definition tend to spring precisely from the inexplicitness or denial of the gaps between long-coexisting minoritizing and universalizing, or gendertransitive and gender-intransitive, understandings of same-sex relations.”20 Concerned with what she termed the “unfortunate side effect” of historical studies (despite their “immense care, value, and potential”), she noted that whereas “‘homosexuality as we conceive of it today,’ has provided a rhetorically necessary fulcrum point for the denaturalizing work on the past done by many historians,” such formulations risked “reinforcing a dangerous consensus of knowingness about the genuinely unknown” in modern discourses of sexuality.21
Sedgwick’s critique had two conceptual targets: narratives of supersession, in which each prior term drops out, and the conceptual consolidation of the present (or the modern). A third target—the perceived emergence of the homosexual locatable in a specific moment in time—can be inferred from the irony that limns her descriptive lexicon of “birth” and “Great Paradigm Shift.” Compelling as her critique was, however, Sedgwick did not endorse a particular form of historiography. She neither asserted the likelihood of transhistorical meanings, made arguments about historical continuity and change, or advocated on behalf of synchronic over diachronic methods. Despite other scholars’ characterization of her critique as a “refusal of the model of linearity and supersession,”22 she did not address temporal linearity or chronology per se, much less advance a standard of total chronological suspension. By attending to “the performative space of contradiction,” Sedgwick deployed deconstructive strategies in her encounter with the past not as a way of doing history but rather “to denaturalize the present.”23
Sedgwick’s discussion of the Great Paradigm Shift received a direct response from Halperin in How to Do the History of Homosexuality, where he offered a pluralist model of four distinct paradigms of male gender and eroticism, all of which, he argued, are in various ways subsumed by or conflated with the modern category of homosexuality. Answering Sedgwick’s objection regarding supersession while also integrating her primary insight regarding synchronic incoherence, Halperin writes:
A genealogical analysis of homosexuality begins with our contemporary notion of homosexuality, incoherent though it may be, not only because such a notion inevitably frames all inquiry into same-sex sexual expression in the past but also because its very incoherence registers the genetic traces of its own historical evolution. In fact, it is this incoherence at the core of the modern notion of homosexuality that furnishes the most eloquent indication of the historical accumulation of discontinuous notions that shelter within its specious unity. The genealogist attempts to disaggregate those notions by tracing their separate histories as well as the process of their interrelations, their crossings, and, eventually, their unstable convergence in the present day.24
In other words, Halperin’s genealogy is committed to the view that modern sexual categories provide not just an obstacle to the past but also a window on to it. In positioning the present in the relation to the past, a queer genealogist might adduce similarities or differences, continuities or discontinuities, all in pursuit of the contingency of history.
In the decade between Sedgwick’s critique and Halperin’s response, skepticism about the functions of historical alterity and periodization grew among pre- and early modernists. In 1996, Freccero and Louise Fradenburg challenged queer historicists to “confront the pleasure we take in renouncing pleasure for the stern alterities of history.”25 Rejecting as essentialist the insistence on the radical incommensurability of past and present sexualities, they proposed a historiographic practice conscious of the role of desires and identifications across time. Echoing Sedgwick in asking “Is it not indeed possible that alteritism at times functions precisely to stabilize the identity of ‘the modern’?” they argued that “it might, precisely, be more pleasurable and ethically resonant with our experience of the instabilities of identityformation to figure a particular historical ‘moment’ as itself fractured, layered, indeed, historical.”26 Related motives animated the work of Carolyn Dinshaw, who sought to “show that queers can make new relations, new identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality.”27 Dinshaw’s “sensible” historiography, which depended on a “process of touching, of making partial connections between incommensurate entities” across the medieval and postmodern, also privileged a view of sexuality as indeterminate, constituted as much by disidentification and misrecognition as by identification and mimesis.28
Such work forged an implicit alliance among two forms of queerness: one directed at subjectivity—affirmatively courting the contingency of desire and rejecting identity’s stabilizations—and one directed at historiography, with the aim of resisting alterity and periodization in favor of similitude, resemblance, and identification. Yet, none of these scholars set themselves the task of writing a historical account that traversed large expanses of time. Even as they challenged periodization, their own analyses remained bounded, whether within one or, in the case of Dinshaw, two temporally distinct time frames. By offering either a synchronic analysis or one that paratactically juxtaposed and connected modernity with premodernity, they could bracket the question of any intervening time span—indeed, the point was to bracket it. The brilliance of this move was that it enabled affective relations with the past to come to the fore—a move the consequences of which I will explore in Chapter 6. But this innovation also allowed these and subsequent scholars to avoid all matters associated with chronology, including how to explain the endurance or recurrence of some of the very similarities that interested them. Propelled by the desire to defamiliarize modern identity categories while finding new affiliations between the past and the present, the emerging field of queer historiography did not, at this point, directly engage with but rather sidestepped this central issue. This is a problem to which Chapter 4 turns, where I offer a positive model for negotiating the play of difference and similarity over the long temporal term.
Only after queer historiography adopted the postcolonial critique of an imperialist Western history did teleology per se gravitate to the center of discussion. In addition to confronting Eurocentrism and its geopolitical exclusions, postcolonial historians and historians of non-Western cultures followed Johannes Fabian in querying the ideological fit between spatial and temporal alterity, whereby spatially “othered” cultures are judged as inhabiting a time “before” Western modernity. Metanarratives emanating from the metropole have, indeed, inscribed a version of history as developmental telos, whereby a tight conceptual link exists between modernity, progress, and enlightenment, or inversely, between premodernity and what Anjali Arondekar terms “the time(s) of the primitive in a post-colonial world.”29 Among those working on sexuality, the critique of Western timelines focused initially on debating the applicability of Western models of sexual identity to non-Western contexts. Troubling the Foucaultian division between a supposedly Eastern ars erotica and a Western, Christian scientia sexualis, historians of India, China, and the Middle East have refuted the discursive construction of non-Western sexualities as anterior, traditional, primitive, and inevitably developing toward Western models.30 Resisting the “sedimented politics of time” that “often reproduces subjects, critical genealogies and methodological habits that duplicate the very historiographies we seek to exceed,”31 these scholars are striving toward a decolonization that is simultaneously archival, methodological, and temporal.
In part because the “Middle Ages” has been treated as the abject other of modernity, medievalists were quick to adopt the postcolonial critique of historical timelines for queer studies. In 2001, Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger emphasized the politically fraught relationships among the premodern, primitivity, and sexual positioning, calling into question “straight (teleological) narration, causal explanations, and schemes of periodization.”32 Since then, more scholars working on Western cultures have begun to look beyond sexual identity
