of the preceding chapters, this chapter ties the analysis of history to the larger stakes—of pedagogy, ethics, and futurity—that motivate the book as a whole. It returns us to the intellectual, historiographic, and pedagogical disposition that would recognize in what we don’t know, as well as what we can’t know, not only the partiality of our methods and a spur to future inquiry but an intractability that has been constitutive of the history of sex and that continues to inform our relations to that history and to each other.
By attempting to think sex with the early moderns, this book aims to show that the obstacles we face in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality and that both impediments can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography, pedagogy, and ethics. It is not just that the truth of sex is not fully attainable or representable in words or images, as the contingencies of sexual signification manifest. Nor is it just that sexuality is socially constructed or a product of manifold historical processes. From the second chapter dedicated to the scholarship of Alan Bray to the tenth chapter dedicated to sexual pedogogy, I hope to persuade that the projects of knowing sex, thinking sex, and making sexual knowledge are situated within the space of an irresolvable contradiction. Other queer studies scholars have asserted and analyzed the “the unknowability of the sexual,”128 sexuality’s “epistemic uncertainty,”129 and the “unfathomable nature of the erotic.”130 They have provocatively raised “the question of sexuality as a question,”131 noting the radical incommensurability between self-knowledge, erotic desire, and the social shapes desire assumes.132 It is one task of those of us in historical sexuality and queer studies to work this contradiction, to render its constitutive irony resonant and productive. Rather than deploy the apprehension of uncertainty and inscrutability to defend psychoanalysis as a method, to situate theory and literature against history, to extract an archival ethics of eroticism out of Foucault, or to separate feminism from queer studies, I use the opacity of sex to draw queer and psychoanalytic theory, history and literature, feminist and queer interests, closer together.
This book represents my effort to think my way not out but by means of a series of epistemological dead ends. As critics, many of us are a lot better at critique than in collaboratively envisioning, much less creating, structures that would stimulate analysis of the recalcitrant knowledge relations considered in these pages.133 To the extent that this book engages in critique,134 I have been motivated by the belief that energy is gained not only when scholars enthusiastically agree about the animating force of a new concept or a renewed method, but when we disagree, when we are not all intent on the same general project, and when pressure is put on existing as well as emerging concepts and methods. If some of this book takes the form of critique, however, most of it gambles on envisioning a different scholarly horizon, where ignorance is productive, inarticulacy is treasured, and bewilderment beckons us toward different questions to ask of the relationship between sex and bodies in time. In recasting the issues as ones of epistemology and pedagogy rather than subjectivity and identity, of knowledge and ignorance rather than norms and their transgression, of erotic dissatisfaction as much as erotic pleasure, of sequence and syntax alongside semiotic content, and of how we know as much as what we know, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns strives to enact an ethical relation, finally, to sex, that is worthy of and accountable to its ongoing history.
PART I
Making the History of Sexuality
CHAPTER 2
Friendship’s Loss
Alan Bray’s Making of History
Explaining the motives and procedures of an “intellectual history that is correlated with critical theory,” Dominick LaCapra emphasizes that such a project focuses “on modes of conceptualization and argument—the way material is or is not thought out, ‘emplotted,’ worked over, and set forth.”1 Furthermore, it “often moves on the ‘meta’ level by inquiring into its objects of study, along with the ways they have been studied, through interrogating and at times contesting their assumptions or sense of what is or is not worthwhile and valid. Thought here takes an insistently dialogic form in interrogating the work of others and in opening itself to interrogating in the interest of both disclosing questionable assumptions or arguments and enabling intellectual movement toward more desirable alternatives.”2
I am not an intellectual historian. And my poles of orientation are less post-structuralism and disciplinary history than queer theory and feminism. However, the impetus for the chapters that follow share with LaCapra an interest in “modes of conceptualization and argument,” and they enact my response to “the very way problems are articulated.”3 This motive necessitates returning to constitutive formulations of a field, as well as raising basic questions about its genesis in order to examine the “prereflective disciplinary habitus” within which practitioners engage.4 I thus begin with some of the concepts devised by one of the originators of the history of early modern sexuality in an effort both to honor his intellectual legacy and to ask how scholars might work with and through the questions that this legacy raises.
In the headnote that precedes his essay “The Body of the Friend,” Alan Bray describes the painful occasion that gave impetus to his work:
In 1987 I heard Michel Rey, a student of J.-L. Flandrin in the University of Paris, give a lecture entitled “The Body of My Friend.” The lecture was only an outline, and his early death left his doctoral thesis uncompleted and his loss keenly felt by many. But in the years that followed that lecture Michel and I often discussed the history of friendship, and I have sought in this paper to complete that paper as he might have done had he lived, as a tribute to his memory. It is a paper about the body of the friend at the onset of the modern world and its loss.5
In a position not unlike that of Bray, I—along with you—confront the loss of a scholar who has done more, perhaps, than any other to return the body of the friend, and with it the complex meanings of intimacy, to historical consciousness. Although it did not fall to me to complete the monumental piece of scholarship that is The Friend, the manuscript Alan Bray was finishing at the time of his death, it does fall to me to try to do justice to a scholarly legacy that has had a singular, indispensable, and galvanizing effect on the history of sexuality, and that has, in its complete form, transformed the histories of friendship and the family.6
Bray’s first book, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, forcefully exposed a cultural contradiction: whereas sodomy was associated apocalyptically with debauchery, heresy, foreignness, and sedition, and thus the dissolution of the social order, intimate male friendship enabled all manner of legitimate social ties and mutually beneficial obligations, advancing homosocial relations within the patriarchal social order.7 There was nonetheless an affinity and a symmetry between representations of universally admired masculine friendship and officially condemned sodomy—as Bray later put it, “they occupied a similar terrain.”8 The result of this “unacknowledged connection between the unmentionable vice of Sodom and the friendship which all accounted commendable” was widespread cognitive dissonance, a reluctance to recognize in idealized friendship the dreaded signs of sodomy.9 The disparity between the rhetoric of unspeakability that governed public discourses and those social and erotic practices in which many men engaged indicated to Bray a “quiet, nominal adjustment,” perhaps unique to Renaissance England.10 This accommodation began to show signs of strain by the end of the sixteenth century, when changes in social relations and modes of symbolizing them
