coimplicated, and do they all possess the same degree of inevitability?
Absent investigation of these questions, the presumptive metonymies of sexuality, temporality, and historiography confuse chronology and consequence with teleological progress. In constructing this specter, the advocates of homohistory assert, ironically, a new essentialism. Chapter 8 of this book will address the relationships between sexuality and textuality by means of an alternative analytic of sequence. For now, suffice it to say that it may not be so very queer to bind such disparate phenomena into a single unitary ontology. To invoke Sedgwick once more: “What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?”81 That these conflations occur under the banner of queer should not go unnoticed. Queer’s freefloating, endlessly mobile, and infinitely subversive capacities may be one of its strengths—accomplishing strategic maneuvers that no other concept does—but its principled imprecision poses considerable analytic limitations. Simply at the level of politics, for instance, queer’s congeniality with neoliberalism has been well documented.82 However mutable as a horizon of possibility, queer is a position taken up in resistance to specific configurations of gender and sexuality. If queer, as is often said, is intelligible only in relation to social norms,83 and if the concept of normality itself is of relatively recent vintage,84 then queer needs to be defined and redefined in relation to those changing configurations.85 To fail to specify these relations is to ignore desire’s emergence out of distinct cultural and material configurations of space and time, as well as what psychoanalysis calls libidinal predicates. It is to celebrate the instability of queer by means of a false universalization of the normal.
The analytic capacity of queer can only be elevated to ontology if it is abstracted and dehistoricized.86 One of the more dubious forms this abstraction takes is to insist that sexual identity is completely irrelevant to contemporary queer life. Opines Menon: “a homosexuality that is posited as chronologically and sexually identifiable adheres to the strictures of hetero-historicism and is therefore not, according to the logic of my argument, queer at all.”87 Although Goldberg and Freccero have no doubt that sexual identities generate real effects, they tend to interpret them as exclusively pernicious. If, as Lee Edelman maintains, “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one,”88 it remains the case that queerness today is imbricated with and tethered to a range of identities, in complex relations of support, tension, and contest.89 However problematic, regulatory, and incoherent modern identity categories may be, this does not obviate their cogency as palpable discursive and social constructions. That we remain under modernity’s sway is clear from contemporary debates about the globalization of gay identity,90 as well as by the pervasive institutionalization of sexual identities in laws, social policies, and clinical therapies. For this reason, a queer historicism that refuses, on principle, to countenance the existence of the category “modern homosexuality” invests too much descriptive accuracy in the transhistorical truth value of queer theory.91
Rather than continue a zero-sum game of identity versus nonidentity, queer scholars might gain some analytical purchase by recognizing that the material, social, and psychic conditions of queer life might not always be served by the presumption of an exclusive queerness: perhaps at least some of us, and the worlds within which we live, are queer and gay, queer and bi, queer and trans, queer and lesbian, queer and heterosexual. This is not only a matter of recognizing the import of social emplacements and embodied desires—or even the contingency of queer theory itself—but the give-and-take of psychic processes. Identities may be fictions—or in Freccero’s term, phantasms—but they are weighty ones, and they still do important work. That they also break down, become unhinged, is understood in psychoanalysis as part of a lifelong process of formation and deformation, not an either-or proposition.
To clarify this tension in less psychoanalytic terms, it may be useful to return to the theorist who has done more than anyone to render explicit the stakes of a queer hermeneutic. Following her description of the “open mesh of possibilities” with a long list of possible self-identifications that “queer” might compass, Sedgwick noted that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.”92 Sedgwick’s queer is positioned in relation to both universalizing and minoritizing axes; its radical potential is relative to the political work of identity, which is seen as simultaneously enabling and disabling, self-empowering and disciplinary. As is usual with her caveats, there is something important at stake here, and it has to do with politics and ethics. Intent on promoting the universalizing over the minoritizing aspects of eroticism, those who would celebrate “the homo in us all” seem unaware of, or perhaps untroubled by, the asymmetrical disposition of privileges and rights attached to sexual minority status. Furthermore, to argue, as Menon does, that sexual identity categories are themselves an effect of a misguided queer historicism93 is to misrecognize the processes by which identities are produced, as well as the political force of their application and dissemination.94
Only by failing to attend to historicism as it is actually practiced can such an accusation stand.95 But rather than engage with history or historiography, unhistoricists seem more interested in refiguring abstract temporality. This would be entirely appropriate, were it not the case that they pursue queer temporality as a wholesale substitute for history and historiography. Posing unhistoricism against what they call “hegemonic history,” Goldberg and Menon take as “axiomatic”96 the critique of the traditional historical enterprise proffered by Hayden White’s Metahistory from 1973, whose work functions as the primary touchstone for Freccero as well.97 Their reiteration of this reference against “History” writ large implies that historians have ignored White’s critique, when in fact it has been widely discussed and to some degree integrated into cultural history, intellectual history, gender history, the history of sexuality, and queer historiography—as practiced by historians. Disciplinary history has witnessed as well a sustained engagement with time and temporality in recent years.
The “un” of unhistoricism disregards these engagements in order to produce a binary for the sake of deconstructing it. Moreover, this project bespeaks an antipathy to empirical inquiry, which, viewed as the primary tool of the historian, is posed as antithetical to acts of queering—as if queerness could not live in the details of empirical history. Needless to say, plenty of scholars in queer studies do practice various forms of empirical inquiry—not only historians, but anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, legal theorists, critical race theorists, and, yes, literary critics—and some of them have offered astute analyses of the relationship between their methods and those of queer theory. Without delving into that bibliography, one can simply ask: Where would queer theory be without the anthropology of Esther Newton, the history of George Chauncey, the sociology of Steven Epstein, the legal writings of Janet Halley? Where would queer theory be without Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex”?98
Rejecting out of hand the methods used by most social scientists, unhistoricism’s hostility to empiricism adorns itself in the resurgent prestige of “theory.” Freccero proposes to not “take seriously the pieties of the discipline that would require the solemn, even dour, marshalling of empirical evidence,”99 while Menon laments that “by grafting chronological history onto theory, Renaissance queer theorists confine themselves to being historians of sexuality.”100 Rendering explicit the hierarchical division of labor informing their critique, this conceptual and affective elevation of (sexy) theory over (dour) history is never fully explained, nor are the key practitioners of the history of sexuality—those trained as historians, those who identify as historians, or those working in history departments—cited and directly engaged. Indeed, one might probe what history stands for in this body of work. For many scholars, history is, on the one hand, an academic discipline, a knowledge community, a professional locus from which to investigate the past;
