such everyday, banal acts of self-disclosure, which, as others have remarked, take the form of performative speech acts that require continual reiteration. Even within the supposedly queer-friendly academy today, coming out through word, implication, personal style, bodily acts, or reading assignments involves a delicate and sometimes stressful choreography of revelation and concealment, exposure and withholding, of strategizing across the boundaries of private and public for both students and teachers. Those teachers and students whose gender presentation, style, or comportment depart most radically from dominant norms no doubt dance to a somewhat different tune than those of us who could, if we so choose, pass as straight.
In its pedagogical investments, however, this book is interested less in the performance of sexual (or gender) identity than in the performance of sexual speech. Whether we come out in the classroom or pass, are straight or would like not to be, central to our pedagogical strategies is our felt experience when speaking sex. Like the performative act of coming out, candor in such speech involves a complex choreography of personal revelation and concealment of erotic interests and affiliations.2 Teaching sexually explicit materials involves not only deep contextualization, but forthrightness. Fellatio, cunnilingus, blow jobs, finger or fist fucking: whether couched in a high or low idiom, these words, or others like them, voiced in an academic setting (no matter whether during an undergraduate lecture, graduate seminar, conference panel, or keynote address), violate tacit assumptions about academic protocol and decorum. However progressive, feminist, or queer their views, many auditors and interlocutors react to what they perceive as a breach of etiquette, or to an imagined assault, or to the contagious quality of sexual shame. I have encountered widened eyes, downcast glances, deafening silence, and nervous as well as appreciative laughter.
It is within such contradictory contexts that my engagements with pedagogy, history, knowledge practices, and the relationship between feminist and queer modes of thinking, acting, and being have evolved. In gratitude for the opportunity to speak sex, to think sex, and to make sexual knowledge, I dedicate this book to my Michigan graduate students who, more than anyone else, have taught me what it means to teach.
Note on Spelling
I have mainly retained original spellings and punctuation in quotations from early modern texts except when quoting from modern editions. Given my hope that readers less familiar with early modern English will read this book, I have expanded contractions, distinguished i/j, u/v, and vv/w, and replaced long s for f. I also have translated typeface into modern roman type. All citations of the Oxford English Dictionary refer to the OED Online.
CHAPTER 1
Thinking Sex
Knowledge, Opacity, History
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
—Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”
Is sex good to think with? Over the past thirty years, historians, literary critics, and scholars of gay, lesbian, queer, and sexuality studies have demonstrated that there is much to be gained, conceptually and politically, in thinking about sex. They have shown the extent to which sexual attitudes, concepts, and practices have been influenced by and are indices of societal concerns specific to time, place, and discursive context. Whether investigating historical lives or imaginative fictions, medicine or pornography, visual or textual representations, they have provided ample demonstration of the diversity of sexuality and the complex ways in which that diversity has been and continues to be represented, claimed, contested, and refused.
But what about thinking sex? That is, using sex as a way to think and, further, as a means by which to analyze what such thinking entails? Is it possible or desirable to use sex itself as an analytical guide for thinking about bodies, histories, representations, and signification? Can “sex” as a conceptual category help us apply pressure to the question of how we make sex into knowledge? To these questions, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns answers in the affirmative. Playing on the double meaning of thinking and knowing about sex and mobilizing sexuality as a form of knowledge and thought, this book explores how thinking about sex is related to thinking with sex, and how both activities affect a range of knowledge relations—especially the affective, embodied, cognitive, and political interactions among those who supposedly know and those who decidedly don’t.
Given the capaciousness of the concepts of “sex” and “knowledge,” inquiry into how sex is made into knowledge potentially could comprise a vast and unwieldy project, traversing several fields of endeavor. Indeed, the inquiry pursued in this book is one without a stable or coherent referent. In what ways are sexual knowledge and knowledge practices about sex “research objects”? Given sexuality’s relationship to the body and the psyche, nature and culture, what are its borders and boundaries? In order to narrow the field of inquiry, I have focused my study of sexual knowledge on three questions: What do we know about early modern sex? How do we know it? And what does such knowledge mean? As forthright as each of these questions appears, each extends outward into separate, yet overlapping, intellectual domains. To ask what we know about early modern sex is to ask a question that is simultaneously epistemological (having to do with the contents, conditions, and practices of knowledge) and historical (having to do with a precise time and space, including the here and now as well as the then and there). To ask how we know what we think we know is to venture into the domains of methodology (the analytical procedures we employ) and theory (the conceptual frameworks that inform our methods). It is to ask not only what sexual knowledge we make but how we might make history through the analytic provided by sexuality. And to ask what such knowledge means is to query what we do with it, how we make it both signify and significant, in individual, interpersonal, and social contexts. It is to query why we want to know what we hope to know, as well as to query what we do with that knowledge. The processes of meaning and doing thus raise questions about the effects of knowing and of the transmission of knowledge—questions infused not only with political but, as I will show, ethical and pedagogical dimensions. In thus reframing the history of sexuality as an epistemological problem, this book aims to reorient the ways by which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer studies scholars, approach the historicity of sex.
When considered epistemologically, sexual knowledge becomes a conceptual problematic, one that I will refer to as “sex-as-knowledge-relation.” I approach this problematic by means of some related premises: that how we access and produce the history of sexuality is as important as what we discover about prior organizations of erotic desire; that sex, like gender, is best approached as a flexible and capacious category of analysis (rather than a delimited or fixed object of study);1 and that methods used to write the history of sexuality—that is, historiography as practiced by both historians and literary critics—will benefit from sustained consideration of what it means to “know” sex in the first place. Because my conception of history includes our own historical moment, I approach the relations between thinking sex and making sexual knowledge as both sequential (thinking comes first, making knowledge out of thought comes second) and recursive (how we make knowledge affects how we think, including what questions we can imagine).
Such
