interesting or valuable, are best assessed in their applicability to specific historical contexts and fields of inquiry. For this reason, I scrutinize in what follows the arguments of three early modernists who maintain that teleological thinking present in queer historicism undergirds a stable edifice of temporal normativity. That a particularly intense critique of teleology has arisen within the context of early modern studies is partly due to scholars’ efforts to contend with the force of historicism, which has been the field’s dominant (but by no means exclusive) method since the 1980s. Furthermore, pre- and early modern studies have been the site of vigorous debate about historiographic method since volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality upped the critical ante on understandings of sexual modernity. The arguments described in these pages thus arise from within a distinct temporal and professional frame, and I leave to others the task of assessing whether my perspective generates questions pertinent to the explanatory potential of queer temporality more generally.6
Because the rest of this chapter focuses on the writings of Carla Freccero (who works mainly in French literature and culture) and Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon (whose expertise is in English), I state from the outset that I find much of their work, including some of their assertions regarding temporality, trenchant and thought provoking. In this I am far from alone: the quick uptake of their interventions bespeaks enormous enthusiasm among a diverse range of scholars. What follows unavoidably involves a certain amount of generalization that elides differences among them (especially regarding the role of gender and psychoanalysis) and fails to convey the insight and verve with which they read particular texts and cultural phenomena. My impetus for treating them as a collective stems from the fact that they have vigorously published on this theme and, despite their differences, share a common line of argumentation regarding teleology, regularly and approvingly cite one another regarding it, and are treated by other scholars as providing a unified perspective on it. The point is not to attack individual scholars, delineate strict methodological camps, or propose a single way of doing the history of sexuality. Indeed, part of what is confusing is that some of these scholars’ recent pronouncements run against the grain of their previous work.7 My aim, then, is to advance a more precise collective dialogue on the unique affordances of different methods for negotiating the complex links among sexuality, temporality, and history making. What are the possible different ways of queering history and temporality? What, if any, are the specific procedures that eventuate out of these different paths? And what are the stakes of those differences? If I answer critique with critique and, in the end, defend genealogical approaches to the history of sexuality—arguing in particular that we can read chronologically without straitjacketing ourselves or the past—I hope to do justice to these scholars’ innovations by engaging seriously with their polemics and acknowledging the value of certain hermeneutic strategies for which they are eloquent advocates.
In many respects, the projects of these early modernists reiterate familiar queer theoretical investments. They share with countless others a desire to promote the capacious analytical capacity of queer to deconstruct sexual identity, to illuminate the lack of coherence or fixity in erotic relations, and to highlight the radical indeterminacy and transitivity of both erotic desire and gender. Like many others, they find their warrant in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assertion that “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to” is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”8 Drawing on Sedgwick as well to privilege the universalizing over the minoritizing aspect of sexualities, these critics maintain that we should not “take the object of queering for granted.”9 In Freccero’s words, her “work has been mostly about advocating for queer’s verbally and adjectivally unsettling force against claims for its definitional stability, so theoretically anything can queer something, and anything, given a certain odd twist, can become queer.”10 Similarly, Menon maintains that “if queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer.”11 In historiographic terms, these critics refuse to countenance the emphasis on historical difference often attributed to historicist scholars. Collaborating on an article published in PMLA, for instance, Goldberg and Menon call for “acts of queering that would suspend the assurance that the only modes of knowing the past are either those that regard the past as wholly other or those that can assimilate it to a present assumed identical to itself.” They also share a resistance to the conventional historical periodizations that typically organize the disciplines of history and literature: “We urge,” Goldberg and Menon say, “a reconsideration of relations between past and present that would trace differential boundaries instead of being bound by and to any one age.”12
Although similar statements appear in the historical work of other scholars, including some they critique, Freccero, Goldberg, and Menon charge these scholars with a failure to deliver. According to Menon, “the ideal of telos continues to shape even the least homonormative studies of Renaissance sexuality.”13 According to Freccero, “what [has] most resisted queering in my field … was a version of historicism and one of its corollaries, periodization.”14 And, according to Goldberg, other queer historicist scholars “remain devoted to a historical positivity that seems anything but the model offered by queer theory.”15 In these scholars’ view, this alleged “ideal of telos”—and its reputed corollaries, periodization and positivism—underwrites work governed by a genealogical intent that treats any earlier figures (for example, the sodomite, the tribade, the sapphist) as precursors of, in the words of Freccero, a “preemptively defined category of the present (‘modern homosexuality’).”16 Stating that they find a lingering attachment to identity that unduly stabilizes sexuality and recruits earlier sexual regimes into a lockstep march toward the present, they adduce in others’ work a homogeneous fiction of “modern homosexuality” that inadvertently, and through a kind of reverse contamination, conscripts past sexual arrangements to modern categories. And although certain deconstructive tendencies motivate much queer historical scholarship, these critics are further distinguished by the manner in which they champion the specific capacities of formal textual interpretation—especially the techniques of deconstruction and psychoanalysis—to provide a less teleological, less identitarian, and in their view, less normalizing historiographic practice. The alluring name that Goldberg and Menon give to their counterstrategy is “homohistory,” defined as a history that “would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism.”17 In sum, they call for a queering of history that would be, in Goldberg and Menon’s words, an “unhistoricism”—or, to use Freccero’s term, an “undoing” of the history of homosexuality (in ironic homage to David Halperin’s How to Do the History of Homosexuality, a main target of her critique).
Before I explore these arguments, I note that this critique has a history of its own. Although the question of teleology in organizing historical understanding has long vexed historians,18 this question gained momentum in queer studies by means of Sedgwick who, in Epistemology of the Closet, proposed as her axiom 5 that “the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.”19 Directed at the work of several gay male historians, Sedgwick’s critique focused not only on the work of Michel Foucault, but also Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, with its social constructionist effort to differentiate premodern forms of sexual desire and behavior from a distinctively modern homosexual identity. Comparing Halperin’s work to Foucault’s, she observed that “in each history one model of same-sex relations is superseded by another, which may again be superseded by another. In each case the superseded model then drops out of the frame of analysis.” Sedgwick’s critique of the “birth of the homosexual” and the model of supersession to which it was joined had as its ultimate goal
