivity; the varied meanings and functions of temporality; ambivalence about comprehensive period chronologies; the problem of historical teleology; the methodological resources provided by language; and the politically fraught relation between pastness, particularly the premodern, and sexualized formations of racial, ethnic, religious, and national otherness. Among the historiographic arguments developed in these pages is the idea that to do the history of sexuality is not to turn a blind eye to perennial features of the erotic system; but neither is it too quickly to assume similarity or homology in such a way that historical distance and difference are rendered inconsequential. Relations between similarity and difference in historiography might be construed less as an imperative choice than as shimmering tension. To think about resemblance can open an inquiry up to alterity—especially to how something differs from itself. To think about alterity can lead one back to similarity—to ghostly echoes and uncanny resemblances. Similarity and difference, so construed, are metabolic and metamorphic; they are not “up against” each other in the sense of opposition, but “up against” each other in the sense of up close and personal—with all the fraught tensions that this can entail.⁵¹

      My effort to think sex beyond the protocols of identity history and social contextualization has involved unsettling the boundaries between hetero and homoeroticism, as well as licit and illicit, transgressive and orthodox, sexualities. Abandoning strict division between such notions, as well as between men and women, same-sex bonds and heterosexual marriage, enables different configurations of relationship to come to the fore. Emphasizing the erratic and wayward transitivity of erotic desires and acts, and questioning the categories by which “the sexual” is defined, I enact a version of “queering” now common among early modernists and queer studies scholars, advancing the idea that queer is that which most “confounds the notion of being as being at one with oneself.”⁵² Nonetheless, there are crucial differences in my approach that trouble a presumed consensus about what it means, methodologically and theoretically, to queer. As I have already begun to suggest, rather than focusing on how early modern sexuality defies modern categories or is itself anti-identitarian, I focus on how sexuality sets up obstacles to knowledge, not in terms of identity but