unduly abstract, I strive in this study to provide compelling demonstrations of how and why thinking sex-as-knowledge-relation might speak to a range of interests and projects. Over the course of the next nine chapters, my answers to these questions resolve into several arguments about the analytical challenges and stakes involved in making sexual knowledge out of the material traces of the past. My argument begins with the observation that many of us engaged in the effort to make sexual knowledge regularly hit up against conceptual difficulties: opacity, absence, gaps, blockages, and resistances. Whether we seek to acquire knowledge of sex in the past or to understand the past through the analytic of sexuality, such moments of impasse are often experienced as our own private research problem—albeit a problem we might acknowledge over e-mail or dinner with friends. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns argues that sexual knowledge is difficult because sex, as a category of human thought, volition, behavior, and representation, is, for a variety of reasons, opaque, often inscrutable, and resistant to understanding. Rather than attempt to surmount or conceal such obstacles, or grant them only minimal due as a matter of what is missing (whether in the archives or in our understanding), this book leverages the notions of opacity, obscurity, obstruction, and impasse in order to explore what such barriers to vision, access, and understanding might entail for the production and dissemination of knowledge about sex. It seeks in such obstacles what social scientists call “methodological release points,”2 using them as an analytical wedge with which to open new questions about sex-as-knowledge-relation and devise new strategies to confront some of the ways it is possible not to know. The principle I seek to mobilize throughout the book is this: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access, but because it doesn’t.
Opaque Knowledge
Why might sex be hard to know? Why is sex opaque—and, as I shall argue, obstinate and implacable in its opacity? While this book will provide some detailed answers to these questions, I begin by noting that obstacles regarding sexual knowledge do not all derive from the same place, nor are they all of the same conceptual order.3 Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns takes its bearings from the fact that sex is an experience of the body (and hence fleeting) and that individual sexual acts are likewise local and ephemeral. Furthermore, there is the basic fact of psychic variation: to put it simply, what turns one person on may turn another one off. The extent of erotic diversity necessarily renders any instance of sexual experience or representation a highly contingent matter of interpretation. These two realities subtend the analyses that follow. Nonetheless, this is not a book about subjectivity, and thus not a book about desire. Nor is it about the emotional needs of the desiring subject except insofar as certain affects—particularly frustration and disappointment—can prompt inquiry into structural conditions of knowledge production. When attending to the past, this shift in focus away from “the subject” shifts attention from the question of what people (or literary characters) want to the knowledge relations they inhabit and perform. When attending to the present, this shift broadens the optic to include the disciplinary structures we inhabit and the questions we ask of past lives and texts.
The chapters that follow demonstrate that the opacities of eroticism—not just those aspects of sex that exceed our grasp, but those that manifest themselves as the unthought—can serve as a productive analytical resource. The epistemological orientation enacted here derives not only from hitting up against such impasses, but from intuiting that these structures of occultation and unintelligibility are also the source of our ability to apprehend and analyze them. In short, the obstacles we face in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality, and both impediments can be productively adopted as a guiding principle of historiography, pedagogy, and ethics.
Given that sex may be good to think with precisely because of its recalcitrant relation to knowledge, the sense of “making” heralded in the book’s first part is slightly ironic: any knowledge made necessarily carries within it, as a hard, inviolate kernel, those impediments by which it is also constituted. Such constitutive impediments explain why I evoke Elizabeth Bishop’s description of the “taste” of knowledge as “bitter” and “briny,” able to burn one’s tongue. At the same time, my conception of the difficulty involved is guided by the apprehension that, as Bishop writes, “our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” It might seem that Bishop idealizes knowledge as ultimately “clear” and “utterly free.” Yet, in pausing with her over the verb that qualifies her invocation of knowledge—that is, to “imagine”—we might find reason to pause as well over the task of drawing knowledge from “the cold hard mouth” and “rocky breasts” of the world. What is at stake, in her poem and my project, is precisely what “we imagine knowledge to be.” At stake as well is what stymies us and what it means to go on “tasting” knowledge, despite its salt-soaked bitterness.
By moving through an instructive range of difficulties (including the archival, the historiographic, and the hermeneutic) and by subordinating the question of the desiring subject, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns engages in an extended thought experiment. It proposes, first, that we approach the conceptual status of sex (its meaning, its ontology, its significance) not only as a problem of representation (of what can be expressed or textualized or not expressed or textualized)4 or as a problem of signification (as something made intelligible or unintelligible by means of particular conceptual categories) but as an epistemological problem. An epistemological approach—asking what can be known as well as how it is known—recasts the dynamics among sex, representation, signification, and historiography as a problem of knowledge relations: constituted not only by social interchange but by implicit understandings of what counts as knowledge and what eludes or baffles as ignorance. Tracing the contours of a structural dynamic between knowledge and ignorance back in time before the “epistemology of the closet,” I advocate that we confront what we don’t know as well as what we can’t know about sex in the past.5 This confrontation with the variety of ways that it is possible not to know implicates the investigator, if willing, in various considerations of pedagogy and ethics.
These epistemological, pedagogical, and ethical propositions come into especially sharp focus when we attempt to think sex, as my title designates, with the early moderns. My title pays homage to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,”6 which proposed “elements of a descriptive and conceptual framework for thinking about sex and its politics.”7 “Thinking Sex” is often credited as one of the founding documents of queer theory, in no small measure because it provides a general blueprint for investigating sex through the conceptual categories by which it is thought.8 In attempting to “build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history” and “to locate particular varieties of sexual persecution within a more general system of sexual stratification,” Rubin anatomizes six conventional ways of thinking sex: sexual essentialism (belief in its biologically mandated and universal status); sex negativity (fear of the dangerous effects of sex on peoples and cultures); the fallacy of misplaced scale (which mandates disproportionate punishment for sexual crimes); the hierarchical valuation of sex acts (whereby monogamous heterosexuality is elevated over “promiscuity” or “perversions”); the domino theory of sexual peril (whereby sexual contagion is thought to spread restlessly through the body politic); and the lack of a concept of benign sexual variation (whereby people mistake their own sexual preference for a universal system). Sex for Rubin is simultaneously a matter of representation and reality, discourse and embodiment, metaphor and phenomenological acts. If what results from Rubin’s capacious focus seems particularly portable—applicable to cultures and times far removed from the twentieth-century United States—and thus becomes recognizable as “theory,” this theory is derived and abstracted from the lived situation of bodies and the acts in which they engage.9
Rubin’s concepts have motivated an enormous body of work on sexuality, particularly within queer studies. Beyond their utility for contesting sexual normativity, the method that activates them provides a model for scrutinizing the conceptual categories whereby we can think sex. My analytical mode, accordingly, is not primarily narrative
