is by mobilizing a concept of cross-gender identification. Hazily defined in queer and gender studies, cross-gender identification involves a process—psychic, affective, analytical, and political—of transiting across gender boundaries. An important feature of early modern performances of gender,83 cross-gender identification—when repurposed as a method—directs attention to several investments. Thinking in terms of cross-gender identification, first, assembles useful perspectives generated out of one gender on behalf of another. In practice, this means that one might recognize in the specificity of male embodiment some dispositions toward knowledge and sex that can benefit women, or that one might deploy pressure on a universal, nongendered category such as queer by considering women’s relation to it.
Second, cross-gender identification trains our eye on the fact that desires are not endlessly fluid and free-floating, but mobile across and through specific sites of embodiment and enunciation.84 Indeed, given that my interest in cross-gender identification is less in the deconstruction of the male/female binary than in the transit across sites whose specificity is precisely what is at issue, this concept may help us refine the work that we want the concept of queer to do.85
While these investments derive from thinking of cross-gender identification in terms of identities, cross-gender identification also facilitates the critical move beyond that terrain by shifting the focus to dynamic social and psychic processes.86 Understood as the “play of difference and similitude in self-other relations,” identification both produces resemblance and self-recognition and disrupts them.87 As Marjorie Rubright describes the critical turn this involves in relation to ethnicity, “attending to the process of identification … reframes our object of analysis by shifting analytic pressure from the ‘what’ (groups, identities, ethnic distinctiveness) to the ‘how’ (the dynamic processes wherein questions of identity and ethnicity emerge).”88 For my purposes, identification (and disidentification) are particularly useful insofar as they call attention to the work involved in any relationship as it seeks to negotiate difference and achieve momentary stasis, balance, or coherence.89
This dynamic notion of psychic process inflects the scholarship of historians and historicist literary critics when they construe “history” as something imaginatively knit together through active engagement with material fragments and traces. Whether they stress the alterity of the past or its connection to us, such scholars reasonably aver that the selection, organization, and interpretation of archival remains are subject to our identifications and desires.90 The following chapters build on this insight but morph it for additional purposes. First, I am intent on showing that identification and disidentification enable us to hone in on the kinds of psychic, cultural, and historiographic labor of making sexual history. Second, I assume that disidentification and disavowal are as crucial as affirmative desire and recognition in that process of making. Third, I show that the play of similarity and difference within dynamics of psychic (dis)identification provides analytical purchase on the unpredictable oscillation of similarity and difference within historiographic practice.
Proceeding from the conviction that the future of feminist, queer sexuality studies lies in an enhanced ability to identify across rather than solely along the vectors of gender and sexuality, the historiography I’ve practiced here is both retrospective and prospective; it recognizes, on the one hand, that “the past exists in a state of infinite regress” and, on the other hand, that “the past is always coming at us.”91 We are the pivot between past and future, their point of vital and vitalizing connection. What is at stake in this perception is a certain way of critically inhabiting a relation to a distant “other” (who can in various ways seem a lot like the self). Most especially, this practice includes not only recognition of the “blind spots in our current understanding,”92 as is often suggested, but an injunction to explore how blind spots condition the very possibility of thought. For this reason, for all my interest in defamiliarizing the present, the historiography I advocate doesn’t so much put all its “faith in exposure”93 as presume that deconstructive disclosure must be accompanied by recognition of those impasses that resist being thought.
The Questions of Psychoanalysis
So conceived, historiography, like sex, names a knowledge relation. It also bears a certain relationship to psychoanalytic thought. To approach identification and disidentification as psychic fuel in the project of making sexual knowledge suggests the utility of psychoanalysis for historiography. Psychoanalysis takes many forms and has a century-long, multifarious, and contentious history of its own. It names, simultaneously, a theory of how things work (e.g., the drives and its affects), a set of analytic concepts (e.g., the unconscious, repression, displacement), and a program of action (e.g., therapy, hermeneutics). It is the second of these—psychoanalysis as a set of concepts—that is most relevant to my project, as I occasionally take recourse in the analytical resources offered by specific concepts regarding the mechanisms of psychic process (particularly identification, transference, and displacement). I approach psychoanalytic concepts and techniques as themselves historical phenomena and thus part of an evolving and internally self-critical method.94 Far from being the explicit framework of the analysis contained herein (or assuming a total congruence between psychoanalytic methods and the history of sexuality),95 psychoanalysis provides this book with a certain disposition toward knowledge.96
The largest departure of this book from most psychoanalytic work is that its focus is not the desiring subject; its greatest debt is to the idea that knowledge is opaque and recalcitrant.97 Knowledge, in psychoanalysis, is believed to develop through anxiety, resistance, refusal, dependence, disavowal, hate, frustration, and abjection, as well as through identification, desire, attachment, gratitude, fantasy, pleasure, and love. One might opine that the idea of sex as inscrutable and resistant to understanding is merely the mythology of psychoanalysis itself: sex resists understanding so that we can mobilize more techniques to know it. Shifting from the attempt to discover the truth of the subject to exploring how we practice sex-as-knowledge-relation, however, enables us to scrutinize and to think more carefully about the specific forms that resistance and attachment take.
When approached as a mode of knowledge relation, psychoanalysis can be employed not for its prepositional contents (the Oedipal complex, the mirror stage), but for its propositional syntax. This syntax is valuable to the extent that it elicits a questioning attitude not only toward the “incognito of the unconscious”98 but toward processes of knowing and making knowledge. Indeed, a propositional syntax directs attention to the kinds of psychic and social work involved in making sex mean, whether in the past or in the present. If there is one thing this emphasis on labor entails, it is recognition that sexual knowledge is elusive, that it requires us to slow down to catch its peculiar tempo, and that, far from functioning as “the sinecure of self presence,”99 sex is just as likely to disrupt such certitude.
One premise of this book is that the psychoanalytic concept of transference—that dynamic exchange of energies (affective, erotic, and cognitive) between any two interlocutors—as well as the related concept of “working through” can be leveraged for the purposes of historiographic practice. The concepts of transference and countertransference offer a structural understanding of some of the strategies and stakes of one’s engagement with the past. Whether transferential energies exist between analyst and analysand, reader and text, or historian and event, whether they are construed as erotically charged or not, they compose a dynamic and tensile knowledge relation.100 Reversing classic psychoanalytic treatments of “history,” it is helpful to think of the past in the position of the analyst, the historian/critic in that of the analysand. The analysand’s desires, identifications, and unconscious wishes may be foregrounded in the analytic encounter, as the analysand may “identify with, repeat, or performatively reenact forces active in it,”101 but they are understood to be only one aspect of the complex negotiation between “pastness” and the scholar. And yet, certain aspects of the traditional position of analyst to history-as-analysand remain relevant to this encounter. To the extent that the historiographic
