of material, ideational, and discursive “events” of past cultures, achieved through various methods.101 But for the unhistoricists, history stands in for a very specific, self-delimiting, and ultimately caricatured set of methods, becoming an abject emblem crowned with a capital letter—in other words, a cliché.
It is not my purpose here to mount a defense of the work of historians, although Chapter 6 will engage directly with their work as it overlaps with and diverges from that of literary critics. For now, suffice it to say that the discipline of history is as varied and contentious as any literature department, and its internal debates regarding the “cultural turn,” “narrative,” “teleology,” “evidence,” “objectivity,” and “theory” are complex, nuanced, and ongoing. Others are doing a better job thinking through the particular affordances of disciplinary history, including its methods and protocols, for queer endeavors than I ever could.102 And historians of sexuality are more than capable of explaining their own investments and methods.103 I doubt, however, that historians will direct those explanations to the unhistoricists, for the latters’ lack of genuine interest in the discipline of history assures that most historians will feel free to ignore them.104 Their mischaracterization of the historian’s enterprise threatens not only to stall productive exchange between literary and historical studies (thereby contributing to the mutual disciplinary estrangement that in the past produced some of the problems of historical practice so abhorred by them), but to deflect attention away from the substantive methodological challenges still faced by those intent on crafting a queer historicism.105
Demeaning the disciplinary methods employed to investigate historical continuity and change does not advance the cause of queerness. Moreover, it has led to unnecessary confusion by implying that to queer temporality is necessarily to queer history and historiography. Historiography, of course, refers to the methods we use to adduce, narrate, and reactivate the past. But the past, history, and temporality—despite their obvious interrelations—are not the same. The past is whatever actually happened, to which we have only mediated access in the form of texts, artifacts, memories (a problem that will be addressed in Chapter 6). Time is the phenomenological dimension in which the ever-receding present becomes the past, even as the present tends toward the future. As simultaneously ontological and epistemological, it is an abstraction, yet also something we know feelingly through our own aging, mortality, future-leaning aspirations, and retrospective memories. And history denotes the narratives that we construct about the past and past times, narratives that take shape according to the precepts of a variety of historiographic methods, from archival sleuthing and textual analysis to interviews and demographics.
To insist on the need to distinguish between pastness, time, history, and historiography is to suggest that the effort to queer temporality may not be about queering history at all. The structure and movement of time is not the only means of access to the past nor the only way to negotiate our mediated relationship to it. Nor does a concern with temporality sum up the kinds of queer-friendly transactions that can be forged between past and present by historians and literary critics. Indeed, the effort to queer temporality charts a very particular itinerary, motivated by distinctive aims—disrupting developmental continuity and teleology prime among them—with only the most oblique relationship to other historical questions such as temporal contingency and change over the long term. Given these distinctions, the question might be how to negotiate the conceptual and methodological tensions between the projects of queering time and writing history. Any such negotiation would involve some difficult methodological decisions: whether and how to balance the claims of historical similitude and alterity when engaging with the past, whether and how to use psychoanalysis and deconstruction to enable not only synchronic but diachronic understandings across time, and whether and how sequence, chronology, and periodization might have utility for queer studies. Beyond these specifically historiographic issues, at stake more broadly are the role of empirical inquiry in queer studies, the adequacy of “homo” and “hetero” as descriptors of incommensurate phenomena, and the tension between identity and nonidentity in contemporary understandings of queerness.
However these issues are addressed, for both those invested in the project of queering temporality and those who remain skeptical about it, it might be the better part of valor to desist from couching the issues in terms of a rhetoric of “normalization.” For those committed to fostering a range of nonnormative modes of being and thought, the derision implicit in this accusation can only be construed as an attempt to foreclose the very possibility of resistance.106 While proclaiming a uniquely queer openness to experimentation and indeterminacy, this rhetoric disqualifies others’ ways of engaging with the past, suggesting that the effort to account for similarities and change over time can only be motivated by a hegemonic, if defunct, disciplinarity. Indicted by association as inimical to the agenda of queering are a wide range of methodological practices and tools: empiricism, periodization and chronology, large-scale historical narration, disciplinary-specific competencies, and attachment to logic itself. Paradoxically, unhistoricism arrogates to itself the only appropriate model of queer history even as its practitioners imply that history is not something they are interested in making. The categorical quality of their polemic, which implicitly installs queer as a doctrinal foundation and ideological litmus test, goes to the heart of historiographic and queer ethics. It goes to the heart of academic and queer politics. It goes to the heart of interdisciplinarity and its future.
Rather than practice “queer theory as that which challenges all categorization,”107 I believe there remain ample reasons to practice a queer historicism dedicated to showing how categories, however mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent, came to be. To understand the chance nature of coincidence and convergence, of sequence and consequence, and to follow them through to the entirely contingent outcomes to which they gave rise: this is not a historicism that creates categories of identity or presumes their inevitability; it is one that seeks to explain such categories’ constitutive, pervasive, and persistent force. Resisting unwarranted teleologies while accounting for resonances and change will bring us closer to achieving the difficult and delicate balance of apprehending historical sameness and difference,108 continuism and alterity, that the past, as past, presents to us. The more we honor this balance, the more complex and circumspect will be our comprehension of the relative incoherence and relative power of past and present conceptual categories, as well as of the dynamic relations among subjectivity, sexuality, and historiography.
Such a queer historicism need not segregate itself from other methods, such as psychoanalysis, with its crucial recognition of the role of the unconscious in historical life, and its aim may well be the further deconstruction of identity categories. But any such rapprochement would require enhanced discernment regarding the ways our bodies remain in time, as well as regarding the use to which different theorists of sex, time, and history are put. In this regard, the exchange I have attempted to advance in these pages cannot help but touch upon the generative legacy of Eve Sedgwick. In its citational circulations, that legacy has become ever more diffuse—and at times attenuated or diluted. The question of how we utilize the multiple “Sedgwicks” we have known is thus one issue at stake. That this is so might give sufficient reason to pause over the prospect of yoking the future of queerness so tightly to unhistoricism. What we create out of the copia bequeathed by Sedgwick—as well as by those with whom she was in dialogue—merits something more scrupulous. After all: what we remember, what we forget, what we retain, what we omit, and what we finally acknowledge as our debts—this is no less than history in the making.
CHAPTER 4
The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography
This
