don’t do, or even don’t want to do.”120 If the thriving market for self-help books, magazine stories, and online advice columns indicates anything, it is that sex remains for many a mysterious domain—even a problem—with basic understandings of anatomy, physiology, affective and sexual response in question throughout the life span.
To the extent that queer studies assumes rather than analyzes the pleasures of sex and implicitly relegates sexual frustration, sexual unhappiness, and bad sex to the domain of therapeutic intervention,121 it not only leaves something important out of its domain of inquiry, implying that the question of sexual ineptitude and dissatisfaction aren’t worth theorizing,122 but fails to benefit from the ways that trial and error provide a means for theorizing sex itself.123 This book proposes that it is by attending to various obstacles to sexual satisfaction, very broadly construed, that we might devise new questions and alternative ways of thinking sex. In short, it hopes to persuade that queer theory could exploit the conceptual payoff of bad sex by including within its sphere of attention sex that is frustrating, dissatisfying, even aversive—for it is out of these affective states, and the quotidian adjustments they require, that queer worlds also emerge.124
Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns
Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns has been impelled by my political commitments as a feminist, my previous research on the cultural history of lesbianism, my training as an early modern literary critic, and my cross-disciplinary institutional location. Posing these commitments in various relations to one another, it enacts an interdisciplinary vision of critical and historical practice: one that is simultaneously feminist and queer, that mines the analytical value of cross-gender identification, and is as respectful of the protocols of archival research as of psychic indeterminacy and close reading. Its meta-level register, however, is perhaps more akin to that of “theory” than is usually the case in literary criticism or historical scholarship. Indeed, because it is hard to outline the contours of an opacity—it refers, after all, to a shadowy presence, with murky edges subject to fluctuating degrees of illumination—I approach sexual knowledge obliquely, through the varying interpretative practices it occasions. Because the latter chapters assume familiarity with terminology, historiographic issues, and critical debates introduced earlier, they are best read in the order they appear. Although certain concerns of the sections overlap, their arguments do not so much repeat as become refracted through the prism of various angles of vision and interpretation; certain issues telescope in and out, as I use literary readings to theorize and historicize, and use history and literature to test the limits of theory.
The book’s first part, “Making the History of Sexuality,” takes up problems of historiographic method as pursued by historians and literary scholars. It does so first from the standpoint of the history of male homosexuality, then by investigating the effort to queer temporality, and third from the perspective of lesbian historiography. These approaches, though distinct, are interrelated, and by the end of Part I they accrue into something close to a methodological desideratum. That desideratum is itself interdisciplinary: if Chapter 2 engages with historiography as practiced by a historian, and Chapter 3 engages with literary critics who position their projects against disciplinary history, Chapter 4 offers my own proposal for “how to do” the history of sexuality at the intersection of these disciplines by focusing on the particular problems of lesbian history. Together these chapters suggest ways to balance historical sameness and difference, continuism and alterity, queer theory and the history of sexuality, and they bring clarity to the principles of selection by which one idea, figure, or trope is made to correspond to another.
Part II, “Scenes of Instruction; or, Early Modern Sex Acts,” builds on Part I’s historiographic inquiries, while also querying what it means to assert historical knowledge. Postulating that the scrutiny of sex acts enables special access to the obscured substrate of sexual historiography, I comprehensively survey the state of our knowledge about early modern sexual practices and offer a framework for how to productively work the constitutive contradictions first adduced in the scholarship of Bray. If Part I focuses on sex as represented in history, Part II begins to make a case for construing sex not only as the effect of historical processes or as a precise set of practices, but as an agent of history—that is, an agent in historical processes of knowledge production. But in order to apprehend this agency, we need to consider whether what “presents” as a historiographic problem is in fact an epistemological one. To consider this issue by means of specific examples, Part II focuses on what we still do not know about early modern sex, asking what this “lack” might tell us. It closely reads early modern language and texts and scrutinizes literary and historical scholarship, attending in particular to the role of presumptive knowledge in the making of sexual knowledge. Advocating the import of what we don’t know as well as what we can’t know, Part II explores the meanings of sexual acts, sexual language, sexual publics, and sex education both in the early modern period and today. In addition, by modeling cross-gender identification as a critical practice on behalf of women, and by managing the gap between treatments of sex as representation and sex as material practice, Part II puts into critical practice some of the methods introduced in Part I.
Part III, “The Stakes of Gender,” pairs two chapters that might seem to have nothing to do with one another, insofar as one is about the relationship between male homoerotic and heteroerotic desire in an early modern sonnet sequence and the other is about lesbianism in contemporary critical discourse. This counterintuitive pairing, however, allows me to capitalize on the methodological payoff of the previous sections, bringing into explicit theorization the diacritical relationships between gender and sexuality, and both to history. These chapters build methodologically on Annamarie Jagose’s proposition in Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence that sexuality “is culturally produced as a sequential fiction.”125 Viewed from the perspective of sequence, all sexual identifications are “always secondary, always back formations, always belated.”126 This belatedness is projected specifically onto the representation of lesbianism, which typically is viewed as inconsequential and imitative, thereby masking a “disavowal of precisely that derivativeness which … is the heart of sexuality itself.”127 Whereas Jagose’s consideration of sequence hinges its critique of the terms of lesbian visibility on the precedential ordering of first and second, origin and derivation, I have repurposed her deconstructive analytic. Splitting the terms of her analysis apart, Chapter 8 focuses on the import of sequence in Shakespeare’s sonnets, while Chapter 9 focuses on the secondariness of lesbianism in current critical dispensations. My reading of the difficulties involved in diacritically reading Shakespeare’s sonnets no less than “the sign of the lesbian” demonstrates that both, in fact, function as exquisite metonymies of the problem of sexual opacity to which this book is dedicated.
“Sex Ed; or, Teach Me Tonight” concludes the book by meditating on the opacity of sexual knowledge in the current moment. An extempore rejoinder at a sexuality studies conference provides an occasion to consider the impossible pedagogical imperatives involved in queer studies as well as in a more capaciously
