recognize that power differentials can have, and certainly have had, a constitutive role in sexuality? Does the widespread use of the term “homoerotic” for periods prior to modernity—a critical practice in which I participate—function, at least in part, as a cover for our confusion about the meanings of erotic desire? These questions—which are obviously hermeneutic, historical, and historiographic—are also, I have come to believe, epistemological.
Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is concerned less with subjects’ desires for other subjects or the contexts within which those desires are granted meaning than with the articulation of desires for sexual knowledge and the various ways those desires are affirmed, ignored, or repelled. It retains my prior interest in the oscillating dynamics of significance and insignificance, intelligibility and unintelligibility, but here I approach the historicity of these dynamics along a parallel route located on a “meta” conceptual register. Rather than devise a chronological cultural history of sexuality or of the pursuit of sexual knowledge, I tarry with the synchronic contradictions of early modern knowledge relations, believing that it is by so doing that a diachronic history of thinking sex might become possible.
Historicizing Sex
Historians and literary critics understandably tend to avoid acknowledging in print how the conceptual, methodological, and archival impasses they encounter affect their interpretations and narratives.44 In part this is because our scholarly instinct is to work toward revelation, to fill in gaps and make lacunae speak. Those of us working outside of a strictly philosophical register (and philosophy’s subfield of epistemology) don’t really have a vocabulary for talking about not knowing—except, that is, by means of psychoanalysis, which, at least within early modern studies, continues to struggle against perceptions of a disqualifying ahistoricism. But our reticence is also a result of the dominant preoccupation of most historical scholars (literary critics as well as historians), which has been to explore erotic attitudes, affects, identities, and ideologies—rather than confront what happens to interpretative practice when we look for the details of actual sexual practices. There are good reasons for this tendency: when we look for evidence of attitudes, we actually find it! Yet, when we start to scrutinize the details of such attitudes—or their concretization into dominant ideologies—they don’t necessarily tell us what people did with one another or what specific bodily acts meant to them. Despite this obvious obstacle, for literary critics and historians alike, the content of sex in the early modern era has been all too presumable, supposedly interpretable through such ready-to-hand, transhistorical rubrics as “homoeroticism,” “heterosexuality,” “sodomy,” “masochism,” “sadism,” “reproduction,” “heteronormativity,” and “cruising.” Such vague referents function as placeholders for a sexual activity and set of relational practices everywhere assumed, but rarely actually described. The material, corporeal aspects of sexual activity—not merely the ecstasy, pain, or ennui it occasions, but the nitty-gritty bodily acts of which it consists—remain surprisingly underarticulated and often subject to a presumptive, tacit form of knowing.45
Although I believe that the more historical evidence we accrue of specific erotic acts the better, I do not think that a diligent compilation of sexual practices will resolve this issue. For the opacity of sex, while it certainly has an archival dimension, is not merely a matter of evidentiary lack. When it comes to sex, even I don’t know what I’ve done, much less what my friends or neighbors do. And despite sociological surveys that purport to present an accurate snapshot of sexual behaviors, what the larger population does is also a mystery. This is less because people lie (although of course they do) than because we don’t have much of a language, even now, to narrate our experiences in anything but the baldest possible terms—which is one reason why historical scholars resort to handy transhistorical placeholders in the first place.46
The use of such concepts has fostered important analytical work. But the time has come to demand more congruence between our theoretical concepts and the historical practices they are employed to name, and not just in pursuit of greater linguistic accuracy. Given the pervasive critical recourse to “heteronormativity,” for instance, we might well ask: what was normative about early modern cross-gender sex? Whatever it was, it was not belief in the self-evident naturalness of desire across the gendered categories of male and female. As literary critic Ben Saunders notes: “in the Renaissance, the love that dare not speak its name is not homosexuality but rather any love that dares to posit a woman as worthy of a man’s complete devotion.”47 A number of pre- and early modernists have shown the extent to which the concept of “heterosexuality” fundamentally misidentifies the way in which sexual relations were understood, and thus leads scholars to misconstrue the societal norms aimed at regulating sexual behavior.48 Similar pressure could be put on the concept of the “homoerotic,” which, as a critical term, serves to designate something, but in point of fact not too precisely. It thus simultaneously registers and deflects our confusion over the thorny problem of identifying what may look like homosexuality to us, but in certain respects isn’t. The resort to “queerness,” opportune as it has been, does not resolve this issue. A related problem is raised by invocations of terms derived from the discourse of sexology. To what does “masochism” refer? An interiorized desire for suffering? A form of bodily pleasure? An explicit erotic act, such as bondage? A sexual orientation and, by extension, a community of like-minded individuals? One impetus of this book is to suggest the payoff in coming clean about the extent to which these concepts are our categories, based on our projections of what the past was like. But no less a crucial impetus is to challenge the presumptive knowledge that these categories each, in their own way, sustain.
This book’s commitment to history and historiography thus runs deeper than the dominant historicist mandate to infuse literary scholarship with cultural and temporal specificity. While not neglecting that mandate, I believe that a literary critic’s commitment to history can also involve matters of method central to and challenging of the discipline of history itself. Beginning with my second chapter on Alan Bray’s histories of male homosexuality and friendship, my engagement with modes of historical understanding as well as techniques of historical analysis provides a baseline for the anatomizing analyses of the ensuing chapters.49 Indeed, the rest of this book attempts to make good on the invitation issuing from Bray’s historiographic legacy. By taking up several different historiographic problems, I aim to historicize sexuality, engage with historically contingent questions about sexuality, analyze and critique the methods used to historicize sexuality, and ask what it means to historicize sexuality. The precise opacities that appear by means of these questions may be distinctive to the early modern period, but figuring out how to leverage them is a task relevant to every historical scholar concerned with erotic desires and practices or gendered embodiment.
It is no accident that questions about historiographic method have been central to the field of sexuality studies since its beginnings, with history, historicism, and historiography situated in complex tension with the hermeneutic priorities of literary studies. Debates about the relations between representation and “real life,” metaphors and materiality, texts and their mediation, signification and social practice have been central to how these disciplines and fields intersect, interpret, and misinterpret each other. One of the objectives of Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is to affiliate the approach toward sex as a complex issue of representation and a remarkably malleable social metaphor (as typically practiced in literary studies and some versions of anthropology and history) with the view of sex as an empirically verifiable, material and social practice (as emphasized in sociology and psychology, as well as in history and anthropology). The ensuing pas de deux is simultaneously conceptual, historical, and interdisciplinary.
In the face of an institutional climate of intense (and at times mindless) championing of interdisciplinarity,50 it is perhaps unsurprising that influential literary critics have championed the separation of literary from historical study in the name of a “queerer” historicism. Parts I and II
