The conceptual terms available to signify sexual knowledge, and thus the terms available to signify what sex is or might mean both in the early modern period and today, are thus crucial to what follows. Beyond the hard-to-pin-down definitional nature of sex and knowledge, I seek to leverage the idea that sex itself poses an interrelated problem of signification and knowability. Indeed, the epistemology of sex is intensely bound to the issues of sexual representation and signification—by which I mean the capacity of language to denote and connote meanings about erotic affect, embodiment, desires, and practices, through practices of articulation as well as silence, and by means of conceptual categories that implicitly organize what can be known and circulated. Recognition of the various discursive means by which sex is (un)intelligible has been central to theorizing the cultural symbolics and ideological work of sexuality.25 Homosexuality especially has been viewed as “occasioning a crisis in and for the logic of representation itself.”26 Lesbianism has been seen as constituted by dynamics of insignificance, unaccountability, invisibility, and inconsequence.27 Historically distinct forms of unintelligibility have been important to queer theorists reading “the tropologies of sexuality that are put into play once the field of sexuality becomes charged by the widespread availability of a ‘homosexual’ identity.”28
This book, however, investigates a discursive system in which the “widespread availability” of any sexual identity had yet to come to the fore. For this reason, early modernists confront what might be called distinctly presuppositional discursive contexts—by which I mean how the past is both like and unlike, “not yet like” and “not ever like,” the present.29 It is perhaps especially the case that, within the bounds of early modern English, one cannot safely assume that a given word, phrase, speech, or bodily act is erotic—or, for that matter, not erotic. “Sodomy” might or might not mean sodomy; “lesbian” might or might not mean lesbian; “whore” might or might not mean whore.30 For, as literary critic Laurie Shannon, following the historian Alan Bray, has noted, there is nothing actually “dispositive” about the capacity of sex in the early modern period to signify particular meanings.31 Or, as I rephrased this insight in earlier work through the concept of (in)significance: “Erotic acts come to signify … through a complex and continual social process.”32 What is true at the level of signifying systems is true as well for individual subjects and the specific conditions of communication in which they participate.33
Because erotic desires and acts are unreliable as modes or catalysts of signification, they have seemed to require supplemental discursive framing in order to reveal the meanings and values they may, or may not, convey. Historicist scholars have tended to negotiate the uncertainty of sexual signification by describing erotic concepts through a period’s own languages and idioms, as well as by locating sexuality within densely contextualized domains—in essence, momentarily stabilizing the meanings of sex through other discourses: legal statutes and trials of sodomites and tribades, medical descriptions of the use and “abuse” of genitalia, and prescriptive literature that articulates dominant sexual mores. They have expended critical energy attempting to decode period-specific lexicons, hoping to pierce through cryptic allusions, linguistic codes, and playful innuendo to recover sexual subjectivities and evidence of erotic acts. This focus on signification and context—that is, on the way things mean—has now settled into what one critic calls “the routines of discursive contextualization,”34 a habitual strategy with both gains and losses.35
Over the past decade or so, a number of historicist scholars have moved beyond identity as the governing question of the history of sexuality, shifting the analytical imperative away from inclusion, for instance, of lesbians in history or dating the “birth of the homosexual,” and toward how sex signifies in ways eccentric to modern identity logics.36 In my previous book The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, I analyzed the instability of sexual signification by exposing the dynamics that, I argued, governed representations of female same-sex desire in early modern England. Intent on resisting the way that narrow definitions of evidence preclude an understanding of female sexuality prior to the development of identity regimes, I traced the fates of figures of same-sex eroticism by composing a cultural history, arguing for a capacious designation of what “counts” as erotic for women.
As was true of that book, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns elaborates questions of sexual signification as a way to explore something other than identity history—not only because identity is haphazardly relevant to the early modern period but because it can constrain the questions that we ask of sexuality.37 To be initially schematic about it (in terms that subsequent chapters will complicate): one strand of scholarship on sex—call it the historical/historicist/genealogical strand—focuses on what we can know about sexuality in the past, often in terms of its difference from the present. Another strand—call it the psychoanalytic and/or queer one—is concerned with how sexuality messes with signification, particularly in terms of the stability of identity categories. This latter emphasis is evident not only in queer theory focused on modernity but in historical studies of more distant periods. (Many studies, of course, enact both impulses.) Despite these differences, however, both strands have viewed the primary question about the past to be the appropriateness of adducing the force of sexual identity categories for earlier time periods.38 In part, this is because influential genealogists have maintained that it is the aim of sexual genealogies to explore “the multiplicity of possible historical connections between sex and identity, a multiplicity whose existence has been obscured by the necessary but narrowly focused, totalizing critique of sexual identity as a unitary concept.”39 The possible connections between sex and identity—related to but not put to rest by the anti-identitarian claims of queer theory—have thus served as the governing question of the history of sex, even when the motive is to show that such identities are unstable or contingent.
This book travels a different path to demonstrate that historical, even genealogical, projects need not concern themselves exclusively (or even at all) with connections between sex and identity, sex and subjectivity, or the truth relations they instantiate. Rather than adducing how early modern sexuality defies modern categories or is anti-identitarian, I untether sex from identity as the main historical question. Setting aside the issue of identity has also enabled me to set aside the issue of sexual nomenclatures. This does not mean the book is uninterested in language, much less in concepts: one chapter explores early modern lexicons for their representational dynamics, scrutinizing the ways by which sex is represented through language, while another takes up the term “lesbian” as a critical sign. But this book approaches signification mainly as a way to move closer to the shadowy borders and uneven edges where words-as-concepts rub up against bodies and the erotic acts they perform.
Many of the questions animating Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns arose out of my previous immersion in and confusion about early modern signifying practices. Because discourses about female-female desire were structured through rhetorics of absence, invisibility, and insignificance, I developed an almost allergic sensitivity to the potentials and pitfalls of the methods by which we research the sexual past. My nascent awareness of the importance of opacity in knowledge began when I had occasion to ask: How are we to locate the lines between passionate friendship and eroticism, especially insofar as women were generally disenfranchised from the classical ideology of friendship (amicitia) and often vilified for expressing self-motivated desire? Or, to move from the register of prevailing social discourses to that of the desiring individual: How, as the historian Anna Clark has asked, are we to positively identify the look, the caress, the sigh?40 What is the basis for interpreting kissing, touching, embracing, or sharing a bed (all common practices in the early modern era) as erotic—or not?41 What, if any, is the erotic valence of flogging, in a period when theological, medical, pedagogical, and legal discourses approach the use of the whip and the rod through their own quite varied understandings?42 And whatever happened to chin chucking, a pervasive ancient and early modern practice that no longer seems to even signify in the modern world?43 Or, to move to the realm of
